Well, well, well...It's been a very long time since I wrote about my adventures in playing Bach. The reasons are many, but mostly my absence is due to my workload arriving in September, it's quite overwhelmed me. I have also realized that music, learning music is not the same as reading through recipes and cooking. Hardly, what was I thinking?
I am still working on the first 3 fugues for the most part. Developing muscle memory, developing understanding of phrasing and dynamics. Bach doesn't require a great deal of emotional out pouring in these pieces. They are technical pieces, but they are lovely all the same. I've become quite fond of Fugue #1, with all its weirdnesses. It seems to like me too. Interesting how fingers seem to have feelings, and running through these pieces brings pleasure to all my little digits. So, rather than worry about learning every piece in this book, Volume 1 Well Tempered Clavier, I am just going to keep working on any piece until it is basically learned with some level of competency and understanding. I have started the fourth fugue and it's still very much a slog with that one. I can only play it in pieces. I think I'll just spend the rest of my life on these pieces. Why not? Is there something better to do?

Daily Bach not Blog

It's become obvious that I will be the only one reading this Blog and that's okay. Somehow its public nature still exerts a kind of gentle pressure on me , a weak force, like let's say gravity. I have only missed one day of practice and this is a new and revelatory experience for me. Something about making a large commitment in such a public way, regardless of whether anyone ever responds to me has spurred me on. Now it's starting to become just a part of my day. There are going to be pieces I do not succeed with in one week of playing, there is just too much that is difficult, subtle, confounding and confusing in these little gems. But I do my best to revisit all the pieces as I go on, and as time moves forward I will pick and choose the ones that need the most work. The mountain of material to wrangle with becomes ever larger.
I will say this, Bach knew how to write beautiful lines of music and he also was not afraid of the harshest of harmonies. If one takes apart small pieces of any given fugue for example, one can zero in on clashes of minor seconds and major sevenths, of tritones tripping by, resolving quickly so that one hardly has time to perceive the "ouch" of those intervals. They are like the problems of a day, harsh in a moment and yet resolved into harmony and some kind of clarity.
I've also been sensing in my being a yearning to play these pieces faithfully and truthfully, for when they are played as Bach intended there is a truth in them that extends beyond any truth that language may provide us. I have lately felt that language at times serves us not for good but for ill; it forces people into rigid ideological positions which invariably can be proven false or inadequate; it fosters a mockery of the intelligence of both the sage and the crowd, but especially the crowd which falls back on mythological thinking, foolish cliche driven rhetoric, the mob becomes inflamed with righteous anger and then becomes dangerous. We are in such a moment in our history, we have an inflamed, illiterate and fear whipped mob intent on bringing down democracy, misunderstanding what a free society is.
Oh boy, what am I doing here? This is my music page, not my political rant page. You see, though, music moves us past the horrors of the day, it speaks to us only with truth. The sound imparts a knowledge and beauty which is actually not speakable in linguistic symbology. But it is knowable in the body and the soul. As far as I'm concerned music is as close to knowing God as one can get.

The implications of studying Bach in school

It became obvious to me yesterday that while it may be important to have an appreciation of science, it may be interesting for students to learn some of the methods and purposes behind scientific exploration, it could be experienced in school as a pass fail course. For those with special interest or passion or propensity towards math/science , science and math could be graded and could have rigorous standards, as exist now in many places. However, as I drag my way through these basic, elemental pieces of Bach and struggle with analyzing them both formally and harmonically, I think, Eureka, the study and analysis and challenges of applying theoretical knowledge to the execution of a piece of music would make much more sense for some students, i.e. me, than the study of science or math. As far as learning how to think analytically, it would work well, there is a lot of mind bending stuff in a Bach prelude for example, not to mention a symphony by Beethoven. There is a plethora of material, there are hundreds of intellectual goals, understandings, outcomes that could result from this kind of study. As much as I loved science at one point in my life, I ended up crashing and burning when I took Chemistry, Honors level, and I remember absolutely nothing from the experience, except the humiliation of doing poorly in a course. School is structured so ridiculously. There could be so many ways for students to learn, to use ideas and principles, to grow as thinkers, as creators, as researchers, beyond the present incarnation of school. It's stunning. Studying these two page pieces by Bach, written over two hundred years ago, is teaching me more than I could've imagined two weeks ago.

A day at the pool

Today has been a nice kind of end of summer day. My practice time has been almost negligible and I'm sorry to admit that. But it's okay. I'll practice more tomorrow. Uh oh, famous last words, eh? But really I needed to see my friends, do nothing but chat and swim and eat. Enjoy being. Enjoy loving friendships, people I rarely see. My state of body seems to be improving. Tomorrow I see the doc again about the pains in my leg. And I play Bach. The Fuga 2 is going pretty well. It is such an attention forcing exercise. Even today I listened and tried imagining singing the piece.

What is a fugue? To speak simply a fugue is like a round, that is one voice starts, another comes in a certain distance later, a third voice, a fourth, and it creates a very lovely sound. A fugue is more complicated as the voices do more than just imitate each other, they play contrapuntally against each other, so that when it's not your turn to play the subject you're doing something else. As was seen in Fuga 1, it can get very complex, turgid, intricate and so on. Fugue 2 is less convulted by far than the first one. I should analyze it, find all the main ideas, the episodes and see what I find. I wasn't feeling so well today and it kind of zapped my energy. But I played. I worked mostly on Fuga 2, but I also continue studying Fuga 1 as it will take a while before it's more or less settled in my hands.
Do people ever write poems as fugues? How could you do that? You would of course have to have a few people perform it, but it might be fun to construct one. It's no doubt been done before.

Monday again, moving on

Started Prelude and Fugue #2. Both are written in C minor. That means that in a scale the third note in the scale is lowered one half step. Minor keys have a different color and feeling. As it turns out I have worked on both of these pieces, one with a teacher the other without. I think they are easier than Fugue 1. But they both have switches in accidentals, in other words there are short modulations to other keys and again I have to really pay attention. I also sang the fugue in Orphenians when I was in high school, a la Swingle Singers. Fun. I don't use my ear enough to help me play. I can hear when it's wrong but if I thought about how a chord will sound before I play it perhaps I can play with greater accuracy. Lots to learn.

Analysis, simple, useful

Something to consider.

Analysis of Bach's fugue BWV 846 in C major (WTC I)

by José Rodríguez Alvira

This fugue in C major, the first fugue from the first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, presents several interesting aspects:

• The exposition presents the voices in the unusual order of subject - answer - answer - subject.
• After the exposition Bach present numerous stretti without any interruption.
• The only measures where the subject is not present are measure 23 and the two last measures of the fugue.

Some authors propose various numerological symbolism. The 14 notes long subject is said to be related to Bach's name:

B = 2, A = 1, C = 3, H = 8
2 + 1 + 3 + 8 = 14

It is also said that the subject appears exactly 24 times in this fugue representing the 24 fugues in the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. But as you will see in our analysis, there are only 22 complete subjects. To be able to get to the total of 24 subjects you need to include two incomplete presentations of the subject. The 1^st incomplete appearance is in measure 14:

As you can see, the 4 last notes are missing. Yet, this voice enters in a stretto, so you really hear it as a subject entrance even if the 4 last notes are missing.

The 2^nd incomplete appearance is in measure 15. In this measure only the first 7 notes are presented:

In the 3^rd incomplete appearance in measure 20, we only hear the first 3 notes (although you may find some relations between the sixteenth notes in the next measure with the 32ths notes of the subject):

It is up to you to decide...

Follows the complete analysis of the fugue. We have numbered the subject and answers appearance. Incomplete appearances, appear in green color:

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