Week 3: 16 October 2023 – “Dorian” Toccata and Fugue and “Schmücke dich”: Trinity 20
Plus: Who was J.S. Bach?, Chuu vs. Jini, music theory in ethnomusicology, and more!
We continue to recognize that Bond Chapel is situated in the traditional homeland and native territory of the Three Fires Confederacy—the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe Nations—as well as other groups including the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Miami, Peoria, and Sac and Fox. We remember their forced removal and dispossession, but also remember to speak of these groups in the present tense, as Chicago continues to be resound with tens of thousands of Native voices.
This week, I’ve been watching APTNtv’s series Living By the Drum, a fun and informative look at Pow Wows across Canada. Episode 1 introduces the Odawa Pow Wow in Ottawa, including both lovely interviews with participants and a soundtrack that might (?) not sound like what you’d expect.
Week 3: 16 October 2023 – “Dorian” Toccata and Fugue and “Schmücke dich”: Trinity 20
Please save applause for the end of each set
Toccata and Fugue “Dorian” in D minor, BWV 538
Alle Menschen mussen sterben, BWV 643
Alle Menschen müssen sterben, BWV 1117
Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele, BWV 654
Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot, BWV 635
Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot, BWV 678
Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot (Fughetta), BWV 679
Fugue “Gigue” in G, BWV 577
As the “above-title billing” might suggest, this is the first week starring pieces that I would have to seriously think about leaving off a “Greatest Hits” of Bach organ works. That’s not to say that I don’t love the music on the other weeks—think about how many fascinating and beautiful pieces we’ve heard the past two weeks! But this is music with a different level of notoriety, a different place in the organ repertoire.
Take the “Dorian” Toccata and Fugue. No, not that Toccata and Fugue in D minor: this one’s better. Really. Start with the Toccata: instead of the stop-and-start North German stylus phantasticus used by that D-minor Toccata, this one is written like a movement from a Vivaldi Concerto in D minor for two violins and cello. I’m being that specific for a reason. Bach was a big fan of Vivaldi, and arranged several of his concertos for keyboard instruments; in a few weeks (Week 6), you’ll hear his organ version of a concerto from L’estro armonico in that key and for that combination of instruments.
But what does it mean for an organ piece to sound like a Vivaldi concerto? Take the opening of the piece: a steady stream of sixteenth notes in one hand, then the other, then the pedals (the three “solo instruments”), followed by an elaboration of the same theme punctuated by chords (the “orchestra”). Later on, Bach repeatedly marks places to alternate between keyboards, producing a contrast of “ensemble” and “soloistic” sounds (concerto grosso and concertino). In both cases, the trading-off allows Bach to manipulate your sense of time and expectation. Once you’ve heard the theme once, you know how it’s going to go when the other part has it, so you start to feel the beat in larger and larger units. Coupled with harmonic sequences—where the same music repeats itself in a predictable harmonic pattern, typically going down a scale—the Toccata has a sense of inevitability, with all the drive and momentum of a freight train.
This description might also sound make the Toccata sound a little repetitive, or at least predictable. And for those who don’t love Vivaldi, this is surely their No.1 complaint: once you’ve heard the beginning of the piece, you can often start to play the copy-and-paste game and guess most of where it’s going. Now, that’s not quite fair to Vivaldi (although he definitely has lots of concertos like that, as any longtime listener to “classical music radio” of any kind will know). But it does represent a tendency that Bach does his best to avoid, even when he’s imitating Vivaldi. In this piece, for instance, the theme is cut up and stretched into three or four different versions, and the sequences are always thematic instead of defaulting to the kind of mechanical scrubbing on repeated notes that you sometimes hear in the middle of Vivaldi movements. (I love mechanical scrubbing on repeated notes!) And, most distinctively, the Toccata has a wonderfully varied harmonic palette, coupled with a fidelity tuned sense of when to switch to a new key for variety’s sake.
This is even truer for the Fugue. The nickname “Dorian” is in one sense hilariously misleading, since it implies an old-fashioned “modal” orientation for a Toccata that is about as up-to-date (and tonal) as anything Bach wrote. What it does refer to is the use of a key signature with no sharps or flats (as opposed to the single flat you might expect for D minor), which gives Bach a wide-open space in which to operate. The Fugue constantly meanders between keys, often crashing unexpectedly into a new one while seemingly still in the middle of a musical thought. And the harmonies themselves are almost insistently dissonant, with suspensions grating harshly against neighboring notes at the beginning of almost every measure. Since the Fugue resembles something like a stile antico “Renaissance-style” choral movement with instrumental decorations, these pungent sounds make it tempting to give it a lamenting or pleading text: I once heard Ton Koopman sing it as Ky-ri-e E-le–——i-son. Lord, save us. See what words work for you.
“All people must die.” I don’t normally get into theology here, but these chorales are probably the organ works of Bach that are least likely to make sense without some context. Here is the first verse of the hymn (translation by Francis Browne, full text at bach-cantatas.com):
Everybody must die,
all flesh passes like grass;
Whatever lives must perish
if it is to become new elsewhere.
This body must rot
if it is elsewhere to recover
and gain the great glory
which is prepared for those who are righteous.
The key to understanding this music is in the final lines. As the subsequent verses hammer home, death is a “joyous” affair, full of “profit,” and giving the righteous their chance to “shine brightly” and achieve their glory. And these really are joyous pieces of music. BWV 643 (from the Orgelbüchlein) is written in the grand style of the big preludes and fugues, and BWV 1117 (a Neumeister Chorale) positively explodes into a flurry of thirty-second notes midway through:
This is not mournful music, nor is it particularly gentle. Here, death blazes forth as the culmination of life. Is it a coincidence that this chorale text was written a few years after the calamity of the Thirty Years’ War? Is this how Germans were able to make sense of the decades of brutality that killed over a third of their people? Was it comforting to soldiers and families to believe that the carnage could at least be their ticket to a greater glory?1
What does it say about Bach’s worldview that he subscribed to this violent and spectacular understanding of death?
Let me save that thought for the section below. For now, we can let it color our hearing of “Schmücke dich,” another “greatest hit” (compiled by Bach into his own “best of” volume, the so-called Great Eighteen Chorales—and arranged for orchestra a couple hundred years later by Arnold Schoenberg). This is probably the Bach piece I’ve played most often. That’s partly because I think it’s beautiful and moving; but it’s also largely because I play it so often at both weddings and funerals. The text (“Adorn thyself, soul, in gladness”) sticks to a metaphor about the soul’s marriage to Christ, but the repeated declarations of yearning for heaven suggest a longing for death. In any case, there are certainly multiple sacraments at work, since Christ’s body and blood dominate several of the verses.
Even if this chorale comes from the same attitude of joy in death, the sound of a mystical union is somewhat different from dying in a blaze of glory. Instead, the music is both wonderfully sweet (lines constantly moving hand-in-hand in thirds and sixths) and harmonically poignant (never settling in major for too long). And then there’s the rhythm. In a subtle way, this may be the most rhythmically complex piece Bach ever wrote. Although it’s in ¾, with six eighth notes to a measure, many of the accompanying figures are four eighth notes long. When these figures are repeated, the group starts at the end of the bar instead of the beginning of the next one; it takes three cycles for the parts to line up again (3 groups of 4 eighth notes is the same as 2 measure of 6). Moreover, Bach staggers and layers these hemiolas (is this what it is to “adorn thyself”?), giving the disorienting effect of three or four dancers turning to their own beats. Perhaps this is the sound of a soul with one foot already in the next world, able to ignore the earthly beat.
How about some lighter fare, like the Ten Commandments? This hymn tune, with its insistent harping on one note, is maybe the most didactic of Martin Luther’s Catechism chorales. And these repetitions give Bach a variety of options: hammering away pompously in BWV 635 (another Orgelbüchlein gem), stretching the notes out to infinity while two violins spin filigree overhead in BWV 679 (Clavierübung III), or cheerfully dancing a fugal gigue in BWV 680. And why not end with another fugal gigue in the same key? We could use a party after all this talk of death. (Or maybe in Bach’s worldview, death is something to dance about.)
Who Was J.S. Bach?
Honestly, as a BIPOC pangender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously.
I imagine that these lines, delivered by a student named Max in Todd Field’s Tár, are supposed to be a caricature of some combination of the words “woke” and “PC.” And tin-eared caricature it is, a hopelessly clichéd outburst that understands the “vocabulary but not the grammar” of such “wokeisms” even at their most extreme. Nobody talks like this; I feel sorry for the actor. Max is clearly being set up to fail—if you saw the movie in theaters, you may have heard applause at Lydia Tár’s hectoring rebuke.
Still, I’d actually like to try to take this statement seriously.2 Why shouldn’t we care how Bach treated his wives? Or how he (at the very least) seems to have expressed Anti-Jewish sentiments in several of his vocal works? Or that the pieces I’m playing today promote death (in a religious war?) as an ultimate glory to be joyously welcomed?
After all, one of the most common ways to listen to Bach—or most brand-name music now—is to listen for personality. Just like Swifties, Bach fans desperately want to identify with Johann Sebastian as a person; they tend to understand Bach
through the prism of their own life and times. Johann Nicolaus Forkel, a passionate keyboard player and German nationalist, first portrayed Bach in 1802 as a virtuoso organist and harpsichordist and model citizen for Germany’s rising middle class. Later in the century, Philipp Spitta, born into a family of theologians and leader of the Lutheran church-music revival, portrayed Bach as the Fifth Evangelist, vigorously spreading the gospel through his Lutheran cantatas, motets, and Passions. And more recently, Christoph Wolff, former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and University Professor at Harvard, presented Bach as a “learned musician,” an intellect worthy of Sir Isaac Newton and a town music director well acquainted with the faculty of the university in Leipzig…[John Eliot] Gardiner proposes…a fallible Bach…a rebellious and resentful musician, harboring a lifelong grudge against authority—a personality disorder stemming from a youth spent among ruffians and abusive teachers. Hiding behind Bach, creator of the Matthew Passion and B-Minor Mass, Gardiner suggests, is Bach “the reformed teenage thug.”
It’s quite impressive that George Stauffer, in these lines from his review of Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, leaves it entirely up to us to draw the implications of why Gardiner might want to see Bach as a “reformed teenage thug.” (I might add that Stauffer’s Bach tends to come across as cosmopolitan and committed to both teaching and his legacy.)
If you are into Bach even partly for his appeal as a person, it is surely worth reckoning with the unsavory aspects of his character, or at least those elements that might seem foreign to you. Gardiner’s violent Bach, for instance, is certainly well-documented; no biographer has ever tried to deny that Johann Sebastian the instigator threw one too many insults and got into a knife fight with a bassoonist. Most of you are probably not hardcore Pietist Lutherans, and might like to think of Spitta’s portrait as outdated—but it’s extremely hard to read the documents and doubt the evangelical zeal of his religious convictions. (Frankly, it’s hard to read them and avoid the sense that he was just kind of an asshole in general.) And of course nobody has tried to deny the immense labor (reproductive, but also in terms of household management and musical logistics) that Bach forced on his wives.
You may tally all this up and feel that Bach is still a character who you want to engage with, as a persona, and that you want to listen to his music through this lens. I don’t think that’s crazy; I don’t want to imply that these character traits make him an “irredeemable” person, if such a thing exists, or even that he exhibited them at all times. (He did only get into just the one knife fight; Michael Marissen has documented some ways that he might have tried to tone down anti-Jewish rhetoric in the Passions.) Buck O’Neill’s mantra (as paraphrased by Joe Posnanski): “People aren’t one thing. People are complicated.”
But I also don’t think you have to accept any of this, and there’s no particular reason to love Bach as a person. Generally, the more I learn about past eras, the less I want to live in them (starting with modern medicine and sewers), and the more I learn about historical figures, the less I think I’d want to be friends with them. I can’t listen to Bach the way a Swiftie listens to “All Too Well (10 Minute Version).” It’s perfectly reasonable for “Max” to find Bach too hard to stomach.
I’m still here though! I don’t think we have to listen to this music for personality, and honestly I think we’d be better off doing less of that in general. (Yes, including spending less time listening to “All Too Well (10 Minute Version).”) While we obviously can’t understand Bach’s organ works without having a clear-eyed view of his personality and context, we don’t have to listen to them for those things, and we certainly don’t have to use them to glorify those things. It’s a point made by Jerome McGann for Romantic poetry and Scott Burnham for Beethoven: these works come with a lot of baggage, and it’s important to disentangle them before rushing in with praise, lest you end up exalting tendencies that (if you think about it) turn out to be coercive or even authoritarian.3
So, as best I can, when discussing this music, I try to avoid making it about “Bach.” “The organ works of Bach” are out there, and indeed “Bach” wrote them, but there’s no reason that praising and performing them has to be about the individual character of their single composer. These organ works are above all the product of German organ traditions, welded to Italian styles represented by composers like Vivaldi; these influences, and how they are wielded in the music, are much more interesting to write and read about than constant droning on about “genius.”
The Bach organ works are often exciting, beautiful, and challenging. I’m generally in favor of people continuing to play them. (Alongside many wonderful works by composers who I do think are worth promoting “as people.”) But I would not like for this to constitute an automatic endorsement of “Bach” as a persona—whoever that may have been. The uses we can put this music to in the present tense matter; their origins don’t have to.
What I’m Listening To
Dorothee Oberlinger and Ensemble 1700 – Alessandro Scarlatti: Baroque Influencer
Ophélie Gaillard and Pulcinella Orchestra – Napoli!
Two very enjoyable new recordings that explore mostly underexposed parts of the Italian Baroque repertoire. There’s some overlap; Gaillard includes a cello sonata by Scarlatti, who, after all, was the most influential Neapolitan composer of his day. But other than that, the focuses are quite different: Gaillard begins her tour with the sixteenth-century Spanish viola da gamba player Diego Ortiz, and proceeds through practically unknown composers like Emanuele Barbella (and an actual anonymous) to give a multicentury overview of Neapolitan music, albeit centered on her cello. This includes some delightful surprises, including a violin concerto by Pergolesi (known to me only as an vocal composer) and what might be the first recording of anything by “Francesco Alborea.”
While Gaillard gives more of a view of the margins of Neapolitan Baroque music, Oberlinger stays squarely at the center. The album title might make you wince, but Scarlatti was without a doubt the most influential composer of his time—and this recording may help you understand why. Oberlinger plays recorder very stylishly, and I love the energy and coordination of her ensemble. Disks like this, where lesser-known music is played as if it’s “greatest hits of Baroque,” show just how much performers can do to make a case for these pieces.
Onipa – Off the Grid
Pangaea – Changing Channels
A much weirder pairing, but these were two new mostly-electronic dance records I loved this week. (Off the Grid is, I think, supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek name.) And I like that they take completely different strategies. Changing Channels gives a subtly contrasting palette of mostly house-adjacent sounds, letting songs build up layers and sequences of juicy, squiggly, and entertaining synth sounds. Meanwhile, Off the Grid offers a potpourri of African dance genres from Afrobeat to highlife to Congotronics, all blended up into a relatively consistent soundword. Forget any of what I just said though; these albums are fun! Changing Channels is a riot of great beats and little dopamine hits throughout its whole runtime, while Off the Grid will get you moving via a slower build (of equally great beats!) to its final “Joy.”
CHUU – “Underwater”
JINI – An Iron Hand In A Velvet Glove
Before you say anything, here’s the tracklist for Jini’s EP:
That’s right, JBACH wrote two of the four songs. How could I avoid talking about it?
There’s a double risk when a star leaves a successful group for a new label. First, they have to craft a new image as a soloist; and second, they typically have to find new songwriters and producers. The first is almost certain to lose some fans no matter what; and the latter is almost certain to be a downgrade. (Congratulations to SUNMI for successfully navigating both.)
To be fair, Chuu and Jini left their groups under vastly different circumstances. Chuu has now become almost as famous as a labor activist than as an actual entertainer; after filing for an injunction to suspend her contract in 2021, she only won her lawsuit against Blockberry Creative in August of this year. In the meantime, Blockberry removed her from LOONA, falsely claimed she had been abusive toward staff, and overall managed to suck so much that they convinced the entire rest of the group to leave as well. Meanwhile, Jini left NMIXX seemingly without a hitch and likely of her own volition; JYP, an established label with a famously great cafeteria, did not give her too much trouble, at least publicly. The upshot is that Chuu has become a hero and Jini (to NMIXX fans) has been seen as a traitor.
These backstories must play into the new images the two are trying to project. Even before her contract dispute, Chuu was probably better known as a personality than as an entertainer. And that persona is, for lack of better words, zany and childish; a popular Youtube compilation has a thumbnail with the text “Chuu is baby” in comic sans. (See also: “Chuu laying on the floor and screaming”.) And it’s undeniably true that she’s fantastic at being both high energy and cutesy on camera. While this presumably reflects some aspects of her actual personality—nobody can turn it on that much and for that long—it has to be the case that Blockberry pushed her turn it all up to 11.
The weird thing is, Chuu isn’t baby. She has two younger brothers and she’s almost squarely in the middle of the age distribution for LOONA. Chuu was 18 when she debuted; LOONA’s actual maknae YeoJin was 15. YeoJin definitely got babied too, but Chuu managed to take some elements of her “natural” role; when she appeared as the actual youngest member of the crew on the TV show Running Girls, she barely needed to change anything about her persona to fit in.
In any case, it seems that Chuu and her new label ATRP have decided that heroic Chuu, having been through legal hell—and possibly having been pushed to act “baby” for LOONA TV videos—should have a more “mature” image. Musically speaking, that means doing the opposite of the song that made her famous. That’s kind of a shame, since “Heart Attack” is catchy from top to bottom, has a spectacularly maximal backing track, and ends with one of the best-integrated bridges/modulations I’ve ever heard. By contrast, “Underwater” stays quite mellow, with a relatively sparse beat, relaxed tempo, and a structure that doesn’t really build or go anywhere. It’s a pretty nice sound, and her singing sounds really lovely in ways that LOONA songs never showcased; I just wanted more (and definitely a better tune). Since this was a surprise pre-release (it’s not even on Spotify yet), perhaps the other songs will have more going on. But this seems like a clear signal that they’ll avoid the LOONA model—probably to their detriment.
Almost exactly the opposite is true for Jini’s “album” (four songs totalling just over 10 minutes). I really like all four of these songs, which have great beats, catchy tunes, and a nice sense of pace throughout.4 Above all, they hang together as songs, something JYP has notoriously refused to do with NMIXX. Where NMIXX songs never quite sit still, splicing in a new genre in the middle of practically every track (it’s in the name of the group!), Jini’s solo songs are content to sit within a groove and let it play out. I can’t say that her singing is particularly exciting—Lily and Haewon clearly have more power and agility—but it works just fine within the songs. This might be a case where doing the opposite of what made you famous actually works musically.
And her new image?
I don’t think it’s crazy per se to read “NMIXX” off of the pattern from her left boot strap. And Jini may have felt like she had to go on the offensive once she left. The last JYP artist to leave a group voluntarily was subjected to a lengthy online hate campaign that included false sexual harassment allegations. Even if Jini hasn’t gotten that kind of backlash, she has to know that her name is mud among NSWER—and she and her label seem to have gotten out in front of it. After all, this was the first track she released from the album:
I’m far from an NSWER, but I don’t get the impression that Jini had a particularly “defiant” or “bad girl” reputation when she was in NMIXX. She was consistently among the most popular members, or at least many people’s second-favorite member. (Which makes the perceived betrayal cut all the deeper?) So here again the circumstances of her leaving prompted a major change of image. We’ll see if Jini can inject a little more drama into her vocals, but for now, the new look is working for her.
Also liked…
Thomas Trotter – A Celebration
Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini – Benevoli: Missa Tu es Petrus
What I’m Reading
I read Stephen Blum’s new book, which turns out to be even more “academic inside baseball” than I thought, so I’ll keep this short. The book tries to define the field of “music theory in ethnomusicology” (subject of its parent series), and in doing so it gives a really valuable survey of a literature that’s rarely gathered together. The bibliography alone is worth perusing, and indeed is the star of the book (140 pages of text, 50 pages of references). The prose is clear and to the point, which is to say that I can’t really recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have a specifically academic interest in this material; it’s the kind of book where most of the paragraphs begin by naming an author whose work is about to be summarized.
To some extent, this book (and the series?) feels a bit like an exercise in pure optimism. Sometimes it can come off like a memo from an ethnomusicologist to music theorists, letting us all know “Hey, here’s all this great thinking in your field that we’ve done!” But most of all it seems designed to try to school ethnomusicologists in thinking about issues of music theory. I hope it’s not too snarky to say: good luck getting most ethnomusicologists to read this!
Still, If Blum’s efforts (and those of Martin Stokes, series editor) succeed, I can imagine this book playing a significant role in defining the agenda of the new subfield, especially via the enumerated lists of theoretical issues at the end of each chapter. As the equivalent subfield in music theory grows, I hope this comes to pass within ethnomusicology as well.
Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!
This attitude reminds me most strongly of some later Medieval approaches to death, such as the grotesquely cheerful Plague-era pilgrim song “Ad mortem festinamus.”
Certainly more seriously than Lydia Tár does herself, since the only reason she’s able to muster for caring about Bach is a borderline nonsensical speech about how an extremely common chord progression shows that Bach cares about “questions.” (Cate Blanchett’s piano playing is very nice.)
You can also throw monumental architecture and—back to Tár—diva conductors on the list of Things I Like That Are (usually) Kind Of Authoritarian. I don’t think any of us want our admiration for the Pyramids to turn into praise for the process that put them there!
I don’t particularly care that they might sound a tiny bit dated; I know some people have accused “Bad Reputation” of having a beat that sounds a bit too much like Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space.”