> according to the musical disposition of that day, he was generations behind it”. He used forms – particularly the fugue – that were unfashionable in the early 18th century.
All the music from the Bach era (1680s to 1750s) that is emphasized today has a great deal in common with J. S. Bach. Bach is just a cut better at it.
Bach didn't just write fugues, and he gave them fun preludes when he did.
From a historic perspective, Bach's music cannot be called anachronistic w.r.t. his period, when taken together with other music from the period which survives.
Hey, look, these three guys were 1685 babies:
J.S. Bach: 1685 - 1750
Scarlatti: 1685 - 1757
Handel: 1685 - 1759
A little senior:
Vivaldi: 1679 - 1741
Telemann: 1681 - 1767
Lol, everyone I can think of off the top of my head is clustered around 1680.
If one of them made old, unfashionable music, they all must have.
>If one of them made old, unfashionable music, they all must have.
Yes, he took the Gould quote out of context, which was in reference to the latter part of Bach's career. Interestingly, JSB parodied Style Galante music in Book II of the WTK here and there, for example in the B major Prelude.
Not necessarily? It's survived some 350 years, which is pretty long as far as music is concerned, but that's because our society places importance on this music. If our societies turn to dust, our inheritors might not necessarily be so infatuated with it. They also could be, much like Greek philosophers have been a fascination in the Western world for thousands of years, but there's no rule saying that people will enjoy classical music forever. Plenty of great things die out or just grow out of fashion.
If you're talking about the music being preserved and able to be played in the future, then sure, but the same thing could be said of Shakira.
For an impressive and beautiful version of the first Well-tempered Clavier prelude, check out Bobby McFerrin singing it while he has the crowd simultaneously sing Gonoud's Ave Maria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14LcvpXmb74
Love the Well-Tempered Clavier! I recommend listening to the harpsichord versions, which emphasize the individual notes and tempo, since (IMO) these were not really meant as expressive, emotional pieces to be interpreted liberally on pianoforte. That doesn't mean they can't be played or enjoyed that way, but I think the harpsichord (which Bach would have composed and played for) is the better way to hear it first.
So find a harpsichord version that works for you - there are still many styles to choose from, but the works are short so you can feel out an artist even with a 30-second preview. The very first track, BWV 846, is an excellent litmus test.
I've listened to the whole thing in sequence many times and the pieces are paired (as the article notes) for actual reasons, but now I like to put it on random and see if I can remember how pieces go without being primed by their position. Wonderful collection of music.
Harpsichord is not for everybody, listening to it for hours on end can be quite grating. Glenn Gould has a very nice version that seems to me to strike a nice balance between being true to the original and using an instrument that is a bit gentler on the ear:
Jacques, since you live in the Netherlands you are free to come play at my Harpsichord and change your mind. The richness of a good harpsichord is just in a class of its own. Mine has three stops.
Note, in the early days of the revival (eighties) not the best kinds of instruments were made. Our understanding and artistic level has increased dramatically since then.
If I listen to your link of the harpsichord, I hear a ton of problems indeed, so I can imagine that it drives you away.
This music though is definitely not the most suitable for piano, the tone color of the harpsichord is so distinct, it lends itself to different types of music. To add, the interpretation of Gould is pretty outdated imho.
For all of you, the Netherlands Bach Society is truly a marvel, look at their channel or at https://allofbach.com. Their quality is unmatched, they attract the best of the best of this world and put everything for free on the internet. Sometimes, I have to ask why we get the most beautiful treasures of the world for free.
> For all of you, the Netherlands Bach Society is truly a marvel, look at their channel or at https://allofbach.com. Their quality is unmatched, they attract the best of the best of this world and put everything for free on the internet. Sometimes, I have to ask why we get the most beautiful treasures of the world for free.
Jacques, be wary of taking piano technique to a harpsichord. Couperin's manual on harpsichord playing is entitled "L'Art de toucher le clavecin". Hard hands don't work well.
Also a harpsichord tone needs time to develop after the pluck. On a revival instrument, playing fast doesn't lose much. On an instrument built following historic practices, slower brings out the music.
Scott Ross once cautioned against playing comme une machine à coudre.
In my opinion, Gould had some things that worked for him, but also some that certainly didn't. Like the link you sent, the fact that he's staccatoing the broken chords in the first prelude... Why? It's horrible.
If you want something on the rigid tempo/clear notes end, I would instead recommend this Thomas Schwan recording:
I agree with the parent that listening to harpsichord recordings does give you something different from the piano recordings.
I don't agree with the expressive pianoforte part, though. As far as I'm aware Bach never left any instructions to that end. Also as far as I'm aware, at the time musicians were expected to breath life into the pieces on their own, deciding tempo, dynamics (sound volume) etc. according to their abilities and the customs at the time. This idea of a piece being set in stone with only one correct interpretation, or at least only small variations allowed, is, I think, a much later idea. You can see it start in say a composition by Chopin that will have detailed execution instructions, and really set in with pop songs in the past 70 years.
As I gather, around the time of Bach there were several different models of both harpsichords and clavichords around in addition to organs, all with relatively different tonal qualities.
If you listen to harpsichord recordings, you'll note that they actually do customize the tempo locally (rubato) to infuse life into the pieces:
I think Bach wrote these pieces so that people, including his own children, could play them at home, whether on a harpsichord or clavichord or something else, and I also think he intended the players to use their instrument to its fullest potential. Why wouldn't he? I have a hard time believing he wouldn't himself graduate the dynamics on a clavichord.
I also think that part of what makes his music ethereal is that it actually does generalize over many instruments, even later instruments like the modern pianoforte, but also something like a guitar. You can find guitar players on Youtube delivering Bach that sounds great. He was a master of harmony.
There were Harpsichords with stops, much like those of an organ to try to give it more expressive character, as well as multi-clavier harpsichord models.
If you like Harpsichord music, and bach, you must listen to Trevor Pinnock. He is IMO the greatest modern exponent of harpsichord for Bach and baroque, he also conducts a period orchestra which makes amazing recordings. (The English Concert)
Unfretted clavichord also works very well for them. IMO even better than the harpsichord, the sound is less grating. There are a few bits that aren't playable on the fretted clavichords of Bach's day, but very few and it can be performed on these (and probably was given how common they were).
There's also an excellent performance on the organ[1].
Clavicord was definitely the virtuoso instrument of the period. It allowed for a lot of control, more than a modern piano. Its biggest issue, lack of sound, made it great for students like the ones Bach addressed in Clavier.
The strings in clavichords vibrate from the bridge to the tangent (the metal hammer that strikes the string), the remaining distance to the tuning peg is covered in damping felt and so does not contribute to the sound. On a "fretted" clavichord, several notes strike the same course (of two strings) at different positions. Only one note can play at a time on each course, so some combinations of notes aren't possible. Unfretted clavichords have a course for each note, but weren't at all common in J.S. Bach's time.
Many inaccuracies in this article. The Well Tempered Keyboard was certainly a deliberate realization of a particular concept, which makes use of several already-written preludes. Also, egregiously:
>a system of tuning that’s become standard (“well-tempered”). Nothing in his description hints at what these short pieces really are – deep investigations into the character of each key
This system of tuning is obscure, and seldom-used (only occasionally by historical enthusiasts). Possibly confused with equal temperament here. Much less ability for the keys to have different "characters" with equal temperament as well!
>providing for his huge family – 20 children from two marriages
20 births total, yes, but never 20 children alive at the same time, unfortunately.
>Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s music can be dazzling, elegant and highly innovative, but we are unlikely to mark the 300th anniversary of even his best piece.
Hopefully, "we" will be more enlightened than that in the coming few decades.
For that matter, JS Bach himself very obscure as a composer during his lifetime, and for 50 years none of his works were in print... and many still weren't until the late 19th century.
Any fame he had during his life or the period after was for his virtuoso organ performance.
Up until the late 1800s, "Bach" referred to his son, CPE Bach. Liszt, Chopin, and other piano virtuosi of the time really helped revive the music of JS Bach, when a lot of his best works were previously thought of as "too hard" or "not worth it."
There is a great - and probably out of print - book called 'Men, Women and Pianos', by Arthur Loesser, 1954. Highly recommended to get better insight into how the piano was invented, worked its way into society and how the various composers rose to the spotlight and/or were forgotten again. It's the best researched book on the subject I've read.
I should have also added Mendelssohn to the list here. He loved playing JS Bach both on the violin and the piano, and edited a book of organ toccatas and fugues that is (suspiciously) the first known edition of the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor (the one that all the movie villains like).
Personally, I suspect that Mendelssohn himself wrote the Toccata and Fugue in D minor based on a few fragments from Bach (particularly the subject of the fugue), and as a tribute to Bach. The Toccata is not really in JS Bach's style at all, making several harmonic choices that Bach makes in no other work - although I think the people who suggest that Bach himself wrote that piece would argue that it was likely a transcription of an improvised work, where the counterpoint could be a little less perfect.
>The composition has been deemed both "particularly suited to the organ"[14] and "strikingly unorganistic".[28] It has been seen as united by a single ground-thought,[29] but also as containing "passages which have no connection whatever with the chief idea".[14] It has been called "entirely a thing of virtuosity"[30] yet also described as being "not so difficult as it sounds".[21] It has been described as some sort of program music depicting a storm,[30] but also as abstract music, quite the opposite of program music depicting a storm.[31] It has been presented as an emanation of the galant style, yet too dramatic to be anything near that style.[22] Its period of origin has been assumed to have been as early as around 1704,[32] and as late as the 1750s.[10] Its defining characteristics have been associated with extant compositions by Bach (BWV 531, 549a, 578, 911, 914, 922 and several of the solo violin sonatas and partitas),[10][14][33][34][35] and by others (including Nicolaus Bruhns and Johann Heinrich Buttstett),[10] as well as with untraceable earlier versions for other instruments and/or by other composers.[10] It has been deemed too simplistic for it to have been written down by Bach,[10] and too much a stroke of genius to have been composed by anyone else but Bach.[36]
So much for consistency in writers. I think the message is that it is going to influence every listener in its own way, possibly informed by the preconceived notions of that listener.
You can argue that the different keys of equal temperament don't have any special character at all, since they differ only by fundamental frequency and the relationship between scale degrees are exactly the same in each key.
What character they do have may come from how accessible they are on different instruments and the association we have with music written on those instruments. C and G major are easy on the guitar for example.
I was a professional harpsichord tuner for a few years in college and composed a few things. Modern brass instruments still do not play perfectly in equal temperament in their low range, although good players can correct most of the way with their embouchure. The fifth is only about 2 cents (2% of a half step) off, which is easily correctable, but the thirds are strikingly different - about 30 cents off - which can sound jarring. I think this is the only class of instruments left in this situation (and it only happens rarely) due to the fundamental physics of the instrument.
Also, certain instruments sound different in different registers, so transposing a concerto written for B flat clarinet up a 3rd (for example) might sound very weird if you played it on the same B flat clarinet. That is particularly noticeable on woodwinds, though, which have very distinctive register differences - most people probably wouldn't be suspicious if you transposed a piano or string piece.
Up to the mid 1900s, pianos were actually tuned to play well with brass instruments that needed the preservation of a particular harmonic series - keeping pure fifths between A flat and C on the circle of fifths, for instance, and heavily weighting the remaining pure fifths in the tuning system toward the flat side of the circle of fifths. A popular temperament of the time was named after a guy named "Kellner," who wrote about it in the 1970's I think. Equal tempering is a very recent invention.
In contrast, the baroque temperaments, like Werckmeister and the theoretical renditions of Bach's "well-tempering" have more pure fifths in the sharp side of the circle of fifths, driven by the fact that string instruments would be tuned with pure fifths rather than equal tempered fifths.
I think this change in tuning ideas is why a lot of the saddest and most emotionally profound music of the romantic period is written with 2-4 flats in the key signature, while baroque sadness was often in D minor, A minor, or E minor.
"The two figures frequently credited with the achievement of exact calculation of equal temperament are Zhu Zaiyu (also romanized as Chu-Tsaiyu. Chinese: 朱載堉) in 1584 and Simon Stevin in 1585."
Yes, people had worked out the pitches hundreds of years ago, but widespread practical adoption really took until the invention of the electric tuner. Tuning an equally-tempered fifth by ear is difficult and unnatural compared to using a slightly unequal temperament.
Great point about the timbres sounding different in transposition. I didn't realise the thirds were so off in brass instruments, thirty cents is a lot!
Bach's life is so hidden from us in terms of letters from him, but we know enough to write some pretty good biographies. My personal favorite is Music in the Castle of Heaven, by John Eliot Gardiner the conductor. Who knows Bach better than those who know his music so intimately?
I also recommend learning a few notes on the keyboard and playing something of his, perhaps the first prelude of the collection they mention in the article. It's magnificent, how he plays with time and harmony.
I'd say it's a bit dry for a young person but you could find them instead a beautiful rendition of his own manuscript. This would be a lifelong treasure if you could find something very well made, or a simple cheaper poster.
Fluff, or if you prefer: a highly circumlocutory string of half connected sentences and paragraphs around not knowing the exact origins of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Book 1, that is. It doesn't even mention the second book.
Yes. It's very difficult to say anything interesting or revealing about music that cannot otherwise be understood or felt by listening to an intelligent performance. Most people are incapable of describing "the music itself", so most writings on music are biographical, as is the case here. It really makes you appreciate how rare writers like Charles Rosen are.
Also if you have a local group that performs Bach works, they’re great to hear live. The Washington Bach Consort in DC puts on some good performances regularly.
I sing Bach professionally, for the last 25 years or so. So I just wanted to echo this recommendation. The All of Bach project is a great way to experience the best of today's Bach performance practice online, for free. It's a great gift to world culture.
It's great what you can do when there is no copyright. Imagine all of the worlds music to be open to re-performance like that without a bunch of rent seeking.
"A camera pans down from high in a church to focus on a stone bust of a typically ill-tempered looking Johann Sebastian Bach. It’s 1962 and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is making a short film about the composer, presented by the pianist Glenn Gould. He’s playing Bach’s Fugue in E-flat major on the organ, initially off-camera. He completes the short piece, swivels round on his stool, and ad-libs the following:
Select and enter your email address"
I thought the Firefox Reader text was a AI piece. Haha
Such timing. I'm working through one of the Preludes (C minor) from the WTC now, but a rare guitar arrangement. There are things about his work it takes (for me) to about the 1000th time I play them to apprecaite, and I can see why real musicians leave his work to later in life. Grinding through some of his less complicated pieces is achievable for someone unschooled in it (like me), but when you play them, you can hear and feel where you stand as a musican, but moreso, as a being. They really are spiritual exercises in an Aquinian sense, written for an audience of one. That said, I also think the amount of woo musicians bring to talking about the work is inversely proportional to their level of ability and technique, so ymmv. I have more than one crackpot idea about him, but in the mean time, it's just a pleasure to puzzle through the pieces.
Am I alone in finding Gould intolerable? I don't have the musical expertise to criticize him technically in depth, but I can best describe his interpretations as "robotic" sounding. Like listening to a player piano.
I'm not into Gould because I too find much of his playing misguided and awful, so my understanding may be incorrect, but I think back in Gould's days, the general piano style was much more virtuoso. I think Gould provided some needed push back on that through his provocateur search for something different.
He does have some great insights here and there - take the first movement of the tempest sonata:
Gould played Bach the way it is written, perfect tempo, minimal ornamentation, that may come across as 'robotic' to you but it's actually the style that most people that are into baroque favor.
If you don't like Gould for Bach may I suggest Dinu Lipatti?
And if you had not heard about him maybe dive a bit deeper and see what else you like, he's an amazing pianist that unfortunately was born before really great quality recordings were made but what's there is well worth listening to. His '(unfortunately)Last Recital' is a masterpiece. Enjoy!
> Gould played Bach the way it is written, perfect tempo, minimal ornamentation, that may come across as 'robotic' to you but it's actually the style that most people that are into baroque favor.
Indeed! These compositions were ...composed "for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study".[1], which I don't think is directly mentioned in the article except maybe from this quote by Gould:
> ...“according to the musical disposition of that day, he was generations behind it”.
It takes skill to play these compositions the way they were written. Piano is not my forte but what effort I have put into learning these tunes was well worth it.
> If you don't like Gould for Bach may I suggest Dinu Lipatti?
When I compare the two different performers, Gould sounds like he's playing to a metronome and Dinu Lipatti is playing to a pendulum.
> And if you had not heard about him maybe dive a bit deeper and see what else you like, he's an amazing pianist that unfortunately was born before really great quality recordings were made but what's there is well worth listening to. Enjoy!
Whoah that's a complaint I've never heard before! Do you know which of his 2 recordings you're listening to? The one from the 80s is much "straighter" than the original from 1962.
Usually people complain - listening to the earlier version - that Gould plays fast and loose with the source. He makes opinionated choices throughout and even recomposes parts!
All that being said, there are no wrong answers with this stuff. If you prefer it more freely played than Gould 62, that's perfectly valid and no music expert (worth listening to) will bat an eye. This thread has some good suggestions of other interpreters you may like more.
I absolutely adore Gould, and while he's known for his Bach, I'd recommend his Mozart interpretations to better understand what makes him so unique and controversial.
The irony of your "player piano" statement is that his famous 1955 Goldberg variations were redone by a company called Zenph to demonstrate the power of their software to re-perform any performance. Probably Gould was chosen because he's so famous and I _think_ the recording was in the public domain and convenient, but also Gould actually has a lot of idiosyncrasies that make his playing instantly recognizable and if anything more human.
That's a nice technical accomplishment (and probably it was very hard to get it to this stage). It makes me wonder if you had had Gould on a Yamaha Disklavier and recorded the MIDI stream how the two would compare.
Probably one of the main differences would be due to re-digesting the MIDI back into sound. I think Zenph's tech actually plays the piano and physically records it. For MIDI, you'd probably use samplers like NI's Kontakt, and while the huge amount of collections available on that platform definitely are closer to real-world sound and variability, if you're just bouncing the raw to audio without re-recording in a physical space, there's probably at least some number of people who could tell the difference. I think there are physical modeling-based VSTs and instruments available, but it's been a really long time since I looked into that space.
The biggest difference is that I'm sure if you introduced Gould to the world of MIDI and DAWs he probably wouldn't stop fiddling with it for months or years. Even back in the 60s and 70s I think he was well known to obsess over his recordings, and his practice of occasionally splicing performances to get the best from each take was/is pretty controversial. The irony also being that he was notoriously a pain to record because he often sang overtop his playing.
The hard part is the pedaling. As they say about Gould: when Gould plays 'x' you don't get 'x', you get Gould :)
Super interesting man and amazing pianist, extremely opinionated and definitely not to everybody's taste. Some of his work I love and some of it I can't listen to without being irritated so I get why there are people that do not like it at all.
They should really do this for Keith Jarrett. As bad as Gould's vocalisations are on his recordings, they're absolutely nothing compared to Jarrett's. I literally cannot listen to Jarrett's piano recordings because the noises he makes just infuriate me.
Which Gould performance ? He himself changed quite a bit in his many Bach performances over time, so it's interesting to listen and contrast his earlier, younger performances with his later works.
I find many of Bach's music simultaneously "robotic" (brainiac, rational, calculating, etc) and extremely emotional at the same time and for me, that's one of the main draws of his music.
The difference between his first recording of the Goldberg variations and his last is a story all by itself, such difference in interpretation. Also have a look at the runlength.
I wouldn't say "intolerable" but there are certainly different interpretations. I like Schiff better than Gould, and I like Dinnerstein the most of all.
I love these magical moments in history. Some have it as 'the muses' traversing the globe and inspiring humanity in the arts and sciences. Golden ages pop up at various points in time and place, and then the cluster of amazing talent that are typically the greats of the respective civilization. Those few centuries in Europe were blazing with talent.
I think an interesting path through history of Humanity could simply follow the golden ages, wherever they are.
The 18th child of Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Christian Bach—AKA "The English Bach", "The London Bach," or "John Bach"—spent five months tutoring the 8-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in musical composition and very likey was, after Mozart's father, the second biggest personal musical influence on the child.
The movie TÁR opens with a music class where Prof. Tár plays the Prelude in C for a reluctant student who says he can't relate to Bach because he was a hetero white guy. All he can say is "You play very well."
I've played that, of course, since there aren't any conventionally difficult parts in it. There is something about that piece that just gets inside you. That has to be the definition of a really great work of art: you can't say what, exactly, is great about it, but somehow it's just there.
I always wonder what Bach would have said about it. "Oh, yeah, that. Just something I tossed off."
> I've played that, of course, since there aren't any conventionally difficult parts in it.
ouch.
> "Oh, yeah, that. Just something I tossed off."
What I wouldn't give for a couple of hours watching JS Bach at work improvising or composing. Just concentrated listening to all of Bach's works is a massive undertaking, it makes you wonder how he found the time to set it all down in between all of his other duties.
Wow, that piano is amazing. As is the music, bookmarked, I will have to re-play that on the weekend when I have more time to listen to it more carefully. But definitely a keeper.
I know of these, but have yet to see one IRL. Even though piano is not my instrument, if I built a house, I would absolutely have one of these in the conservatory.
I would recommend you two start with something simpler, e.g. the Klavierbüchleins that contain simple practice pieces for his children, and work your way up. Those pieces still have the same magic. Volume two of the Suzuki method for piano is 42% Bach of that caliber, so it's doable with some basic technique.
Also, check out his cello sonatas and violin sonatas and partitas for true soul wrenching. I can still recall moments from live performances of these I went to more than 20 years ago.
> I would recommend you two start with something simpler, e.g. the Klavierbüchleins that contain simple practice pieces for his children, and work your way up.
Screw that.
Just slow down suddenly went there are too many melodies moving too quickly in the given fugue. Then when things become easier again, switch back to your original tempo.
Or if that's too difficult, just drop the inner voices and keep the bass moving at a steady rate.
After all, those techniques were good enough for the NES. Games like Metroid did this with both the video frame rate and the audio, and it didn't stop them from selling over 17 million cartridges and spawning many sequels.
If gaming isn't your forte (heh), how about consulting with the first page of the first movement of Chopin's B-flat minor Sonata? He gets this full throttle accompaniment groove going with both hands. Then when it's time for the melody to come in, guess what? He replaces the full accompaniment with a simplified pattern that can be played with just the left hand. It's considered a masterpiece, so the audience was apparently none the wiser. :)
In conclusion: throttle. Apply voice stealing algos. Transpose everything to C. Shamelessly shape the music to fit your current set of motor skills. I mean for crying out loud, you're hackers!
I've always felt that Prelude in C major is Bach's prank to all of us. It's the start to Well-Tempered Clavier and makes you feel that maybe this set of compositions is approachable. And then you try out the fugue that's paired with this prelude and find that not only is it so extraordinarily difficult to master it at a technical level (your 2 hands have to play 4 different voices! And sometimes the middle voices require you to use your other hand for assistance), but also to be able to voice it well (your 2 hands have to express all 4 different voices clearly!).
A prank, LOL. Supposedly Liszt named some of his easier pieces "Consolations" because they were a consolation to the pianists who can't play his other stuff.
When much younger, I promised myself that if I do nothing else in life, I would learn to play the Prelude in C. I've since met that promise, and played a few other things too, but the Prelude will always be special for me.
