What Did Bach Sound Like to Bach? | Hacker News Reader

What Did Bach Sound Like to Bach?

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139 pointstintinnabula72 comments

If you've never heard Bach performed on period instruments, you're in for a treat. Here's a performance of the third Brandenburg concerto by the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSHLlidrZh8

Compared to "normal" instruments, you'll hear something that's a lot lighter, less monumental, more fun, a bit faster especially in the third movement. I was lucky enough to see them live a few times, and it's really great to hear how much they listen to each other, how much work has gone into their performance, and how much fun they're having, with big smiles and happy looks.

For those that didn't notice, the group performing is in the Bay Area: https://www.voicesofmusic.org/

"During the Covid19 pandemic, Voices of Music is doing the following:

Releasing one video per week so that anyone, anywhere, has access to music, and it is completely free. We have a daily audience of 80,000 and it's growing. Over 2 million people view our music every month. Our free, online video library has over 370 videos."

Did you reply to the wrong thing? The parent's video is performed by Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, a German orchestra in Berlin.

Voices of Music is also great, though!

Grand-parent commenter here, and I have no idea why everyone is talking about Voices of Music. It's interesting to compare them with the Akademie für alte Music, whom I find much more alive, much less posh.

Maybe they meant to reply to this comment, which has a Voices of Music link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23390181

Here’s another link that shows the musicians. You’re right they are having a blast. Thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole this morning.

https://youtu.be/pdsyNwUoON0

There's also an important element of period performance style. Modern performers learn to play with a very different set of default skills than in Bach's period. Combining the two (the style and the instrument) and the music seems to really "jump" alive in ways that modern classically trained orchestras can't seem to quite get to.

A great example of the playing style difference is this interpretation class with Benjamin Zander - https://youtu.be/b2S-OjTb4nU

I was recently rather taken by the opening of the St John Passion by Sukuki https://youtu.be/SiKgrevzT-g

The director's name is Masaaki Suzuki.

Oops - typo

You've honed in on why I love listening to Bach on period instruments; it's kind of a musical analogue to folks who are really into some niche of CS, propelled purely by love and obsession. That passion comes through in the music.

The 3rd Brandenburg is the song that got me into music -- I first heard it in MIDI form when it was included with Windows 3.1 (or wndows 95?) ages and ages ago. Inspired me to pick up the violin later in life, and a few years after my first lesson I was lucky enough to play this with a community orchestra. I feel a connection to this song.

And this performance you linked is definitely the most fun I've ever heard it played, thank you for sharing. The way they lean into the rhythms and play with accents and boldness is giving me chills just to hear it through my macbook air speakers. Amazing.

Hard to go wrong with Tafelmusik:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSHLlidrZh8

A live recording session from their YT channel:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztnHM09d-RA

BWV 999 prelude for life! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnpaMm_2QYc

Bach's lute music towers over everything ever made to me. Can't listen to it on guitar either. Has to a real lute.

don't care either if it was written for lute harpsichord.

Never seen that instrument before. Why are there 6 strings floating out of the arm? Are they ever played? Is it just for the harmonics they produce?

The theorbo is very similar to a lute, except with an extra neck, and it usually adds six strings. These are bass strings, which are tuned to specific notes; they don't have a fretboard underneath, so the left hand can't change their pitch.

An excellent video by Elizabeth Kenny, featuring an even longer theorbo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVabz8LneI4

Seems to be a Theorbo.

Here is a video of Rob Scallon interviewing Brandon Acker about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48RVcbkhNHQ

Great video, thanks! Crazy instrument: floating strings, movable frets, last 2 strings are lower in the octave...

I read this as “I was lucky enough to see HIM live a few times” and this had me legit thinking how that could be possible

Perhaps parent commenter was in the oil and gas industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_in_Mirrorshades

Confusingly, I did see HIM live once (the Finnish rock band).

Listening on period instuments can be revelatory. The first movement of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata, which is murky on a modern piano, is comparatively clearer on the fortepiano. The fortepiano has much faster and more pronounced decay (in the Attack-Decay-Sustain-Release ADSR formulation) and weaker bass, but that punchiness works well for the Waldstein as it makes it easier to hear the rhythm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fhmm_hfZAo

As a complement to period instruments, I found that Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos also made me listen to Bach in a new light. Physical low-register instruments do not speak all that clearly — not even today, and not in Bach's time either. Compare a string bass with an electric bass — or even more starkly, a synthesizer bass!

The bass register in Switched-On Bach has much cleaner, more identifiable pitch than Bach would have heard from a period ensemble playing one of the Brandenburg Concerti. But is one actually more "true" to Bach than the other?

My feeling is that what Bach heard in his head were closer to a synthesizer version than a baroque chamber ensemble version. Because even though a good composer strives to write for a medium and compensate for the strengths and weaknesses of actual instruments, the essence of Bach is counterpoint and harmony, not orchestration.

Wendy Carlos is a well-known name (mostly for the Clockwork Orange soundtrack I think), but her recordings are not as accessible as they ought to be. That is, there are no (legal) digital downloads or streaming options for her oeuvre, and the CD's and records have been out of print for years.

I only recently discovered Switched-On Bach (and the other three albums that followed: Switched-On Bach II, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, and Switched-On Brandenburgs), and you are right; these are really interesting performances of such well-known classical works. Worth exploring!

And for a light classical snack: she created a 'sequel' to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals with 'Weird Al' Yankovic in 1989!

Side 1 of Switched on Bach on IA: https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach2

Side 2: https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach1

I also (weirdly?) found them hosted on the site of the Computer History Museum:

Side 1 https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/sound-r...

Side 2 https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/sound-r...

An incredible masterpiece.

> https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach2

Holy shit this sounds so much ... fun! It sounds so incredibly joyful on those synths! Thanks for posting, marvelous

> her recordings are not as accessible as they ought to be

I found an article from 2019 about that: "Where is Wendy Carlos?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23394457

> As interest in the early music movement has grown, performers and musicologists have increasingly turned to period instruments, smaller ensembles, and faster tempos to try to more faithfully recreate the music of the past.

This is misleading. The interest in baroque music grew strongly in the 50s. The turn toward period instruments, smaller ensembles, and faster tempos appeared at the end of the 60s, and was steadily established in the 70s with great leaders like Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. There have been little changes over the past 30 years.

This looks like a fun but futile project. Though I strongly relate to the desire to know more about Bach's music. As Émile Cioran wrote, "Bach's music is the only argument proving that the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure".

Professional period-performance singer here:

Definitely not true that "there have been little changes over the past 30 years"; both the scholarly understanding of performance practice, and the performances themselves, have radically advanced and matured since 1990.

I did not mean to say nothing has changed, but, as a naive listener, the interpretation of baroque music, and especially Bach's cantata, is not radically different now from what it was in the 1990s.

Bach's cantatas under Karl Richter are totally different from Gustav Leonhardt recordings just 10 or 20 years later. Add 20 years to get around 1990, and Philippe Herreweghe, Masaaki Suzuki or Christophe Coin bring some obvious changes. For each of them I can't notice deep changes in their more recent recordings.

But I admit that I can't name any conductor for Bach's cantatas that has started conducting in the 21st century. I don't think I have any recording like this. Recommandations are welcomed.

> Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure. Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure.

* Emil Cioran, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7427027

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran

A close friend of mine did his doctorate on Emil Cioran:

https://www.amazon.com/Emil-Cioran-cr%C3%ADtica-progreso-his...

https://www.amazon.com/Emil-Cioran-Criticism-Historical-Prog...

And Gil Shaham on Bach (70-second video): https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=n6d6JEZCObg

> The turn toward period instruments, smaller ensembles, and faster tempos appeared at the end of the 60s, and was steadily established in the 70s with great leaders like Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Is Harnoncourt generally associated with fast tempos? I thought the opposite. His recording of Händel's Messiah runs to 141 minutes (according to Amazon, I don't have my copy here). Almost all other performances I've come across try to squeeze it into two hours. I much prefer Harnoncourt's slower tempo. Though he might have treated other pieces differently.

> Is Harnoncourt generally associated with fast tempos?

Historically informed performance feeds on research on the place, time, established practices, theoretical treatises, instrument construction limitations, interpretative styles, etc. where the music took place. The approach to interpretation is revised upon new discovery. Faster tempi (than romantically-inclined interpretations) are sometimes incidental outcomes, and not exclusive to Harnoncourt.

One ingredient for the observation, is at the time Harnoncourt was making strides in the 1950s, conductors were reading tempo markings of old music as if the metronome had already been invented (it is an early 1800s invention). Many famous pieces marked adagio, andante, largo, lento, (denoting a slow tempo) were performed comparatively faster than the romantic readings, as such markings were used quite liberally.

Another ingredient is that Harnoncourt had a unique reading of orchestral classical pieces that emphasized tempo and dynamic contrast (e.g. Mozart piano concerti, Beethoven symphonies), which may lead to perceive sections were played faster than usual.

And I don't think those traits were set on stone in his idearium. If he were alive today, my impression is he would revise his decades-old reading of Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers, perhaps with slower tempo, applying transpositions in the Magnificat, and refraining from doubling strings and brass in the Dixit Dominus.

That is to say, it's not really about tempo, or any specific performance feature, though that's all that may come to our ears, or that we may be able to understand without extensive music knowledge.

It's very very difficult to do a full Messiah in under two hours; what you probably heard was a version with cuts. That being said, 141 minutes is not extraordinarily fast overall. Hogwood's recording is 136 minutes; you can find others that are a bit faster yet.

For concreteness, the Harnoncourt recording I had in mind is this one: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyXewGfDx5l0xsWKwAlHT.... According to the calculator at https://ytplaylist-len.herokuapp.com/ this has a total length of 147 minutes. At 1.25x speed it would be 118 minutes. I only did a very quick check, but playing it at 1.25x speed does sound comparable to other recordings I've heard. So I'm sure it's doable and would sound okay-ish. I know I have at least once heard a full (uncut) version on the radio that fit exactly into a 2 hour slot. Needless to say, I found it too fast.

But it's true that I can't point you to a specific two-hour recording right now.

Someone I would have associated more easily with faster tempi is Trevor Pinnock. However, there are some rather fast interpretations by Harnoncourt (maybe more likely of Händel than Bach)

I think, in the end, they're all incidental observations[1]. Readings of early music are revised continuously. Tempo is just one feature of music whose change in manifestation we may be readily able to perceive with our knowledge. There is much more under the hood.

Regarding Trevor Pinnock, his Pachelbel Canon & Gigue may be nimble[2] (compared to romantic readings), but then have you heard Reinhard Goebel's (Musica Antiqua Köln)[3]?

Rinaldo Alessandrini of Concerto Italiano revised his own approach to Vivaldi's Gloria towards a slower tempo.[4][5]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23390831

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa_ndWt0Hjo

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z__dWl0MWbQ

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws470IUmcqM

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXf8S6sY5M

The hard part is I don't think we hear harmony the same way.

The way we hear music, what makes sense about music, is a function of the music we've listened to in our culture as we have matured. I don't think we can really ever cross that gap. And it's probably not a bad thing. We have a much broader palette of sounds and harmony to draw from. Early music especially had a much different theory of harmony.

Probably the same thing can be said about shakespeare as well. We just have a very wildly different context than its contemporaneous viewers. And our culture and language as it is now is hugely influenced by all of shakespeare's works that we probably miss a lot of what could have been novel and interesting about it.

This is interesting - I think going backwards in time, different musical harmonic/sound conventions still make "sense" to us. Like you could be listening do music from nearly any period of time from the past 500+ years and it would broadly "make sense" to the listener, even if you weren't directly exposed to it before (with the exception of perhaps experimental 20th century atonal classical music, or microtonal music from other cultures).

But I'm not sure it works the other way around - if you took a 17th century person and played music from the last 50-100 years to them - Michael Jackson, bossa nova, Debussy, Smashing Pumpkins, whatever - they probably wouldn't "get it".

Some stuff based on pentatonic scales (blues) would probably make sense. From what I recall it's almost universal in different cultures. Bobby Mcferrin has a fun demo about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk

But yeah I bet some jazz would be baffling. I wonder how fast it'd take people to get into it. You could probably find some indigneous populations to work with.

> But yeah I bet some jazz would be baffling. I wonder how fast it'd take people to get into it

Even without going into crazy experimental free jazz, most people of western cultures are baffled by something like Giant Steps. I don't know how fast they could "get into it", but I don't think it would easy

See this seems really weird because Giant Steps is super simple and makes sense to me, inherently. And I can't step back from that and see it otherwise except to acknowledge that your point is probably true. But that is purely an intellectual standpoint because I know people are different.

Maybe it's like some optical illusion pictures that once you see it you can't not see it.

Cool link. Thanks!

bach would probably have an aneurysm from all the parallel fifths and octaves in a typical rhythm guitar part.

The rule about no parallel fifths exists to help the listener distinguish several melodies played together (counterpoint)---a bit like the rules of English style governing unambiguous use of pronouns. In a rhythm guitar part, there typically aren't multiple lines of melody; the whole chord shifts by a fifth.

Or he might understand it as an organ stop. The 5 1⁄3′ (quint) and 4' (octave) stops just create constant parallels.

The prohibition of parallel perfect intervals is for independence of distinct voices, which strengthens counterpoint. It prevents a voice from being confused for the overtones of another.

When independence isn't necessary, you can find these sorts of parallel intervals in even Bach's music.

Music of his time and right before are interesting to me because they in a lot of cases were coming at harmony from a different place than we are (hexachords and modality).

So I heard things that were surprising compared to common practice afterwards; certain harmonic choices would jump out at me that were dictated by voice leading, but they felt extremely modern and somewhat alien.

That and the connection to jazz improvisation that sort of existed with basso continuo accompaniment in baroque music blew me away.

Not strictly related but I recall once hearing that Bach may have never heard his Brandenburg concertos performed.

Looking at Wikipedia now I see:

"Because King Frederick William I of Prussia was not a significant patron of the arts, Christian Ludwig seems to have lacked the musicians in his Berlin ensemble to perform the concertos. The full score was left unused in the Margrave's library until his death in 1734 [and] was only rediscovered in the archives of Brandenburg by Siegfried Wilhelm Dehn in 1849"

I have just switched them on and feel very grateful that I can.

Nor the Mass in B Minor, again because the resources to perform it were never available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_B_minor

Honestly I was expecting the article to discuss tuning/temperament! Has anybody listened to Bach or Chopin's preludes played on a well tempered piano? To me it feels as if those pieces were written to take advantage of the different purities/impurities of certain intervals in each key.

Composers did take advantage of the interesting properties of earlier temperaments.

With a non-equal temperament each key signature has a characteristic tonality due to its particular series of intervals, and a key that is 'far away' from the home key that an instrument is tuned for can have harsher sounding intervals. Equal temperaments like 12-TET were favored at least in part because they opened up possibilities for romantic era composers interested in exploring new ideas in modal harmony and more elaborate song structures.

There's a recording of the WTC by Richard Egarr that uses the tuning system derived by Bradley Lehman from the squiggles on the cover-page of the WTC manuscript. (See http://www.larips.com/ for more about that.) It sounds pretty good to me, though I'm far from being an expert. (Caveat: Some but not all listeners, of whom I am one, hear an annoying mains-hum-like sound on the Egarr CDs. I don't know whether it's a thing that affects some CDs but not others, or whether it's filtered out by some reproduction equipment but not all, or what.)

In a similar vein, singing to a more "natural" tuning (i.e. quarter-comma mean tone) is insanely more comfortable. Adam Newley and 12Tone on youtube have excellent videos that explore this topic further!

Reminds me of this excellent video with Ben Zander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2S-OjTb4nU

Especially at this part: https://youtu.be/b2S-OjTb4nU?t=233

Related, the standard pitch for an orchestra has also changed over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#History_of_pitch...

This is very cool. There's similar work that reveals how Byzantine choral work sounded in the Hagia Sophia, which I find to be beautiful in an unearthly way:

http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/hear-the-sound-of-the-hag...

A follow-up article should be, "What did older Beethoven sound like to the older Beethoven?" (provides recording of silence)

He could probably hear it in his head to an extent.

Naturally he could, but the feedback loop was broken, so he wasn't able to refine his compositions as effectively. A lot of late period Beethoven has aspects which are "off" somehow. But the fact that Beethoven produced something which was even coherent under those conditions is just mind boggling.

The arrangement may sound off occasionally (great conductors like Mahler or Mendelssohn couldn’t always get their orchestration right the first time either), but the music itself certainly didn’t suffer. Yes, late Beethoven is often just weird, but not in any amateurish way.

I don't hear it so much in arrangement, but in things like harmonic rhythm or harmonies. So that means we disagree, because harmonic rhythm is an aspect of the "music" by anybody's definition. I wrote about a couple examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104132

I don't think "amateurish" is a good word. It's more of an extremely accomplished work but needing an additional round of editing. Stuff which would have been obvious to Beethoven had he actually been able to hear it, but since he never got the chance to, it never got corrected.

I don't believe that Beethoven couldn't imagine harmonies perfectly in his head. Perhaps not orchestral texture and balance though, but probably no one could while completely deaf.

Are you talking about the famous "boogie-woogie" variation in Op. 111? I don't see what could possibly be "glitchy" about that, rather than utterly visionary!

Very recent scholarship suggests Beethoven's deafness was less profound than is widely assumed: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/01/beethoven-not-...

I visited Thomaskirche a few years ago. Please tell me they are going to release multi-channel impulse response files which represent the work they have done on this project! That would allow us to simulate this historic space at home. Aural archeology!

Why is Bach more prevalent in HN discussions than, say, Mozart or Beethoven?

Wild guess here, obviously I don’t know what everyone is thinking, but Bach’s music was very beautiful in an almost mathematical sense. Compositions where the right and left hand are exactly the same but delayed by a bar or two, pieces that are the same played forwards and backwards, etc... Bach was a true genius, as were Mozart and Beethoven, but I think the symmetry of Bach’s music around the axis of time and harmony could be why he’s more prevalent on HN.

In my experience, Bach appeals more to analytical and mathematical types because the music relies less on dramatic swells and romantic melodies, and more on complex, baroque counterpoint that requires multiple listens to truly unravel. That and it makes people feel smart.

No one has mentioned the crab canon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU

I love listening to Bach on period music. I especially enjoy the sound of the harpsichord.

Great tittle for an article! :)

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