J.S. Bach the Rebel: The subversive practice of a canonical composer

> take, for example, the B minor fugue in Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, whose theme employs all twelve notes of the chromatic sequence, defying traditional notions of what constituted a beautiful melody.

Chromaticism doesn't defy traditional notions of melody. For example, Purcell's got all kinds of chromatic noodles in his melodies and people love to sing them.

What's melodically defiant is how disjunct that fugue subject is-- it keeps leaping around different registers with two-note sighing motives. In that sense it sounds like what a string instrument should be doing in the inner voices to fill out the harmony. Instead, it's presented unaccompanied at the beginning of the fugue because... that's how fugues typically work.

The reason it works is because the people who play and listen to Bach understand fugal forms and textures. They know that an unaccompanied fugal subject often has rhythmic and melodic holes in it precisely to leave silence that gets filled in later with the arrival of two or more additional melodies.

Lest you think you're too uninformed to hear any of this-- listen to Conlon Nancarrow's Study No.36 for Player Piano[1]. It's a four-part canon where, like Bach's fugue, Nancarrow leaves rhythmic and melodic space for the other voices to fill in as they enter. Except Nancarrow tweaks the tempo of each voice so that they move with a ratio of tempos that equals 17/18/19/20. If the result sounds unhinged to you, then congratulations-- you understand and can hear the basic musical premises that underpin Baroque period fugal forms.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubepzLKAcCo

Seems tendentious to secularize Bach. There's something to be said for deistic awe for creating great art.

If you were just getting interested, here are some contemporary performances:

BWV 1006 by Nigel Kennedy: https://youtu.be/nWx4pIe7FoE?t=179

BWV 988 (goldberg variations) Glenn Gould https://youtu.be/p4yAB37wG5s?t=169

from BWV 816, Gigue, Andreas Schiff: https://youtu.be/f_U0lm6HZMk?t=777

Bach is my favorite artist & composer. There are times when I listen to a cantata of his and I feel as if I am in possession of a total understanding of life that departs me as soon as the music ends. It's a mystical and intellectual pleasure that has been among the chief joys of my adult life.

Yes, Bach was a dynamic and interesting person/composer. That being said, this reads less like a biography of a musical rebel and more like a sensationalist media retelling of his life as a way to sell a new book.

These depictions of JS Bach as a rebel and a bad boy are from people who don’t recognize or connect with the timeless underlining genuineness of Bach. His goal in every writing was to make music for the glory of God, purely. Weather you’re religious or not, clearly his music is genuine. What’s missing from this article is why did he he do the things he did, and the back stories to each one is seeped in his struggle with those who are selfish or otherwise poor minded compared to him. You can recognize bits of Tibetan saints even in this stories.

Here’s a perfect example where a head master downplays a music ciriuclum at a school, and he reacts to what is right and the speaker in this video can’t believe why he would stick up for what’s right vs his own self interest only. And then seems to imply that saints are just nice and don’t stick up for what’s right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzCfB2gpAhw&t=5m

Bach was the first rock star

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ho9rZjlsyYY

Don't miss the chance to listen to this in a church.

Nothing about the arguments in the article are convincing. It seems he merely shoehorning a collection of disparate anecdotes into a predetermined (probably politically motivated) thesis. One which does not have a precise meaning, to boot. What does it mean, anyway, to be "subversive", simpliciter?

> tax-free beer

I don't think there was anything subversive about it. Beer was regular drink and food.

Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"[1] was one of the demos on the Amiga 1000 that I still remember. Impressive in 1986. I was looking for it and couldn't find it on Youtube a few months ago, but that may be because I perennially confuse it with Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522uWGQV134

I hope this will be the last time I read „Javascript Bach“

Many of the most-admired composers of that time were colorful personalities, and very much ... including Beethoven and Mozart. That they openly revealed their humanity only makes the heights they reached all the more remarkable.

This author makes a similar mistake to the ones he accuses prior authors and historians of making. He's pretending as though Bach were operating alone in acting against certain norms in his music. It's obviously preposterous to suggest that anyone is acting alone or making a social statement in drinking to much or fucking hot chicks in the organ loft.

The most common misconception in music history is that it's fairly easy to attribute certain innovations to specific composers. Like, it's often dumbed down and presented as though Bach were the father of tonal music and that he was some kind of music radical in both inventing that system and taking it to its logical extreme.

This is the same kind of over-simplicity that brief histories of science and technology make.

The reality is quite a lot more murky. The tonal system was vestigially present early in the Franco-Flemish school of composition. You can see it forming in the work of Ockeghem and by the time you get to the masses of Orlando de Lassus you get profoundly different work than contemporaries who were firmly rooted in modal traditions like Zarlino and--more notably--Palestrina.

Bach's music is responding to a centuries-old tension between modal, tonal, and chromatic musical elements. Another gross simplification is the idea that modal music slowly evolved into tonal music. That all the modes except for Ionian and Aeolean simply fell out of use. Which is of course absurd since Ionian wasn't a real mode. It was just later included for the sake of theoretical completeness, not a thing composers actually used.

That aside, my point isn't that Bach is acting as a subversive rebel or charting new territory in the way that this author suggests, nor is he a god-like individual of lone genius in the way that traditional historians suggest. He is a part of a movement and incorporates elements from different musical traditions and expands on some of those and formalizes some of them.

The fugue mentioned in the article is more of a musical proof of a mathematical concept than it is an attempt to disrupt norms of melodic writing. The entire point of the Well-Tempered Klavier is to demonstrate that you can perform in all keys without stopping to retune your instrument. The b minor fugue (also weird thing here from this author: it's traditional in music theory and history texts to capitalize major keys and lower case minor keys. In a rigorous paper, this should be written as b minor fugue, not B minor fugue) is a demonstration that even within a single piece of music, you can work your way around the entire chromatic scale without retuning.

On top of that, the author isn't even correct about that particular fugue anyway. Again, Bach is operating in a context and responding to it. One of the main musical consequences of the protestant reformation and the resulting schism from the Catholic Church was that instruments were allowed in religious ceremonies. The "serious" composers of the Catholic church were focused almost entirely on vocal music, and instrumental music wasn't considered very seriously by scholars. But the protestants fostered a movement that was very focused on instrumental music that allowed the kinds of motivic writing that ignores melodic content to a certain extent and enables more intricate counterpoints. There is some aspect of what the author is saying, but it's hardly subversive. It's a continental and cultural and philosophical movement that started long before Bach was born. He's a part of that.

I do appreciate that we should stop pretending that people were pious and holy just because they wanted to be perceived that way and that Bach was way more human than perhaps we're often led to believe. But this author is really, really reaching in this excerpt, and in trying to set the record straight is glossing over all the relevant context that other historians skip over too.

Maybe he was a dissident, but his music is still boring to me. Or maybe his predecessors were just so boring that he was the first step away?

I usually don't understand from his music why he is celebrated. Is it that he is just historically important? Like the discovery of logarithmic tuning of sqrt_12(2)?

It could also be that I am just moved more by the romantic era. Mozart generally gets relegated lower in my list of great composers, but in Mozart's case my objection is the strict adherence to tempo and clear tone.

Edit: It should also be mentioned that the organ is not a very versatile instrument when compared to a piano. Although I have been treated to some great organ interpretation with a distinct familiarity to Daft Punk.