Switched-on Bach II

The older composers get, the more they turn to counterpoint - the strict writing of music where many parts are combined harmoniously, and where voices are treated with near-equality.  For example, at the end of Mozart's life, he was writing symphonies like the 'Jupiter' which were almost completely contrapuntal, while Beethoven, in his monumental late 'Grosse Fuge' string quartet originally the finale to Op 130, takes a fugue and makes it thoroughly symphonic.

Given this tendency, it is no surprise that JS Bach, who began his life writing fugues, and used them in practically every work he created, should seek ever more complex and constrained forms as he grew older. It is as if he and his fellow composers needed greater challenges for their mature compositional skills. Thus shortly before his death Bach produced encapsulating works like the 'Goldberg Variations', where every third variation is a canon - a strict round of voices entering with the same tune one after another - but at widening intervals.  Or like 'The Musical Offering' which offers all kinds of extraordinary musical feats - compositions which gradually modulate through the entire scale or hugely complex ricercars. And the summation of these summations, the 'Art of Fugue', which, as its name suggests, is a distillation of every technical contrivance available to the contrapuntalist, including mirror canons where the voices move in contrary motion and pieces with cancrizans or crab counterpoint which can be played both forward and backwards. 

It is probably no accident that practically the first commercial record of synthesiser music played on the Moog synthesiser was called 'Switched on Bach', and consisted of some of Bach's best-known works played on what was then a novel instrument.  The totally unconstrained sounds of the electronic keyboard were used to perform the most constrained great music ever written.

We tend to forget how essentially arbitrary musical instruments are. Although the basic principles are set in a fairly obvious way - hitting, blowing, scraping or plucking are the four basic modes behind all conventional instruments - the exact details are largely a matter of chance and tradition. Or, in the case of the saxophone, of sheer will: Adolphe Sax invented it by taking the basic design of the clarinet and changing its fixed diameter bore to a conical design.

This problem is upon us again with the widespread use of cheap synthesisers - the successors to that quaint, primitive Moog.  Now we can produce any sound, with any quality, in any scale.  The question is, how do we choose? Schoenberg faced a similar question after the final dissolution of classical tonality.  Arbitrarily he imposed his so-called dodecaphonic system placing equal emphasis on all the notes of the chromatic scale.  Today we find ourselves in an equivalent pre-Schoenberg musical world. Although many fine works have been written with computers and synthesisers, they tend to feel contingent.  As history has shown, what composers need above all is not total freedom but a set of coherent rules within which to work.  The question is, who will be the switched-on Bach II to give them to us?

(21.3.92)

See also Moody Sonnets – Bach, And Chopin’s Hands

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