Bach's Holy Dread | Hacker News Reader

Bach's Holy Dread

newyorker.com

131 pointstintinnabula42 comments

The depth of devotion evident in Bach's music would almost drive you towards being more religious. It's powerful.

There's an excellent site which I've looked at periodically for years which goes through every prelude and fugue in the WTC and gives an interpretation of them, along with religious interpretations where applicable for structures and phrases and voices and so on. It also lets you play single bars and things. It's very good:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/tas3/wtc.html

Here's my favorite lament, the C#m fugue, which is relevant given the article:

http://bach.nau.edu/clavier/nature/fugues/Fugue04.html

That is a great link! Thank you for posting it. This is the Internet at its best.

Thank you for this amazing link!

You're welcome!

I've been attending a traditional Catholic parish for several years now, and over the last year got involved (for the first time in my life) with my church's choir. I've always loved music and could already read a bit of Western notation (owing to piano lessons at a young age – thanks, mom!), but really didn't (and don't) know that much about it, with respect to both theory and performance. The journey to the "production" side of sacred music has been an interesting one (still very much ongoing), and I feel quite enriched by what I've learned and experienced over the last few months. I encourage everyone to step out of their comfort zone and learn a bit more about music ~ it's rich history and the joy it can bring to so many. Listen to music from 3 centuries past, from 100 and 1,500 years ago!

At Midnight Mass 2016, just a few days ago, we offered Michael Haydn's (1737–1806)[1] Missa Sancti Gabrielis[2]. The younger Hadyn was a teenager when Bach died, and his music was shaped in and shaping the period following the Baroque era (Bach's era), which we identify today as the Classical period.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Haydn

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_sEDzrkIM4

So, despite not knowing any music from the production side, you manage to easily enter and sing on the choir? I wanted to do something, but my voice seems very out of tune for that I despite various efforts I can't get it much better.

Advise me, please.

Its probabaly not your voice, it's more likely that you could use some ear training, try musictheory.net

A decent voice teacher can help with that. Not everyone can be Frank Sinatra, but you can learn to sing well enough to join an amateur choir if you desire.

To find an inexpensive voice teacher, look up the information for a voice professor at the nearest college, and ask for a referral to one of their students (don't shy away from an undergraduate, and be clear you're a total beginner).

Learn a bit about Solfège[1]. Find sheet music for the voice parts of some piece you'd like to sing – simpler would be better, at first – and practice marking up the sheet music with the solfège syllables. Then, or concurrently, use TonalEnergy[2] (or something similar, but T.E. is top-notch) to playback the syllables and the tempo. Finally, start working at matching your voice to the syllables – T.E. will visually indicate what notes you're actually hitting (or not hitting, as the case may be). Likewise, simply practice going up and down the scale with your voice until you can reliably reproduce do–re–mi–etc per the indications of T.E. Eventually, try singing the words instead of the solfège syllables, while hitting the proper notes.

Good luck, and remember to relax and have fun!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge

[2] http://tonalenergy.com/

I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise the mainstream media (MSM) but: Here, with the OP, thank you HN, the Internet, and The New Yorker, there is, infinitely welcome as a grand exception, something very worthwhile -- candidate for one of the crown jewels of civilization!

Thank you Bach, BBC, PROMS, Kathryn Knight, Internet, Google, and YouTube: As I type this, I'm listening to a good performance, at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTm_KdxqPPk

Now how to get the rest of the MSM to clean up their act, up their game, and start to catch up to even 10% of the OP!

For the St. Matthews Passion, this is considered one of the great recordings - directed by the great Philipp Herreweghe. Truly exquisite. I bought this on CD a long time ago and had it on repeat for the entire first month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78XgYWGXDjw&list=PLiJnN4bTWJ...

https://smile.amazon.com/Bach-Matthaus-Passion-Bostridge-Col...

Thanks!

FWIW, it's very interesting to take the various recordings (or recordings of performances) Herreweghe did over the last 30 years, with various ensembles (though many with Collegium Vocale of course), and compare the interpretations (tempo, vocals, dynamics,...). Worth some time.

Do you have a particular favourite?

when I read (excellent) music articles like this I just wish they came with a sidebar with the music excerpts that are being discussed.

I know what you mean: a direct example of what was being discussed would help.

The Dunedin consort have some very short excerpts from the Bach passions on their site, including the Herr, unser Herrscher chorus mentioned in the first paragraph. There is a longer video trailer available.

I am familiar with large force performances of the Bach passions and found the small ensemble approach sufficiently interesting to purchase an actual recording.

They're all easy to look up on Spotify, and the article was much better for listening to them at appropriate points.

Spotify isn't available in the country I live in.

Totally! Meanwhile, here's the magnificent Herr, unser Herrscher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIcinMxNYBc

Well, I think you're supposed to know the music beforehand. What would you do if the article was a comment on some piece of literature?

Then, presumably, it would quote the applicable segments. Or it would, at the very least, contain a link to the whole article.

A link to the whole book?

Quote the entire book, you mean? A comment about a book may not be a comment about specific segments, but to the entire thing.

being familiar with the piece is not the same as when he's discussing about tonalities having a sidebar with a piano reduction of the vocal score notated with key and chord degree information, and to go the extra mile you would be able to switch from piano to original performance seamlessly while looking at said score.

I would be very willing to pay for a website that provided this kind of experience, or, even better, for an app that did that: kind of similar to what 'the orchestra' for ios is like but more in depth with music theory discussion as well.

On a related note, it is quite enjoyable to listen to the interviews on "all of Bach" [1] as in some of them, especially organ, the performer will discuss the piece while playing short excerpts.

[1] http://allofbach.com/en/

I wrote a comment recommending this site, but just so you see...check this out if you're interested in analyses alongside performances and scores:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/tas3/wtc.html

When I read Gödel, Escher, Bach I wished the book came with a CD...

Here's a Spotify playlist I've had around for that purpose: https://open.spotify.com/user/rspeer/playlist/3q3TsI67o6rUfS...

There's room for interpretation in the list -- for example, I get to pick any "two-part invention" Bach wrote. And it's kind of up to you to line up the nicknames of the pieces (which Hofstadter uses) with the more formal names (used in track titles).

It could use some commentary to go with it, to better explain what the tracks have to do with the chapters. But I've never gotten around to putting together the Web page that would require, and also to fill in post-GEB details like:

- Bach probably didn't write the Little Harmonic Labyrinth

- The Little Harmonic Labyrinth doesn't end the way Hofstadter says it does

- The Crab Canon is not a Möbius strip, but a charlatan on YouTube decided he could "improve" GEB by spreading the meme that it is, and now everyone links to that dumb video and claims it's GEB

The Crab Canon is not literally a Möbius strip, of course. But the Möbius strip is a fabulous analogy that goes a long way toward helping people understand what is going on. I've used this in my teaching on that topic:

http://www2.nau.edu/tas3/MOcancrizans.pdf

You made that page? Interesting. I'd like you to explain.

I believe that the Crab Canon is in no way analogous to a Möbius strip, and the topology is in fact quite different. When you go around a Möbius strip once, you end up in the same place you were, flipped upside down.

The Crab Canon is not a Möbius strip, it's a palindrome. It is not flipped upside down, it's flipped left to right, in the direction of time. This is already illustrated in GEB, with the clefs at both ends of the page, as well as by Bach himself.

The video bamboozles its viewers with poor graphics. They can't see that the music on both "sides" of the Möbius strip is completely unrelated.

A Möbius strip does have an analogue in music: it would be a canon by inversion. Bach wrote some of those. It would take a particularly short canon by inversion to actually be represented by a Möbius strip; the gap between the entries of the parts would have to be half the length of the song.

In your notes, what role does the half twist play? Why would it not be the same without the twist?

>>the music on both "sides" of the Möbius strip is completely unrelated.

Glad to see the "enquotion" of the word "sides." The point of the analogy is that a Möbius strip has but ONE side. The analogy illustrates thereby that while there may seem to be TWO melodies (different on each "side"), it is actually ONE and the same melody that counterpoints itself.

The problem with the YouTube video is that its TWO playheads move in opposite directions. There should actually be but ONE playhead, wrapping around both "sides" of the Möbius strip, playing BOTH of its "sides" simultaneously, thereby showing ONE melody in counterpoint with itself (as in the pdf link)

All analogies break down at some point, as your observation that the melody inverts at the midpoint is valid. But is not the Möbius strip itself the visual representation of a mathematic? As such, would there not be inconsistencies there too? I'm not a mathematician so cannot think of any.

But as a musician, I believe the better analogy would be a simple canon at the octave or unison, like the E minor "fugue" of the Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1.

http://bach.nau.edu/clavier/nature/fugues/Fugue10.html

Toward the bottom right there is a link to another Möbius pdf. One might again object that it inverts the canon follower, but that is easily solved by inverting the follower line of the graphic (which misrepresents the canon in two dimensions as traditional music notation, making it a canon in contrary motion).

To be sure, all analogies break down at some point, and never more so than in the representation of non-dimensional sound in three dimensions. To my way of thinking, the “twist” of the Möbius strip (with its resulting melodic inversion) is best understood by thinking of the thumb/forefinger "playhead" as having but one clockwise orientation, in which case the melodic inversion evaporates, but the contrapuntal inversion is retained.

It is indeed true that a Möbius strip should have one side. The best use of the mathematical idea of a Möbius strip does not involve a piece of paper you look at from one direction or the other, and see different notes; instead, you should be seeing the same notes, but see them right-side-up or upside-down depending on how many times you have gone around the strip.

The Crab Canon analogy breaks down completely, because the notes are never upside-down. There are many canons that could apply to in the Musical Offering, like the ones that Bach illustrates by putting a second, upside-down clef on them.

> The problem with the YouTube video is that its TWO playheads move in opposite directions.

The PDF says: "To "perform" your model, one musician would start at each clef, read around the strip in the prescribed direction to the other clef, and then reverse directions."

I believe the two playheads the only thing that gets you the actual structure of the Crab Canon, which is a palindrome.

When you model it as a Möbius strip, then ignore the twist as "oh well the analogy doesn't quite work", and gradually change everything about it to say "oh, it's a palindrome; we just made it a Möbius strip to look cool" -- then it's not a Möbius strip.

My current belief is that various people hear that the most famously nicknamed canon in the Musical Offering is a Möbius strip, and then contort their minds to believe that it is true, and tell other people the same thing.

You could make the analogy work with the right canon! I think one of the canons in BWV 1072-1078 would do the trick. But they don't have catchy nicknames or references in GEB.

That book is quite high on my todo list - can you recommend it?

Following through that link from anjc leads to this:

http://bach.nau.edu

Interactive St. Matthew Passion and Mass in B Minor there, plus the Goldberg Variations and Well-Tempered Clavier

Another excellent book on this subject, which examines Bach's counterpoint and its varied meanings to his contemporary society, including religious meanings, is "Bach and the meanings of counterpoint" by David Yearsley. A terrific read full of examples for those interested.

It almost seems as if some people believe that music hasn't really evolved in the last century.

I have been binging 'Mozart in the Jungle' and remeber one part where they were trying to tie into contemporary composition. They just stuck a loop of some random keyboarding by 'the maestro' into a fairly simple extremely loud EDM track that mainly expressed violence.

Such subtle evaluation of 18th century sounds with no serious effort to integrate or bridge the gap with contemporary tools and audiences.

Its a pretentious, irrelevant, backwards-looking fantasy world.

Ah, finally an art essay in the New Yorker on something that I'm knowledgeable about.

Folks… despite the 'dreadful' link baiting in the title, this is a pretty great article.

Nothing linkbaity about it. "Dread" as in "fear of God" is a common theme in western Christianity, especially around Bach's time (and still is in some cases today, cf. the Rastafarian dreadlocks being a symbol of respect for the power of God). And in this sense, "fear" is meant less as "scary haunted house" kind of fear, and more as respect and obedience to the divine power.

Also of interest: the etymology of the word "dread"[0]; Fear-God Barebone, the brother of the more famous Praise-God Barebone, for whom the "Barbone's Parliament" during the English Commonwealth takes its name[1][2]; and the theological theory behind the idea of the fear of God[3].

[0]: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praise-God_Barebone

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barebone's_Parliament

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_God

The phrase itself is well known and has been kicking around for ages. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous drug trip:

"And close your eyes with holy dread"

But also Wycliffe's Bible, from the late 1300s:

"The hooli drede of the Lord dwellith in to world of world"

Puritans had the best names. Praise-God's son was named "Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone"

Ah, fantastic. Some cultures still do names like that: I once met a woman from Zimbabwe whose name translated as "Merciful Lord", which I thought was pretty cool.

Upvoted. Despite the sibling comment (+ thread) explaining quite well (thank you) about "dread" and "holy dread", that's not something everyone is knowledgeable about, and as such the title can appear to be "baity". Especially as a non-native speaker, as well as someone not into devotional music and its history, this comment was appreciated, and it was what made me decide to read it, which I'm glad I did! Thanks!

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