I've been watching quite a few YouTube videos by Samuel Andreyev recently. He is a composer, Canadian, but long-resident in France, and he specializes in talking about the more advanced or challenging contemporary music. He also talks about avant-garde pop music by people like Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground. There is only one of the so-called "canonic" composers he has ever bothered doing videos about.
Beethoven greatly admired the music of Mozart with whom he hoped to study when he moved to Vienna, but sadly Mozart had just died. There is one composer he mentions by name that he really thought was impressive.
Canadian pianist Glenn Gould based virtually his whole career on performance of music by only one composer.
Probably the greatest setting of the Catholic mass was by a composer who wasn't even Catholic.
Brahms rarely transcribed the music of other composers--with one exception.
Anton Webern, the most advanced of the composers of the Second Viennese School was greatly influenced by this composer.
The first classical guitarist I ever met only played music by a single composer.
And so on.
The composer is J. S. Bach, of course and he is the one composer that you could think of as the "Universal Composer." Universally respected and loved by other composers, performers and audiences. Mind you, there is the story that Leonard Bernstein once said "Bach, that pregnant syllable that terrifies performers, causes composers to fall to their knees and bores everyone else to tears!"
Bach is extraordinary for so many reasons. When he died he was an obscure Saxon organist and church musician who was little known outside his immediate surroundings. But over the decades more and more musicians fell under his spell. When Beethoven first moved to Vienna he made a reputation playing Bach preludes and fugues in the salons. Soon after Bach's death his son C. P. E. Bach collected over three hundred of his chorales and published them for the harmonic education of composers. That book is still in print over two hundred and fifty years later and a copy is sitting on my shelf.
Bach was master of every musical form of his day except opera and in place of that he wrote similarly scaled oratorios that fulfill a similar role. He also was master of forms that only exist today because of him such as the cantata, a part of the Lutheran service that is no longer used. He was the greatest contrapuntalist of all time to the extent that he succeeded in areas that other composers don't even attempt. He was the greatest synthesist in music history taking the dance forms of the French Baroque, the crisp harmonies and concerto forms of the Italian Baroque and the contrapuntal complexities of the German Baroque and fusing them into a musical unity greater than the component parts. He was enormously productive, turning out as much music in a week as most composers do in a year.
Composers as varied as Alban Berg and Toru Takemitsu quote Bach chorales in their works.
It is curious that Bach should be so greatly admired in our day: he approaches music via counterpoint which is virtually forgotten in our day; he was very religious which, again, is very uncommon in our day; and he makes no concessions to the listener, which is almost unheard of in our day!
I have a little story about Bach that I have told before. Late in the 1920s pianist Rudolph Serkin (father of pianist Peter Serkin) gave a recital in Berlin. It went very well and he was called back for an encore. He chose to play the Goldberg Variations with all the repeats which easily takes an hour. After each variation some members of the audience trickled out so at the end when he finished there were only two listeners still in the hall: the great pianist Artur Schnabel and Albert Einstein.
Let's listen to some Bach. First up, possibly the greatest setting of the Catholic mass, the Mass in B minor with John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists:
Next the Cello Suite No. 3, the first solo music (and for two hundred years the only) ever written for cello:
Next, the Art of Fugue, probably the greatest piece of counterpoint ever composed.
Next, the Concerto in D minor for harpsichord:
Finally, the longest single movement ever written in the Baroque, the Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 for solo violin:
Was there anything that Bach was not master of?
11 comments:
Back in the 90s a friend mentioned that he didn't like to listen to much Bach because of the continuous melody line. Clearly he and others listen or hear mainly the keyboard works. I recommended that he try the Cantatas as they are quite varied in the format and he liked those more. The oratorios and Mass can be a bit much for many casual listeners. The problem is that the Cantatas are often performed poorly or at best in plodding fashion. When you hear some sweet voiced singers like Ameling or Buckel they are transformed as they are with performances that dig in a bit on the rhythmic nuances.
As for Lenny his own serious music is not holding up too well, so it is always dangerous to make those kind of comments if in fact he did.
Bach takes a bit of practice to learn to listen to.
I don't have a source for the Lenny quote, just one of those things you hear in the biz!
You provoked me to dis around and I found an article written by Sudip Rose several years ago. This is the quote which LB apparently made on an Omnibus TV program which has important context. So I retract my LB comment.
Yet what I find most amazing about the Omnibus episode on Bach (it aired in 1957) is the disclaimer Bernstein offers at the outset. Not only does he acknowledge that his audience may find Bach’s music utterly boring, he concedes that most people would have heard very little of it. With the help of his musicians, he proceeds to demonstrate some of this exotic fare—a few lines from the Magnificat, the opening to the Toccata and Fugue in D minor—these now-familiar fragments presented as if they were rare species of butterflies flitting across our ken. This was just prior to the early music revival, which began in the late ’50s, and well before the full flourishing of the period-instrument movement a few decades later. At any rate, Bernstein assures us that the only thing really required, if we are to fall under Bach’s spell, is careful attention, study, and familiarity with the music’s materials. “Once you do get to know Bach’s music well enough to love it,” he adds, “you’ll find you love him more than any other composer.”
Sorry for the typo. I meant Sudip Bose.
I always thought that the Bach quote was just the sort of thing Lenny was likely to say! Brash and with just a grain of truth.
I have given a lot of thought to why I love Bach so much when Baroque music in general tends to leave me lukewarm. My major pandemic hobby has been learning some violin sonatas and partitas on the guitar, and I have never put in anything like this kind of time on any other classical composer. For me, the major appeal is Bach's pedagogical aspect. His music teaches itself to you with remarkable clarity, through methodical repetition and development. I don't agree that Bach "makes no concessions to the listener." His music is complex, but it's not at all difficult to understand or follow. It's one
catchy hook after another! My young kids walk around the house humming sections of the pieces I've been practicing. I definitely relate better to his secular and instrumental music than his chorales and cantatas; I'm there for the harmonic and formal ideas, not so much the spiritual ones.
it's a rote establishment observation but Manfred Bukofzer proposed that the longevity of Bach's music had to do with his synthesis of French, German, Italian, English, German, Polish and other regional styles that other composers had also attempted but not achieved in the same way that Bach did. Bach also mastered the old and new styles of his era. Bukofzer went a bit further and proposed that Bach balanced the contrapuntal complexity of the learned styles of his day and place with the dance rhythms of his time. To put it in more colloquial terms, Bach's polyphony was never so complex we ever lose the palpable sense that he always has an actual groove. His dances may not be our dances but when can get a feel for what those dances were through the music he wrote.
Bach's life and times so substantially pre-dated the ideologies of the Romantics that even though he was criticized in his lifetime (Bukofzer again) for making music that was too hard for the lay listeners to understand the ideological chasm between practicing musicians and audiences had not become so big as it would in the Romantic and post-Romantic eras. For every wildly complex polyphonic technique Bach might use he would still ground some element of the music in a vernacular element like a dance or a Lutheran chorale.
I can't resist pivoting to DSCH because I'm going through Pauline Fairclough's biography about him. She pointed out that Shostakovich scholars have tended to downplay the degree to which his film music was a medium in which he tested out ideas or developed themes that would eventually show up in his chamber music. It wasn't just a matter of socialist realism precluding DSCH from writing music that was some hothouse growth, Fairclough has a point in highlighting the ways in which Shostakovich let his "pop" work interact with his "serious" music and that he did a fair chunk of film scoring in his life. It's an idea that Ethan and I have kind of traded back and forth at my blog if at times in elusive ways but I think the idea that "high" and "low" have to always be so cordoned off doesn't make sense of even most of the history of classical music as we colloquially know it.
Ethan, one of my pandemic hobbies has been working on Bach on guitar as well. I just re-learned the Bourrée from the 1st Lute Suite and am still plugging away at the gavottes from the 3rd Lute Suite. You might be right about Bach's appeal to the listener. On some level, rhythmic or melodic, he reaches out the listener even though there might be some real contrapuntal complexity going on in the background.
I haven't read Bukofzer for many years, but I think he captured some important truths about Bach.
Don't forget the Italian Suite: Pure bliss!
It is hard to find a piece by Bach that isn't wonderful!
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