If the Prelude and Fugue in G major were all about virtuoso exuberance, this prelude and fugue are about beauty and restraint. The Prelude is cheerful and rhythmic, recalling more the influence of dance movements and less that of the improvisatory unmeasured preludes. There are some lovely descending 5th sequences--Bach always manages to make them sound fresh. A big cadence on E flat major in the middle emphasizes the relation to binary dance forms and Bach works his usual magic with the running sixteenths as an ever-present obligato.
Call me crazy, but the simplicity of the fugue subject:
Really reminds me of the similar simplicity of the fugue subject of the Prelude and Fugue in A major from Shostakovich's Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues:
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Both subjects outline the tonic triad with special emphasis on the dominant. What Bach does with his very neutral subject is link it very closely with its answer:
This supplies some of the harmonic interest that the subject avoids with its 4-3 resolution and 4-5 ending. The subject sits on the tonic but points to the dominant while the answer emphasizes the dominant. For much of the fugue these two are very closely linked. Bach plays around with the melodic shape of this material, sometimes widening the leap of a sixth to a seventh. He modulates to F minor and B flat minor. The whole atmosphere of the fugue is that of restrained beauty and melodic grace.
Here is a performance on harpsichord by Olivier Fortin:
And another with Sviatoslav Richter that has the score:
The Prelude has such a charming motif that one wonders, if Bach were alive now, would he be writing pop tunes for Katy Perry?
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Of course, in the pop song version we wouldn't have quite so distant a harmonic effect as Bach does in m. 17 where he follows a diminished chord on E natural (which should resolve to F) by a deceptive resolution on D minor, which quickly turns to D major, providing a nice V7-i cadence. He then gives us another cadence over a tonic pedal, just to be sure.
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But it's all really charming.
The fugue is just an excellent fugue in four voices with a proper sort of subject and countersubject. Bach gives us the four voices in the exposition then has a brief episode that leads to restatement of the subject in all voices in B flat. Another episode follows taking us to C minor with two statements of the subject. The next episode returns us to G minor and there is a stretto in three voice at a half-note separation. One last statement of the subject in the alto and we are done. Here is that stretto, starting in the soprano in m. 28:
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Here is Sviatoslav Richter's performance with the score:
Laughter on the Acropolis is a review of a new translation of Aristophanes the Greek comic playwright.
Of his 40 plays, eleven remain. Mr. Poochigian has given us “Clouds” (423 B.C.), a spoof on Socrates, rhetoric, argument and education; “Birds” (414), the Utopian vision of a place that looks a lot like a perfected Athens, but in the air, with birds instead of Olympian gods in charge of the show; “Lysistrata” (411), in which the Real Housewives of Ancient Greece leverage desire in order to end the Peloponnesian War; and “Women of the Assembly” (391), in which women (the idea people and the moneymakers) establish free love, common resources and equality as the basis for a new society.
It sounds almost if they were written last week instead of 2,400 years ago.
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Pretty thin pickings this week, so let's have three envoi. First, the Symphony No. 3 by Schubert, a piece we don't hear very often. Played by Günter Wand and the NDR Sinfonieorchester.
And here is a collection of music likely for Medieval buskers.
And here is some Bulgarian choral music. Who says we're not diverse?
I often find myself saying that all the great pianists these days are Russians and I just discovered another one, the nineteen year old Alexander Malofeev. Here he is playing the Saint-Saëns. Piano Concerto No 2 in Madrid this past November:
Also, I'm starting to think that Camille Saint-Saëns is actually rather an interesting composer. A while back I found myself listening to his Symphony No. 3, which has a heck of a finale:
This prelude and fugue remind us that Bach was a very virtuoso keyboard player and he lets it rip in both these pieces. The prelude is in the unusual mixed time signature of 24/16 on top and tempus imperfectus (or 4/4) on the bottom, which just means that there are six sixteenth notes to every quarter note.
The editors of the Neue Bach Ausgabe go over the top a bit by putting both time signatures in both staves. Really not necessary. Apart from the ferocious fingerwork, there is not a lot going on here. Bach touches on several keys, but keeps up the fireworks to the end. It is rather like a concerto movement.
The fugue shares a similar spirit, with a lot of sixteenths in the subject together with two wide leaps of a seventh. These become significant in the course of the fugue as we notice when Bach gives us several entries of the subject in inversion. The upward 7th leaps become downward leaps. The turns in the subject become inverted turns and so on. There are a couple of incomplete strettos where the subject begins in one voice and is joined in another, but the first is an incomplete statement. Again, this feels rather like a concerto movement. Here is that subject:
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And the beginning, in inversion:
Apart from that there is nothing especially tricky in this fugue. It is rather "a good time was had by all" sort of piece. Bach originally wrote these pieces to teach his children and sometimes it is good to learn that music can just be sheer exuberance.
Here is a performance on harpsichord by Ketil Haugsand:
And another by Sviatoslav Richter who takes the fugue at an incredible clip. The subject entries are colored for your edification:
We just had a great discussion in the comments about my post The Objectivity of Musical Quality wherein I argued that there is such a thing as objective musical value which is why we see composers like J. S. Bach and Beethoven as being highly respected and enjoyed over centuries. Mine is a conservative view, but I make no apologies for that. When I started this blog, it was just out of personal enjoyment. But I soon realized that my many years of teaching in conservatories and universities meant that I instinctively took an educational approach. As my work on composition has grown over the years (ten since I started the blog in June 2011) I have focussed more on contemporary music, but, I hope, without losing touch with the main corpus of classical music. While I occasionally wander into world and popular musics I make no claim to much knowledge or experience in those areas.
What I do realize is that perhaps the core purpose of the blog is to appreciate and transmit knowledge of the riches of Western Classical Music--the canon in other words. This has come under increasing criticism in recent years, but to me that is all the more reason to do something like this blog. There are lots of reasons why it might not be easy to become well acquainted with the musical traditions from 11th century Notre Dame up until our time, so I will keep plugging away at it.
Years after I left university I was shocked to realize that in eight years of music history and theory we never took a close look at any Beethoven piano sonatas and only one Haydn String Quartet. We analyzed a lot of Bach chorales, but never the Mass in B minor. The only time I had a course that really dug into a Bach fugue was a doctoral seminar. I'm sure my experience is not unique. It is hard, in a normal bachelor of music degree, to really get to know the Western corpus. You get little fragments only. Part of the reason is time. But another reason is that a lot of professors think of the mainstream canon as being old hat and not worth examining. This is an artifact of their own graduate work when they had to find a new area to examine in their dissertations and had to avoid, for example, standard repertoire.
All this comes down to the problem that a lot of people, audiences and even musicians, don't know the basic repertoire very well. I know I have become far more familiar with it in doing this blog.
This is an "unwoke" blog, meaning that I am not trying, indeed actively avoiding, any political crusades. This was a decision made years ago and it was a happy one. The only time I will mention political issues is if I see them directly impacting on the pursuit and enjoyment of classical music.
Let me hasten to say that I have derived great enjoyment from popular artists such as the Beatles, the English Beat, Talking Heads and Kanye West as well as from world musics all over Asia and Africa. But, as I said, I have no special expertise in those areas to share so I don't talk about them very much.
The prelude is one of Bach's very dynamic pieces in running sixteenths with falling 5ths sequences and two cadences on C#. At less than a minute long it provides a foil for the more extended and very different in character fugue. Regarding the fugue, and especially its subject, Joseph Kerman comments:
It is as though having invented the most emotion-drenched subject/countersubject unit he could, Bach wanted to see if he could sustain a fugue with nothing else.
Here is that very unusual subject with its troubling halt on the third note:
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And the countersubject:
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The sobbing countersubject sounds as if it might have come from an aria in the St. Matthew Passion. Given the expressive strength of this material, Bach doesn't alter it apart from two inversions of the subject in the second half. There is also little modulation except to the dominant. One entry of the subject, in measure 25, is hidden with a melodic variation of the first two notes. Again, he uses the occasional rising fifths sequence. Just before the end and fitted to the long note in the last statement of the subject, Bach inserts a particularly biting harmony: an augmented chord on C# (C#, E#, A = G double-sharp). Both the prelude and fugue end with a tierce de Picardie.
Here is a performance by Sviatoslav Richter with the score:
I use the Richter recordings so much because they are the only ones with the score. There are certainly other fine performances!
The Prelude and Fugue in F# major have a jaunty air. The flowing sixteenths of the prelude in 12/16 meter outline triads and offer syncopations to the striding bass line. Bach takes us through a variety of keys: C# minor, D# minor, A# minor and G# minor--before returning to the tonic. A dominant pedal with a hint of the Neapolitan of the dominant, D major, takes us to the final cadence.
The Fugue is a bit more complex. The subject begins with a strong tonic flavor and this "head" motif will assume greater importance later:
We have three quick entries of the subject but after the third a new motif is introduced that acts very much like a new subject, except it is a bit too short. Call it a prominent countersubject, even though it is not actually used to accompany the subject!
This is heard in various voices and expanded in the form of a descending sequence. It becomes so prominent that it is the motif that you recall more than the subject! Towards the end the subject returns for two statements, on the subdominant and supertonic to set up the final cadence. But it is that little sixteenth note figure that sticks in your mind. It appears six times just before the final chord. Trust Bach to write a fugue in which the subject is overshadowed by a little countersubject-type motif. Oh, and the "head" motif from the subject is detached and used in what would be stretto if he stated the rest of the subject, which he doesn't. Bach shows here, as he does in many fugues, that the form is infinitely malleable.
Here is a performance by Sviatoslav Richter with the score:
Possibly the biggest, and certainly the trickiest question in musical (or any) aesthetics is the question of objective aesthetic value. Many people, including recent interlocutor Ethan Hein, deny that such a thing can even exist. I have argued before that it can.
Perhaps we can turn the question upside down: is it possible for Ethan and I to agree that such-and-such a piece of music is utter crap, objectively? Even that modest goal would prove my claim that objective aesthetic quality in music does indeed exist.
For me, when I look around and see the remarkable popularity and longevity of the music of people like J. S. Bach, or Antonio Vivaldi, or, yes, Beethoven, it is, for me, a very small step to say that there must indeed be something objectively there other than mere personal preference. And this is not just about classical music: the longevity and respect for the music of Miles Davis, for example, is another indicator of objective musical quality.
One argument for objective aesthetic quality is that one's tastes change both as one grows older and as one becomes more educated in specific musical styles and genres. You might say they evolve, as one certainly has the impression of understanding and appreciating the music better. On first acquaintance with, say, Haydn string quartets, one may find them an amorphous mass of musical nattering. But on further listening you start to hear differences both of technique and of quality. You are becoming aware of the objective qualities of the music.
Indeed, perhaps the most outlandish claim would be the one that there is absolutely no such thing as objective musical quality. Everything is absolutely relative to every person's individual preference. I'm pretty confident that I can walk up to almost any stranger, at least in the Western world, and ask if they have heard of Bach and they will answer, yes, of course. Why? Because the music of Bach is of such objectively high quality that everyone has heard of him. Otherwise how would you explain it?
I'm detecting signs that there may be light at the end of the tunnel. A piece in the Wall Street Journal says "We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April." I'm starting to think I might be attending the Salzburg Festival in August after all.
Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?
In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.
Glyndebourne has just confirmed that it will proceed with its annual opera festival this summer. Like most events in our pandemic age, many alterations will be made to ensure that social distancing and other safety precautions are in place - audiences will be capped at 600, which is 50 per cent of the 1,200 person capacity, and entrances to the festival's famed fine dining experiences will be staggered - but the prestigious event's announcement is the first sign that the traditional British summer season, however altered, may be back on track.
These days, Bang is a sprawling artistic conglomerate, with an annual budget of $2 million to $2.5 million, a dedicated record label, a virtuoso chamber ensemble (the Bang on a Can All-Stars) to carry its branding internationally, an active commissioning program, a summer residency and a distinctive performance format — the new-music marathon concert — that is practically a trademarked part of the organization’s identity.
The Bang on a Can Marathon, in fact, is one of the few musical ventures to make a graceful transition to the COVID-era virtual concert hall. The latest installment is scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 21, with four hours’ worth of premieres by Eve Beglarian, Gabriel Kahane, Jakhongir Shukur, Alvin Lucier and others.
Some commentators have called this prelude and fugue melancholy, but I hear a profound serenity. Bach achieves this serenity by eschewing the use of all those techniques that push the musical movement forward, such as sequences and stretto. Instead of those methods, which work by stepping up the musical tension, Bach works through a number of different keys and harmonies, none very remote, with frequent cadences. A cadence brings the music to a close and composers, like Wagner, who want a constantly increasing tension, avoid them. Here, there are cadences every few measures. If I could suggest a visual metaphor, listening to this music is like watching clouds slowly move and transform in the sky.
The fugue as well departs from Bach's usual practice: instead of the subject moving from tonic to dominant harmony, this one moves from dominant to tonic harmony. The subject is quite chromatic and the answer is tonal. The countersubject is a very simple anapest figure that is used for all the episodes. That's it really. Subject, answer, simple episode. He makes smooth modulations to closely related keys like C and G major and A flat and E flat. But no strettos, no clever invertible counterpoint, no transformations of the subject. Just subject, answer and episode. Despite the chromatic angularity of the subject the mood is serene calm throughout. That in itself is pretty remarkable.
Here is Sviatoslav Richter and the subject is shown in red in the fugue.
According to the teachers who founded the group #DisruptTexts ... They believe that the Bard of Avon should either be removed from school curricula entirely or rebranded in a way that dumps significant criticism on his work as a symbol of white supremacy and colonialism.
Well, sure, if your entire world view is shaped by ideological concepts, allowing no room for consideration of aesthetic quality, then why the heck not toss old Shakespeare in the trash? But if you are that blind to actual literary quality, how the hell did you become an English teacher? Science too hard? The humanities just offer more opportunities for political power trips and general idiocy?
But if it can happen with English teachers then why isn't it happening with Music teachers? Or does the usual requirement that you actually have some skills in music tend to weed out the whackos?
I've puzzled lately over some of the mysteries of progressivism. For example, efforts have been made to "cancel" important artistic figures like Homer, Heinrich Schenker and Beethoven. In some instances this was to clear the curriculum for works by women and people of color, in the case of Schenker it was because he was supposedly a racist and in the case of Beethoven it might be just because he is a really famous composer.
I wonder about Bach: is he going to survive while Homer is cancelled simply because classical music has already been consigned to oblivion by pop music?
I discovered classical music, and Bach in particular, when I was in my late teens, around 1970. In essentially moving my interest and loyalty from pop to classical I was moving contrary to the historical trend. Starting in the late 1950s pop music recordings started to out-sell classical ones. While Van Cliburn could compete with Elvis Presley at the record store, by the time we get to the Beatles in the mid-60s there is no contest. Classical music was well on its way to bing a minor niche in the world of music.
This was not the case in the somewhat different realm of music education where classical music still had huge prestige. It commands more and more in-depth scholarship than does popular music. The latter has taken a long time to infiltrate the halls of academe and the process is still ongoing.
But now there is a new trend, the re-ordering of society according to the demands of social justice. Homer is being cancelled and even Shakespeare is attracting some dubious glances. While an attempt was made to cancel Beethoven, largely unsuccessful, a more concerted effort did result in the dismissal of a music theorist for defending Schenker. Will they come for Bach next? Or is he simply too unimportant to bother with?
If the social justice project, like many other leftist projects, is simply about the claiming of power, then perhaps people like Bach are too minor to be worth the trouble. Beethoven has a more salient political profile, which is probably why he has been attacked.
Bach is, after all, a figure in history with only aesthetic power. His only influence outside pure music would perhaps be in theology--and theology is even more minor in the contemporary world than classical music.
This spritely prelude and fugue is even shorter than the E major prelude and fugue. In Sviatoslav Richter's performance both pieces together only come to two minutes duration. There are some other resemblances as well: the prelude is again in 12/8 and the fugue has a subject with a lot of running sixteenth notes. But apart from that, this pair of pieces are unique individuals as are all the ones in the Well-Tempered Clavier.
The prelude is dominated by sequences of various kinds with a great deal of exchanges between the two voices. The virtuoso brilliance is enhanced by the extended trills.
The fugue subject begins with a very distinctive motif that turns into running sixteenths which then act as a rather neutral countersubject. There is not much else here other than that subject which appears in succession in the three voices twice, making up the first half of this brief fugue. The second half is dominated by the subject in stretto, again, stated twice at the interval of two measures. The first time the subject appears from the soprano through the alto and finally bass and the second time that is reversed, bass, alto, then soprano. In the middle, there is another stretto, just with the bass and alto. We haven't had this much stretto in a fugue since the very first one, in C major.
Just a little note for those joining us late: a "stretto" is a contrapuntal technique where a subject is layered upon itself giving the music a feeling of hurrying up. It is as if one person interrupts another in conversation by starting to speak before the first person is finished. In a fugue it is not considered rude, but rather an opportunity to both show off the composer's skill and to increase the musical tension.
This fugue is all about entries of the subject of which there are thirteen before a brief episode that closes the piece. And all this in the span of one minute.
The Prelude and Fugue in E minor are two of my favorite pieces from the Well-Tempered Clavier, especially the prelude. It is an odd sort of hybrid piece with an opening ornamented aria for soprano over an obbligato bass followed by a toccata. Oddly, it is not the soprano melody that sticks in your head, but that obbligato bass line:
When the presto finally arrives it is devoted to that same obbligato transposed up a fourth:
The fugue subject, to my mind, bears something of a family resemblance to that same theme, but chromatically altered:
That's not quite a twelve-tone theme (though I believe there is one in the Well-Tempered Clavier somewhere) as it is missing A natural and F natural, but it has all the other notes. Most fugue subjects start with tonic harmony and move to dominant harmony, but usually not as strongly as this does. The effect of the A#s is to strongly tonicize B, but then we end up on a D natural, so B minor is suggested. The second entry of the subject takes us to B's dominant of F#. After an episode, we have the subject in G. In every instance, except the first, the subject is accompanied by its countersubject:
And when I say "in every instance, except the first" I mean it. We even get the countersubject without the subject a couple of times. The episodes are also important with crossing sequences, by which I mean that the material in one voice crosses to the other as the material is repeated at a different interval. There is a heck of a lot going on in this fugue which is, in Glenn Gould's performance, less than a minute long.
Speaking of tempo, I feel that most performances of the prelude are a bit too fast, with not enough contrast with the presto. And some performances of the fugue are not quite fast enough. In this case I think Gould has the tempos exactly right. Here are his performances. Sorry, I couldn't find the fugue to embed so you will have to follow the link.
Perhaps the most interesting passage in that Guardian article about Caroline Shaw was this one:
Being open to so many influences hasn’t always been straightforward. One of the vocal techniques referenced in Partita was Inuit throat-singing, which Roomful of Teeth studied with two representatives of the tradition. In autumn 2019, another Inuit singer, Tanya Tagaq, claimed on Twitter that Partita was a work of appropriation. Shaw was devastated.
“I stopped any performances of Partita at that moment. We had to figure this out. I fully respect what was said. Then a few months later Covid hit, so we haven’t performed it at all since then.” How does she see Partita working in the future? “I’m going to change the section that I never would have written had the conversation been different 10 years ago.”
There are a number of interesting elements here. Let's take the last one first. She says “I’m going to change the section that I never would have written had the conversation been different 10 years ago.” This raises the interesting question of whether any piece of music--or artwork generally--can endure over time? As they are always finding new things that are no longer permitted, then that raises the possibility that any artwork can become, even over ten years, objectionable in whole or in part. Ten years ago it was "cool" to study Inuit throat-singing and, as a kind of tribute, incorporate it into your work. Now it is "cultural appropriation" and therefore forbidden. That is like a sword of Damocles hanging over any creative artists work. Who knows what new thing will be forbidden ten years from now?
But let's look at this idea of cultural appropriation more broadly. It seems the strangest pole to hang your flag from because all music, and art, undergoes transmutation and "appropriation" in the course of history. One artist even said once that composers don't borrow, they steal. Yes, and if they do it well, it may result in better music than the model. Just look at what Bach did with Vivaldi concertos. If Inuit throat-singers really want to take back throat-singing so that it is a technique only they can use, ok.
But Europe called and wants its harmonic system back along with equal temperament, the violin, cello, piano, guitar and most other instruments. You can keep cymbals as they come from Turkey and the marimba and xylophone as they come from Java. Everything else, including the five-line staff, is cultural appropriation!
We have had some fairly long preludes and fugues, up to eleven minutes in total duration. But this pair are the shortest so far with various performances ranging between two and three minutes in length. Bach has stuck to a fairly small range of time signatures so far, usually what we call common time (C) and Bach would likely have called "tempus imperfectus." That "C" time signature and the one with the vertical slash, both come from the older mensural system that used circles, half circles and dots to show meter and division. But this prelude is in the slightly unusual meter of 12/8, compound quadruple time. The score is a single page, as is the fugue, and Bach reminds us that he, as well as Mozart, can toss off charming melodies effortlessly. The prelude modulates to the predictable B major, then the less-predictable B minor, then F# minor, A major before returning to E major. Towards the end there is a kaleidoscope of keys briefly touched on including G major, B major, C# minor before closing with a chromatically decorated plagal cadence.
The fugue has another of Bach's rhythmically dynamic subjects and one that undergoes no exotic transformations. It is as if he is giving us a rest after the E flat minor fugue. The countersubject is just the turn figure from the subject. Not too much to say about this unprepossessing fugue that delights more than it confounds.
Philosophy, Plato wrote, begins in wonder. At the beginning of thinking there is an affect of astonishment. Will students who grew up with hip hop music experience wonder and astonishment if they’re just taught about hip-hop, its history and its internal grammar? Some may perhaps be surprised that hip hop has a history, as well as historical antecedents, and that there is also a technique of composition, at times complex. But compare that with the radical defamiliarization entailed by exposing the same students, say from urban areas, who listen to pop or hip hop, to the French baroque or to the Art of Fugue. Are we so sure that students who chose to attend music school want to hear and analyze what they are already familiar with? Are we so confident that students in literature want to read and reflect on rap lyrics or Beyoncé rather than Faulkner or Melville or Samuel Beckett? Should colleges and universities situated in rural America teach country music and reality TV? Should they not instead fulfill their mission of exposing students to Fellini and Bergman and urban culture, their mission of taking their students to a different intellectual and aesthetic space?
When Caroline Shaw became, at the age of 30, the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer prize for music, she described herself as “a musician who wrote music” rather than as “a composer”. Partita, her winning score, is a joyful rollercoaster of a work, encompassing song, speech and virtually every vocal technique you can imagine. It was written for Shaw’s own group, Roomful of Teeth.
Eight years on, she’s still wary of defining herself too narrowly. “Composer, for some people, can mean something very particular,” she says, “and I’m trying to make sure I don’t get swallowed up into only one community.” Not that Shaw’s range shows any sign of narrowing: even a small sample of her work over the past few years throws up an array of names not often seen together: rappers Kanye West and Nas, soprano Renée Fleming, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, pianist Jonathan Biss. She has written film scores, sung on others, was the soloist in her own violin concerto, and even managed a cameo appearance as herself in Amazon Studio’s comedy drama Mozart in the Jungle. A year ago, Orange, a recording of her string quartets, won the Attacca Quartet a Grammy.
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From Slipped Disc comes this clip of gangnam-style conductor Yuri Simonov:
Also from Slipped Disc (where else?) is this collection of iPhone sound effects. Sung. A capella.
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A question that seems more and more exigent: Can branding help save classical music? Follow the link for some samples of the San Francisco Symphony's new look.
The modern approach plays out in its new look, which patrons will see on everything from posters outside the box office to tickets to the website and social media. The static typeface of yesteryear, which looks the same no matter where it’s applied, is gone. In its place is a new custom, variable typeface called “ABC Symphony” that evokes the sensation of singing. The typeface “has all the qualities of traditional classical music: sophistication, elegance, slight grandeur,” says Mikolay, but with a key difference: The team gave it a contemporary behavior, so “it can react, stretch, and skew and bend in reaction to sound.” Letters in the same word might be incrementally shortened or attenuated, so the logo, which reads “SF SYMPHONY,” arcs from left to right like a crescendo. Some words lean forcefully to the right for emphasis, like a pianist playing forte.
The major conclusions we were able to draw from our study are as follows:
The median commission fee for all compositions was $1500, or $150 per minute.
While commission fees were generally under $10,000, there was a sizable portion of outliers – around 11 percent of works – whose fees were between $10,000 and $50,000, or sometimes even greater.
Commissions for small groups or soloists were more likely to be unpaid, or for small fees. Commissions for large ensembles were more likely to be paid, and to command larger fees. Most outlier fees were for large ensemble commissions. The best paying large ensemble was the large choir.
Composers with more experience tended to receive higher fees.
Without taking into consideration factors such as experience level, female composers had a higher per-minute pay rate than males, and white composers had a higher per minute pay than non-white composers (as a group).
The article is a long one with a lot of hard data, so worth having a look at the whole thing.
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For our envoi today, let's have some thing different, a string quartet by Caroline Shaw. This is Entr'acte with the Calidore String Quartet.
When you are this far out on the circle of fifths it is moot whether you use six flats or six sharps so Bach gives us one of each. D# minor is the enharmonic equivalent of E flat minor, that is, they are the same, but spelled differently. Like fish or phish.
The prelude is a lovely piece that is both a sarabande and an aria, first for soprano and later for bass. There is not too much more to say about it unless we analyze the harmonies in detail. I'm not going to do that, except to say that Bach, as always, shows his great command of harmony, here to create some piercing dissonances that resolve beautifully.
The fugue is a whole other kettle of fish, however! Here Bach really shows all the possibilities of the subject:
The fugue is in three voices and we hear this subject first in the alto, then the soprano, and finally the bass. Then there is an episode with some lovely chromatic passages. Next we hear the subject in stretto with the soprano following the alto one half-note later. After another short episode we hear the subject inverted:
We hear this first in the soprano, then in the alto, and after another short episode, finally in the bass. After another episode we hear the original subject in stretto with the soprano following the bass after a half-note. Then we hear the inversion in stretto with the alto following the bass at a half-note. There is another entry of the inversion in the soprano then Bach presents the subject, in the bass, in augmentation, with doubled note values:
The subject in augmentation appears twice more, once in the alto and finally in the soprano and another brief episode takes us to the cadence. Let me see, did Bach leave anything out? The subject in augmentation in stretto is all I can think of! Maybe later on in the Well-Tempered Clavier.
We are a very long way from the simplicity of the first prelude and fugue in C major.
UPDATE: I forgot to include a performance. Here is a fine one by Sviatoslav Richter:
In the Prelude and Fugue in E flat, Bach explores other fresh ideas. For example, the prelude is actually more rigorously contrapuntal than the fugue! We tend to think of Baroque preludes as usually being brief, fantasia-like and improvisatory. And often they are. But Bach sometimes makes rather more of them. In this prelude, for example, Bach bases the opening section on the simplest of motifs:
Not only "bases," that is virtually the only thematic material! Then there is a two-measure virtuoso flourish leading to a new section in quarters and half-notes that unfolds a simple theme, but in close imitation at the half-note:
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In this example you can see the second measure of the flourish and the beginning of the contrapuntal section. It begins with a canon in four voices: first the tenor, then the bass a half note later, then the alto and finally the soprano. This turns into free counterpoint, but bit by bit, the sixteenth notes return until, by measure 26, the first, simple, motif returns and is combined with the canonic idea. This is elaborated and developed over three pages with the first motif and the canonic theme weaving in and out.
The fugue is rather more conventional with one of Bach's most catchy subjects. But it is the countersubject, a jaunty little arpeggio figure, that he chooses to develop in the episodes. The subject isn't even stated that often, just now and then as if as a reminder. Instead, Bach seems to focus all his attention on the countersubject right through to the end with a rather jazzy chromatic descent from E flat through D flat, C, C flat to B flat.
Here is András Schiff from his tour-de-force performance of the whole Well-Tempered Clavier from the BBC Proms:
Here is a lovely piece by Antoine Forqueray, played by Jean Rondeau and Thomas Dunford:
Sounds simple enough, except for all the ornaments, right? Now have a look at the score:
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That white notation stuff was supposed to go away when we moved from mensural to modern notation early in the 17th century. But maybe France didn't get the memo? Anyway, I want to transcribe this for guitar, so I am going to try and sort it out.
I don't often find myself chuckling when I listen to a Bach fugue, but I did with this one. More about that later.
The Prelude in D minor is the first instance of the use of triplets so far in the WTC. I don't know if a lot of study has been done of Bach's rhythmic techniques, but one thing we notice in the preludes is that each one focuses on a particular rhythmic structure, just varying it enough to be interesting. The typical mistake that beginning composition students make is to have too much variety. After two bars of something they want to do something contrasting. But notice Bach's practice. This entire prelude, except for the final cadence, is in triplets with the bass line in eighths. That's it! The variety comes almost exclusively from the harmonic progressions and the filigree of triplets just highlights that. The modulations are to closely related keys, such as G minor in mm. 6 - 8 and again in mm. 17 - 18.
But the fugue is where Bach really has fun. This piece is all about inversion--not invertible counterpoint, though that can always be present--no, here Bach inverts the subject. Here is the subject in its original form:
And here is that same subject inverted where every interval is reversed--a step up becomes a step down and so forth (ignore the first eighth, the inverted subject starts on the F):
The subject, recto, appears five times on page one of the fugue (and three times on page two) while the inversion appears five times on page two. The first two appear in stretto and so do the third and fourth statements. Looking for appearances of the inversion, I started chuckling when I saw an incomplete version of it in mm. 14 - 15. He was prepping us. Can you call it a false entry if we haven't heard the whole inverted subject yet? Search me. Then in m. 21 we have the original subject with the inversion entering in m. 22 and another statement of the inversion in m. 23. So a stretto of the original theme with its inversion is immediately followed by a stretto of the inversion with itself. There are some more false entries here and there (a false entry is when we just hear the first part of the subject). What really got me chuckling was the penultimate measure where, in the right hand, Bach has the first part of the original subject, doubled in thirds, and in the left hand the inversion, also doubled in thirds. Yeah, ok we got it! Who says Bach didn't have a sense of humor?
Here is Sviatoslav Richter with the Prelude and Fugue in D minor. Incidentally, I don't choose his clips because he is the only good Bach player, but his seem to be the only ones with the score.
In this prelude and fugue, at three minutes long shorter than your typical pop song, Bach shows us yet more ways to write a prelude and fugue. The prelude is another moto perpetuo like the C minor prelude, but this one is done differently, with scale passages over a secco bass line. There is a brief fantasia-like passage at the end leading to the cadence. The two big chords are interesting: the first one is viiº7 of I and the second is viiº4/3 of V. Then V-I. I remembered one theory professor saying quite casually that EVERY piece in the common practice period ends with either a V-I cadence or a IV-I cadence. But if I recall correctly there may be a Bach chorale or two that ends with an odd cadence.
The fugue subject is nothing more than a variant of a standard Baroque ornament followed by a brief scale passage. What makes it exciting is the rhythmic verve. We haven't talked about this, but Bach's subjects all tend to be rhythmically really appealing. Here is that subject:
And here is where I think it came from. First of all, from the guide to ornaments found in the introduction to an edition of the WTC. As you can see, six of the notes are the same:
This is the double cadence, from Rameau's table of ornaments:
Bach's group of eight notes is a bit different from either, of course, but I see a family resemblance. It you were sitting at the keyboard, just fooling with these ornaments, you might stumble across what Bach uses here. Rhythmically it resembles the double cadence and the trill from below, but he has organized the notes to, instead of functioning in a cadential context, to simply suggest a tonic triad on D. He follows this with nothing more than a scale segment in dotted notes. And that's it. A fugue subject that, while it sounds complicated because of the 32nd notes, is actually very bare bones.
The fugue is quite brief, only 28 measures, but there is room for lots of sequences. Here is an ascending fourth sequence:
And he soon follows that with a sequence descending by step. Because of the nature of the subject, sometimes he is doing a stretto that you might mistake for just another sequence, as in m. 13. And sometimes he does a stretto between outer voices and stuffs a false entry in the middle as in m. 20. At the very end, just preceding the cadence, he doubles the ornament motif in tenths for two measures and follows that with the dotted motif in filled out chords for two measures. Cadence, done. Another example of Bach doing a great deal with very little.
Here is Friedrich Gulda with the D major Prelude and Fugue:
So far Bach has just been getting warmed up by tossing off a few simple and quite short preludes and fugues. Now, with the C# minor prelude and fugue he starts to show off what he can really do. Both of these pieces have rather an antique feel to them which reminds us that Bach comes from a family with deep roots in the world of music. Members of his family were church organists in Germany since the 16th century. The prelude almost has the feel of Renaissance counterpoint with the simple theme echoing itself at the octave then wandering off into free melodic counterpoint.
Let's just review what we have seen Bach do with the fugue so far:
the fugue in C major was an exercise in stretto where Bach jams in twenty-four statements of the subject in a fugue only twenty-seven measures long. There are no episodes and only two measures of transitional material.
the fugue in C minor has no strettos whatsoever, but lots of episodes as well as false entries, hidden entries and invertible counterpoint.
the fugue in C# major is all about developing the motivic material of the subject and nothing else and has a minimum of statements of the subject.
This fugue, by way of contrast, has nothing but the subject and halfway through Bach adds a second contrasting subject (not a countersubject) and from then on there is even less room for anything but those two subjects heard against one another and against themselves in stretto. One huge difference from the C major fugue is that that subject was fourteen notes long, but this one only has four notes.
The subject has a venerable ancestry as it can be found in counterpoint going back centuries. Imagine if you were asked to write a long, long fugue with only four notes. And not only make it interesting, make it truly great. That is what Bach has done. I don't have to go over the details as some wonderful person has put up a clip of the piece with all the entries of both subjects shown in red, blue and pink (for when the subjects overlap a lot). Here is the clip:
This prelude reminds us that Bach intended the Well-Tempered Clavier as a teaching resource for his children, three of whom became leading composers in the next generation, so I guess that worked! Much of the prelude is a demonstration of invertible counterpoint as the opening eight measure phrase is immediately followed by another in which the voices are inverted. Then another where they are inverted again. And another! This is then fragmented into shorter phrases, again alternating with their inversions. Two thirds of the prelude consists of these demonstrations of invertible counterpoint. I don't want to get into all the details here, but have a look at my post on the mirror fugues from the Art of Fugue for some more discussion of inversion.
Once the long section in invertible counterpoint is done, Bach turns to sequence and modulation for the last part of the prelude. Again, you should notice that the structure and resources of this prelude are completely different from the ones used in the first and second preludes. Incidentally, I forgot to include the score in yesterday's post. You can always go to IMSLP for any of these scores. The Well-Tempered Clavier is here. Here is the prelude:
The fugue, in three voices, has a subject that easily divides into two parts:
The first part, with a little turn, outlines the tonic triad while the second, leaping up in sixths, has a cadential feel. Once the three voices have entered with the subject the first episode, beginning in m. 7 uses an inversion of the turn to accompany a little motif derived from the falling triad outline. Then the turn is turned right side up and we get another statement of the subject in the dominant, G# major. The episode uses that decorated triad motif, but this time inverted. The next statement of the subject is in A# minor and is followed by an episode based on the turn figure in various forms. The next statement is on E# minor and so on. The whole fugue is very tightly focused on the material of that subject and the countersubject is in very neutral running scale passages in sixteenths--which you could argue is just a version of the turn figure. The developmental episodes, working out all the possibilities of that subject, dominate the fugue which has no strettos and not that many statements of the subject. The second page only has the subject five times. I won't put up the score to the fugue as I found a YouTube clip that includes it. Here is Sviatoslav Richter with the Prelude and Fugue in C# major:
This prelude and fugue are as different from the first ones in C major as could be imagined. Starting with the prelude, it begins with a relentless moto perpetuo using an arpeggiated figure, another one of Bach's happy inventions. Did any other composer ever find so many different ways to arpeggiate chords? Here, the arpeggio always includes neighbor tones and wanders around among closely related keys like E flat, B flat and G major. Towards the end there is a surprising change of texture with a coda in three tempi: presto, adagio and allegro which does little more harmonically than sit on the tonic, tonicize the subdominant and cadence on C minor with a tierce de Picardie (major third). Great piece with a unique rhythmic layout. Towards the end it resembles a fantasia.
This fugue is one that has been extremely popular with music educators because it demonstrates so many features of the genre: false entries, hidden entries, sequential episodes and so on. Whereas the first fugue in C major is stretto, stretto and nothing but stretto, this one hasn't a single instance of the stretto. Instead it has developmental episodes and contrapuntal inversions. But what strikes the listener first is the jaunty, dance-like subject.
A false entry is one where we hear just the beginning of the subject, in this case that very distinctive C, B natural, C motif, but it is not followed by the rest and the actual subject, complete, soon after appears in a different voice. An example is found in the second half of m. 10 where that beginning motif, in this case, B flat, A natural, B flat, is found in the alto voice, followed by a couple more notes from the subject, but it does not continue but is instead interrupted by the real subject in the soprano in the next measure on E flat.
The design of the fugue is fairly simple, one reason is it popular with those teaching how to write fugues. There is the subject with its characteristic lower-neighbor ornament and two downward leaps, first a fifth and later a sixth. The subject is accompanied by two countersubjects, the first in mm 3-4 joined by the second in mm 7-8. Bach manages to use nearly all of the possible inversions of these three elements: subject below with CS2 and CS1 above in that order, subject on top with CS2 and CS1 below in that order, subject in the middle with CS1 above and CS2 below and so on.
Like all Bach fugues, the more you listen to it, the more you hear. Take for example the sudden rich harmony of the last two measures leading to the final cadence. Joseph Kerman, in his fine book on Bach fugues, The Art of Fugue, hears a bit of extravagant self-parody here (p. 14). Do you agree?
Unlike a lot of composers since his time Bach chose to organize his traversal of all the keys, major and minor, by chromatic scale instead of the circle of fifths. That is, after C major and minor he goes to C# major and minor and so on, ending with B major and minor. Shostakovich, on the other hand, follows C major with A minor and then G major and E minor, working his way through the circle of fifths ending with F major and D minor. Chopin follows the same schema in his Preludes, op. 28.
I mentioned that I have written a lot about Bach on this blog and in fact I have already done a fairly substantial post about this very fugue: How to Build a Fugue. That was way back in December 2011! Instead of repeating myself, I am just going to send you back to that post. Today, I will just talk about the famous prelude to that fugue. Here is the beginning in the original manuscript:
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And here is the complete score in the Neue Bach Ausgabe:
The first thing that strikes you about this piece is that, except for the last three measures, every measure has exactly the same arpeggiated layout of the harmony. Indeed, you could do a version that just shows the chords with an instruction "play with this arpeggiation." Here are the first four measures with the arpeggiation removed:
The harmonies are I, ii4/2, V6/5 and I. Perhaps the best way to learn a piece like this is to memorize the chord progression and arpeggio separately and then put them together. This piece is all about harmony as there is almost nothing else there. 19th century editors were so scandalized at one particular passage that they re-wrote it to make it less startling. This is from measures 22 to 23. Here are those two measures with the measures on either side, for context:
The analysis would be IV7, viiº7 of V, viiº4/2 (of I), V. Bach spices up the passage, which is simply a dominant preparation, with a secondary dominant (the viiº7 of V), but what really catches the ear is that he avoids resolving that into V, but instead goes to an alternative to V, the viiº4/2 which very strongly leads to V as the A flat has to resolve down (to the G) as does the bass of all 4/2 chords. For added dissonance he suspends the C from the previous chord which finally resolves on B in the last measure of the example.
I hope that was not too technical! Bach is regarded, by composers, as a great (perhaps the) master of harmony. Soon after his death his son C. P. E. Bach collected together a lot of his chorales in a volume and, in one form or another, that same collection has remained in print to this very day. A copy sits on my shelf. Everything Bach does is within the common practice harmonic system--actually he was one of the main architects of that system. But he was always able to make it sound fresh. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Bach is that he can write what are very simple, basic progressions, but do so in a way that makes them sound fresh. Just listen how that simple arpeggio enlivens the humdrum and very ordinary progression of the first four measures. And then, throughout the piece, he keeps unfolding more and more extensions and expansions of basic progressions, often using suspensions, as in measure 8, where he suspends the bass B, on its way to the A in measure 9, to create dissonances. But his dissonances always resolve. One thing, as a composer, that I have learned from Bach is that if you prepare a chord with good voice-leading, you can write just about anything.
One more thing to notice is that after we have arrived at the dominant chord in measure 24, prepared by that elaborate progression I mentioned, from there to the end is just one long dominant harmony except for a gesture towards V of IV in measure 32. Being an organist, Bach was, of course, a real master of the use of pedals.
As we go on, with this project, I think we will see how Bach manages to create something new with every prelude. Next time, C minor! Now here is the Prelude and Fugue in C major played by Siebe Henstra on harpsichord:
