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:

Back to:

Articles

teoria.com

Versión en castellano

© 2005 José Rodríguez Alvira
Published by teoria.com

Concentration

Today I played the Fuga 1. I think I understand why piano teachers do not assign this as the first fugue for intermediate or nearly advanced students. It is deceptive. I am not sure what is going on in this piece but I think there is some perhaps mathematical equation for which Bach is writing the musical equivalent. It is necessary to pay close attention to the held notes, the harmonics are established partly through these, and they are everywhere. Booby traps. Wonderful result though is in order to keep track and play these various holds one has to concentrate in an extreme way. Of ten when I practice my mind drifts off, to whereever, and though I may keep playing adequately I check out from the piece when I do this. I suspect concentrating is like anything else, one develops greater skill as one keeps at it. I wonder where I might find some kind of analysis of this piece, as some of these difficult---for me--- spots have harmonies which are truly not beautiful, and yet I suspect there is something revealed in these measures, some musical truths, some death defying tricks of genius. And to play is to give one's self over to the experience, you can not fake your way through Bach, he insists that you pay attention to the details. Ah, something I have resisted often. I like the big picture, the larger meanings, the overall and general view. Sorry, that won't work here. It's strictly and utterly all in the details, whether it be augmented sixths or diminshed sevenths or passing tones or six four chords in the relative minor, you cannot take your eyes away from the proverbial ball for a second. You cannot drift off into your own narcissistic web of cognitive self absorption.
Chromatic harmony. That's it. Colors, resonance, dissonance, consonance, but he, Maestro Bach expanded the possibilities of chromaticism, hence the strange sounds coming from the fugue.
Onward. Upward.

Bach as stern teacher

I love imagining the Bach household. He and his first wife had seven children, three of whom died before his wife died. I think the story goes that he was away when she died, doing music, concerts of some sort with his boss and musical friend/partner Prince Leopold. He didn't know she had died until he arrived home. My sense of him is of a man full of passion and deep sensuality, a man who loved to hold his children on his knee, laugh with them, sing with them, teach them and demand a great deal from them. His first son was a composer but I believe he had some serious difficulties with alcohol and happiness. I'm sure it wasn't easy to be a son of Bach. With his second wife he had thirteen children, 8 of whom died in childhood. Don't believe for a second that each of those losses wasn't painful.
Today I felt almost as if I went backwards in my progress with Fuga 1. I only have one more day and then I'm supposed to go to the next Prelude and Fugue. Uh oh. I'm gaining so much from this one piece I can hardly believe it, even if I can't identify the function of every chord I am starting to hear the odd intervals and motion in my head, at random moments. The amazing thing is in the midst of these densely tangled spots come perfect rule abiding cadences. And he ends the piece with a lovely consonant heavenward thread resolving into a lovely C major chord. As if , nothing to it folks. It's only a fugue, what is my problem?
Speaking of heavenward...Here's an interesting passage from the Wolff biography:
Resembling the model of 17th c. scientific inquiry, Bach's musical inquiry demonstrates its results as it proceeds. His musical knowledge is invariably tied to his musical experience, as his compositions so amply manifest, whether canon, concerto, cantata, or anything else. And fully aware that Bach's music always invites one to discover "polyphony in its greatest strength" and "the most hidden secrets of harmony," Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach issued the warning that only "those who have a concept of what is possible in art and who desire original thought and its special, unusal elaboration will receive from it full satisfaction." ..Too full-blooded a performing musician, Bach would not have been interested in pursuing an abstract goal. Yet he definitely wanted his musical science understood as a means of gaining "insight into the depths of the wisdom of the world", reflecting a metaphysical dimension in his musical thought. ..... Bach's compositions...may epitommize nothing less than the difficult task of finding for himself an argument for the existence of God----perhaps the ultimate goal of his musical science..." p. 338 and 339
Today I just stumbled along. Finding all the tangles and doing my best to untangle and understand them. What univeral intelligence would provide for such amazing elegance, music, science, meaning.

clavier trio 1017

What in this piece tells me it is Bach and not let's say Handel or Telemann? Do I hear any harmonies that remind me of the little piece that is moving into my head and hands? How he does use diminished chords, and augmented sixes. My harmonic analysis skills are diminished in the extreme these days. But I sorted through the thickets of Fuga 1 as best I could, finding the parallel ideas in various measures. Marveling again at the dissonances that played alone are jarring but in context merely provide a vehicle to get from one place to another in an interesting way.

Who was Bach?

Not so much cicada singing today, though perhaps I'm just refusing to listen. I played today, it was a bit less satisfying but I think there will be profits to come. I played several measures that are particularly tangling of the fingers and I played them over and over. I realized that I need to have a pencil at hand and I really need to write down the fingering I like best. Otherwise, as is my wont, I'm always changing the fingering and sometimes that ends in complete disaster. One runs out of fingers and though one does some jumping of notes in Bach, you can't run out of fingers. Is it cheating to continue playing my favorite Prelude in C#? Because I run that every day too, but not in as careful a way as I do the new fugue.
I didn't thank the Maestro today, so I will have to go back and play some more and do a proper and polite thank you.
I read about Bach today, found my book, "Johann Sebastian Bach, The Learned Musician" by Christoph Wolff. It's a very dense accounting of Bach's life and music. But as the writer himself admits the biographical details aren't very exciting and they lack richness. Still today I gained some insight about the time in which he lived which was of course an exciting time in terms of science and philosophy. He was a musical scientist of sorts, though for Bach everything he wrote was a gift from and to God. Religion was the well spring, the ground bass of all his works.
Carl Phillip wrote after his father's death, many years later in 1774 that the 6 Clavier Trios, BWV 1014-1019 were among the most beautiful of his father's compositions. These pieces were not mentioned in Bach's obituary catalog of works. Much of his work has not been passed down, but scholarship is of course ongoing and undiscovered works and letters will probably continue coming to the light of day. As Wolff says though, we still have a basic understanding and a huge body of work to enjoy, and study, we can even though inadequately come to know this great Maestro, this great Kappellmeister.

Glenn Gould, a master

The cicadas are screeching away, I saw one yesterday in the driveway. It must've been exhausted by its efforts at music, it has a long way to go. But I guess I'm being judgmental. The katy-did has a job here on earth, I shouldn't disparage it.
I spent some time with the Maestro this morning. Fuga 1 is starting to become a part of my hands and my mind. I love the process of digging in to a piece, as simple as it might be. The piece is in the key of C, it's your first key, no sharps or flats, ha!! That's what you think. In order to create interesting harmonic textures a composer does a thing called modulating, he or she will for a time change keys, meaning the tonal center of the piece goes to a new place. What might work here for a metaphor? Maybe it's how a good writer will have a main theme in a story, main characters that get most of the action, but there will also be a subtext or a minor theme possibly carried by other lesser characters, which serve to amplify the colors and overall sense of the work. In this numero uno fugue, we move along for four measures before there is an accidental (a sharp or flat) in this case an f#. That tells me I'm moving into the key of G, maybe, but then shortly after that there is a Bflat telling me I'm in F for a second, but neither really make it, it's just a delicate addition of color. I had to dig in starting at measure 10 where things start to get a bit tricky. He finally gets us to the key of A minor. But not before crawling around some diminished chords, V6 chords and some wicked dissonances.

As I was playing along this morning I realized for the millionth time that this music of the Maestro, as I will call him most often now, is completely abstract. It doesn't make you think of something else, it isn't supposed to conjure up the picture of a forest or a field, or a relationship breaking up. It just is as itself, is the expression, sui generis? I have to look that up. It's abstract and it doesn't mean anything, except itself. It isn't for anything, except it is creating a sound landscape that is quite lovely, intricate, rich in possibilties regarding understanding how it means itself. I will probably perform it sometime for my family, but if I only do it for myself that is okay too. I had a wonderful realization that I am actually having a relationship with Sebastian Bach, he is speaking to me with silent notes that were once shooting out of his mind; he saw the notes, he wrote them, he played them, he heard them when his children played them and so on. Now I am reading his mind and making his thoughts come to life in my living room, on my 30 year old Yamaha piano. I feel I owe it to the greatness of his being to pay attention as best I am able to the details of his music and to master at least a vague sense of these little soundscapes. It is different from looking at works of art, for the music is happening now, it's alive as if he comes to life again every time someone plays his music. I thank him everytime I finish practicing.
But what are some of the chords he throws in to this fugue? Need to brush off the theory book. And I need to revisit stories of his life.

It's a warm August morning. I worked on Prelude I and Fugue I yesterday for a little while. Felt immediately discouraged with the fugue, as I've not looked at it, ever. I played hands separately for a little while, then noodled around with my favorite Prelude in C# major. I worked hard on that about 8 years ago and learned it for some friends who had come back into my life from the time I was a singer in New York City. This morning I sat down and addressed my piano, listened carefully to each pitch in a C Major scale; it's always interesting how many pitches are within one single pitch and if you take the time to listen you can hear them. They surround the note as if they are the petals of a flower, surrounding the juicy parts inside. I then played the left hand a few times, my weaker hand. Played the right and noticed that often in the separate lines there seem to be these moments of a final cadence being reached. But when you put the two hands together the cadence then appears an illusion, it gets buried in some slight of hand, as Bach adds harmonic colors that shift the tonal center, tricky the unsuspecting listener. It isn't finally a difficult piece of music, but there plenty of challenges for me and if I can also do a bit of analysis I know I'll enjoy it more. I did start to like the piece very much. Tomorrow will bring more facility.

In much the same spirit that Julie Powell created a blog to both inspire, motivate and challenge herself to accomplish something that seemed quite impossible, I am here to do the same. For many years I have taught music to children, a career threaded with a parallel career as a classical singer, much less successful sad to say. My success as a teacher was in part derived from my passion for music. My first instrument was piano. I am a passable pianist, but for years now I have been playing the same four pieces. Three by Bach, one by Chopin and an occasional Beethoven sonata and Debussy thrown in for spice. My strong belief is that Bach is the best foundation for anyone doing any kind of music and for any instrument. He was, this will sound very silly, the Julia Child of music; his books are the very best "cook" books for musicians. Among the best is "The Well Tempered Clavier". I have Volume One. It has 24 Preludes and 24 Fugues, in all the keys major and minor, one in each key. I have never played all of them, in fact, I haven't even come close. So my challenge is for the next 365 days to see if I can work my way through all of Volume One. It won't mean they are performance ready but it will mean I can basically, without stopping and with some sense of elegance and technique play each piece. It would mean basically a prelude and fugue a week, which means some significant practice time each day.
This is my challenge and I will report back and tell you where I am and what Herr Bach is saying to me.