Show Notes
Opsimath Organist My first trip to Germany (I was 21) I walked into a church in Weimar and heard— by beautiful coincidence— an unseen organist play Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue, BWV 582. This was a piece I heard for the first time only a year before. I remember exactly in which chair I first heard it. If the Chaconne is Bach’s universe tightly wound into a handheld box, the Passacaglia is a different vision of the same, exploding through thousands of pipes. It is a piece you cannot overlook when thinking of the crowning achievements in Bach’s career. At 21, I knew Bach was Bach, but I hadn’t yet dedicated myself to him fully. Even so, I knew Bach’s organ works could be the supreme solo musical activity: the most complete musical experience had by a single person. Think about it: it’s making music with all four limbs, drumming on multiple keyboards. The soundboard of this instrument is a church. But I was a pianist, not an organist. At that young age, I had already excluded myself from being able to participate in certain musical activities. Why? Where did I get this notion? Knowing your limitations is healthy in many areas of life, but in music— especially young musicians— you should know: your potential is unlimited. I don’t know how or why one draws the line at what a student can and cannot do, why some teachers restrain enthusiasm, or make students feel limited to certain areas from a young age. I’d guess it’s a mixture of abuse and a fear of money. Abuse is handed down: the teacher was told they can’t do X, soon the student learns to stay away from X. ‘It deepens like a continental shelf.’ We glorify abuse on the screen: teachers inflicting suffering so the student may rise stronger after being broken… but this makes for a good film— not a good life. To actually teach like this is nothing more than sophisticated child abuse. As I’ve said on the show in my ‘advice to musical teens,’ if you ever find a teacher who leaves you feeling worthless or unhappy with music, leave that teacher immediately. There is no reason why a musical education shouldn’t be full of joy and happiness and discovery. Yes, hard work, too, but under the right teacher, hard work can be a joy, not a punishment. One objects, saying a line must be drawn early in order to mold the student into an employable musician. “You should focus on only one instrument, kid.” In an era of specialization, this seems almost necessary. But is the ultimate goal of music a job? Money? A c-a-r-e-e-r? My colleagues reading this can confirm that many of us in the business have lost the spark that initially made us want to become musicians. But I won’t harp on the perils of ‘building a career’ or the traumatic musical upbringing I experienced. I want to focus on how, during my few decades in music, I have time and time again doubted my abilities, only to find that there was no reason for doing so. Rather than passing the blame, I’d like to revisit these moments and focus on how I overcame such a crippling emotion.
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Transposition I remember learning a concerto when I was 16 or so— probably Mozart or Beethoven, and I was trying to memorize a section that happened earlier, only now it was in a new key. I explained to my father that, could I transpose, I wouldn’t have to struggle to learn the passage more than once— if I had the type of mind that could transpose. He shrugged and said, ‘so learn how to transpose’ and walked away. That made me mad. What an idiot! I thought. One can’t learn such things. Some are born with the gift of transposition, I wasn’t. Why I thought this at such a young age is a bit sad and confusing (and I’ll resist launching into a rant about how, if a student is advanced enough to play Beethoven, transposing should be something they learned long ago.) For whatever reason, in my mind, I couldn’t transpose. Of course, one does learn how to do such things, and I did— even if it was nearly a decade later. One star
More from WTF Bach
The music at the end is BWV 600, from a forthcoming ‘electrified’ arrangement of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein. The beautiful passage toward the end of my rant— with the koto accompaniment and bird song— comes from one of my absolute favorite books: R.H. Blythe’s writings about Haiku. Blyth considered the three greatest geniuses of time to be Basho, Bach, and Shakespeare— in that order! Wow! What am I missing with Basho!? More than a podcast. This is WTF Bach.
Volume 6 in ‘J.S. Bach: Complete Keyboard Works’ is on presale today! Here are the relevant links: * J.S. Bach: Complete Keyboard Works, Vol. 6 - Arrangements of Albinoni and Reincken(https://modernclassicalx.lnk.to/JSBachCompleteKeyboardWorksVol6FromArrangementsofAlbinoniandReincken) I might call this volume a ‘headphones album’ or perhaps one to listen to in the car: The sonic space shifts throughout the course of these pieces. I describe this process in depth in the episode, but essentially each track is two recordings of the piece, playing simultaneously: one recording is the original live performance, while another is that very same performance, played back through the Disklavier with the dynamics flatlined— as if the piano keyboard were incapable of dynamics — like a harpsichord. The two recordings were then ‘live panned’ during the mixing according to my feeling for the music. The result, while perhaps less extreme than this all sounds, is certainly a noticeable phenomenon, especially in headphones or seated between two speakers as in a car. But enough about that, let’s get to the music. Fugue it:
We’ve now covered the seven surviving earliest vocal works by Johann Sebastian Bach! This episode is a brief tour through the episodes we dedicated to these pieces, refreshing our memories and attempting to identify unifying stylistic features. All the episodes covering the Arnstadt/Mülhausen cantatas can be found at:https://wtfbach.substack.com/t/early-cantatas Wanna Cantata?
“The consummate expressiveness of {BWV 4] has always been marvelled at. Each verse is as if chiselled in music.” -Albert Schweitzer, Vol. 2 Bach’s early Easter cantata remains one of the most beloved in the entire canon. Barely 22 years old, he is already in full command of his tone-painting. Here are three measures particularly packed with symbolism: Filling the music with rests at the word nothing, ‘one death eating another’ through the closest possible canon, crosses both in shape and every note ‘sharped’ (gekreuzt,) dripping blood on the Passover doors with short 8th notes, leaping a diminished 12th (!) in the bass aria at the word death, this cantata is a dictionary of text painting. …und singen Halleluja!
Sometimes an article from the EB strikes me as so amusing, I simply have to share it with you. See you next week (or the week after, latest) for the conclusion of our early cantata survey, with Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4. Thanks for listening! Well, That’s Fascinating!