Week 12: 15 January 2024 – Trio Sonata No.1, “An Wasserflüssen Babylon”: Epiphany 1

Plus: What's a "version" and what's a "work"? MIXXpop is good now? The Afterlife of Bach’s Organ Works, and more!

I hope everybody is celebrating well this holiday weekend! And I hope that it’s not too crass to suggest that organ music isn’t the worst way to celebrate MLK day, given his attachments to music and sacred music in particular. Albeit more bop than Bach. 

That said, if you happen to be in the area and are still looking for ways to celebrate (and maybe more directly on-theme ones), here’s a great list of events both locally and across Chicago. 

As always, we 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—making a slight pivot from featuring “music from members of indigenous groups linked to Chicago” to “indigenous music in Chicago”—I’ve really been digging the cumbia stylings of local Kichwa band Chicha Roots. They have a really groovy way of mixing the psychedelic guitars of Peruvian chicha itself with the flute salad I associate with [Columbian] cumbia in general. So, the guitar work on “Tikray” (from the Kichwa for “to overturn”) is married wonderfully with flute solos on “Yachankika” (roughly “You Know It’s True”) and especially “Mindalae” (something like “bringing Kichwa culture to the world”). It’s great stuff, and I look forward to the next opportunity to see them.

Week 12: 15 January 2024 – Trio Sonata No.1, “An Wasserflüssen Babylon”: Epiphany 1

Please save applause for the end of each set

Trio Sonata No.1 in E-flat, BWV 525

i. [Allegro]

ii. Adagio

iii. Allegro

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An Wasserflüssen Babylon, BWV 653

Wenn dich Unglück tut greifen an, BWV 1104

An Wasserflüssen Babylon, BWV 653b

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Concerto in A minor BWV 593 (after Vivaldi, L’estro armonico, No. 8, RV 522)

i. [Allegro]

ii. Adagio

iii. Allegro

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After the glut of chorale-based works over the past few recitals, hopefully it’s refreshing to have a program focused on chamber music. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t include a “Prelude-style” piece here, but maybe omitting those is also a nice change of pace. When’s the last time you heard a Bach concert with no fugues? 

Still, that doesn’t mean this music (including the Vivaldi concerto) is lacking in counterpoint or imitation. And there’s no better illustration of that than this trio sonata.

The first trio sonata was also my first. I probably learned it “too early” for my technique—although, part of the point of these pieces is to develop technique, so you have to start somewhere. In any case, because it was my first real exposure to Bach’s “chamber music,” I didn’t realize quite how unusual this piece is. It may not be the hardest Bach organ piece, or even the hardest trio sonata (I think most organists would agree that Nos. 2 (last movement), 5, and 6 have it beat) but it’s certainly the one that’s written least “naturally” for the fingers and the toes. That could be a sign that this sonata really was a piece of chamber music that Bach arranged for the organ. But it could also simply have been an exercise in making few concessions to technique, or even in making things deliberately awkward.

That’s probably most obvious in the first movement. Take a passage like this:

If you have a piano at hand and the inclination to try to work things out even slowly, I highly encourage you to try this left-hand part on for size. (That’s the middle line.) Something about how this line constantly doubles back on itself (even without reading the music, you can see how it repeatedly changes directions), combined with the unhelpful timing of notes using the black keys, makes this a truly contortionist exercise, even without the other parts. I have more fingerings written in these three measures than in the rest of the trio sonatas combined.

Then there’s the pedal part. You can see that it tops out here at a high D-flat, near the top of its range. But that first measure, like so many in this piece, also stays to its extreme of the pedalboard. In this case, your left foot has to stay awkwardly far to the right for an uncomfortable amount of time; then, in the next couple of measures, you have to rotate your body around to bring the right foot down to the left side of the organ. 

Beyond this twisting and turning, this movement’s pedal line is mostly not written with the pedals in mind at all. To bring up a fairly basic point about organ technique: most people (organists at any rate) have two legs and two feet, left and right. That generally means that pedal lines are smoothest to play when the feet can alternate notes to the left and the right (low and high) without crossing over each other. So typical pedal lines will often look like this (from the third movement, which is written quite idiomatically for the pedals):

If you want to write a scale for organ pedals, you’ll usually want to make it fit this alternating pattern, “low-high, low-high,” rather than going straight ahead in one direction:

(Second example is from the Pedal-exercitium BWV 598.)

Now take a look again at our first example from this trio sonata:

That’s just mean. Either you make cumbersome use of your heels or you have to have one foot bounce around without making the line sound clipped or disconnected.

And that’s a problem hinted at from the beginning of the piece. If you listen to the opening, you can now tell that this is not a theme written for pedals at all:

That “short-short long, short-short long” theme keeps going up instead of alternating high and low. When it’s cited in the pedals (including in the very last measure of the movement!), it’s a lot of work to make it sound as natural as it did in the hands.

Actually, the fact that this theme even shows up in the pedals at all is striking. Uniquely, in every movement of this trio sonata, each of the three parts has a turn playing the main theme. There are other movements like that (e.g. the finales of sonatas Nos.2 and 5), but most of these trios are more like accompanied duos: two violins plus continuo; two hands plus feet. And even in the other “equal trio” movements, the themes are written much more with the feet in mind. You’re now in a position to see how this theme from the finale of No.5 is, if not exactly easy, very naturally written for the feet:

Especially when contrasted with:

OK, that’s a whole lot of words about technique and not too much about the music. For the latter, I’ll just say that there’s a reason I wanted to learn this sonata first: it’s sunny, bouncy, and even catchy in the outer movements, while the slow movement is beautifully mournful. It may be devilish to play; but, to borrow from W.B. Yeats:

A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.  

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You may remember from last week that a very young Bach copied out a piece called An Wasserflüssen Babylon by Johann Adam Reinken.¹ Maybe you even followed the link and listened to it. In which case you would have noticed that this Reinken’s piece is over seventeen minutes long, making it easily the longest “continuous” piece of organ music written until some time in the nineteenth century.² And maybe you know the anecdote that a famous old organist once told Bach that “I thought that this art [of improvisation on a chorale] was dead, but I see that in you it still lives.” The organist was Reinken, and the chorale was “An Wasserflüssen Babylon.”

It might be a relief then to hear that neither version of Bach’s “An Wasserflüssen” is seventeen minutes long. Actually, the piece is quite compact—maybe four minutes—simply going through the hymn tune once in the solo voice, with short interludes in the accompaniment. And in terms of style, Bach’s piece is also a far cry from Reinken’s: it’s lyrical and sweet where the older composer had been grand and austere. To the extent that Bach may have paid direct homage to Reinken, it’s limited to small gestures. The second version (BWV 653) ends, unusually, with an extra descending scale in the solo line; at the same time, a new voice climbs up in the organist’s right foot (while the left foot stays put). The same thing happens (at a much larger scale) at the end of Reinken’s fantasy.

And, speaking of extra voices in the feet, Bach’s earlier version (BWV 653b) uses double pedal throughout—maybe, but probably not, a reference to a short passage of double pedal in Reinken’s piece. The result is necessarily quite dense, and it definitely fits into the “German pedal ideology” of “more is more” that David Yearsley has analyzed so well. But the result isn’t quite as “suffocatingly thick” as “Aus tiefer Not,” Bach’s other double-pedal piece. In any case, I think it’s worth playing along with the later version; I’ll have more to say about these two versions and their relationship below. Hopefully the somewhat melancholy Neumeister Chorale “Wenn dich Unglück tut greifen an” makes a suitably contrasting slice of cheese in the “An Wasserflüssen” sandwich.

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If the Bach/Vivaldi D-minor concerto is Bach’s hardest organ piece, this A-minor concerto isn’t far behind. (I realize that this week is starting to sound like one long complaint about technical difficulty; hopefully it’s at least interesting for some of you.) Even having made this piece my digital calling card for a few years now, there are still a number of passages that make me sweat. Just like in the D-minor, there are long stretches of repeated notes in the pedals, often in uncomfortable registers:

(And so on for over a page at a time.) In the most egregious passage of all, this is combined with having the left hand cross all the way over your body to the upper edge of the keyboard, while having to sit in with ungainly splayed legs for the pedal part:

But probably the most distinctive bit of repeated-note writing in this piece is actually for the hands. Just as in the D-minor concerto, Bach has to do something to replicate the wonderfully energetic effect of Vivaldi’s scrubbing repeated notes. And here, he figures out a way to keep them all in, with a correspondingly machine gun-like effect:

It’s quite a clever trick to divide the notes between the hands (and keyboards) like this, giving regular breaks in what would otherwise be an impossibly exhausting series of repetitions in the fingers or the wrist. Instead, the technique has been simplified into a much easier string of two-note ricochets. It took until reasonably late in the nineteenth century for other organists to try this effect;³ it’s a shame Bach never dared to use it again.

Again, that’s plenty about technique and not much about music. Here though, I’m not sure I can do much better than direct you to Susan McClary’s excellent chapter “What Was Tonality?,” which centers on an analysis of this piece. McClary, in reasonably nontechnical language (or at least writing where the technical bits aren’t the crucial part), does a wonderfully thorough job of explaining how Vivaldi manipulates your expectations, using harmony and form to create a very large-scale sense of rhythm. Vivaldi’s rhythms (the small-scale ones) drive you forward; but his slow and predictable changes of harmony tell you not to expect changes to be too frequent. In other words, Vivaldi was perhaps the first composer to have a transmission in his musical car; this is music that runs at a high gear.

Works and Reworks

A few people have told me that they miss the more “philosophical” writing of posts like “What are “The Complete Organ Works of J.S. Bach”?” I hope they’ll be happy with this week’s return to the same territory. (If you’re in the opposite camp—first of all, thanks for your polite silence. And don’t worry: there’ll be more talk soon about Bach’s musical style and personality, Bach and Nazism, and other cultural aspects of his organ music.)

One thing I mentioned a few times in that post, and subsequently, is the issue of choosing between versions. I’ve typically justified my choices by saying that the version I’m playing is more unusual (e.g. BWV 566) or has more music in it (e.g. BWV 545b). But that skips a step. Why stick to playing one version of each piece at all?

I don’t want this to sound like a rhetorical question. Benjamin Alard has demonstrated that there are worthwhile musical reasons to play and record several different surviving versions of each piece, and that the result need not be tedious or overly repetitious. At the very least, it’s an opportunity to try on different interpretations, whether or not they’re conditioned on the different musical affordances of each version. I hope more organists and harpsichordists follow in his footsteps. 

But why aren’t we all doing the same already? Partly, I think it’s a tendency to see earlier versions as drafts, or even sketches—unfinished products. As a number of musicologists have wryly noted, sketch scholarship rarely concludes that Beethoven (it’s so often Beethoven) made his music worse over time, or that he made “wrong” musical decisions. Instead, it typically becomes an opportunity to celebrate the composer: “these are the moments when a piece “becomes” extraordinary via the intervention/inspiration of a creative genius”; “who else could have had such a great idea starting from this basic material?” You get the idea.

But composers often do make pieces worse for practical (Verdi) or psychological (Schumann) reasons. So I think it’s especially worth questioning the idea of “progressive refinement” when it comes to later revisions of completed works. Even when the later version adds new music, it can sometimes disrupt the smart proportions or lean texture of the first version. It may be more but that doesn’t necessarily make it better. 

It’s also not always easy to tell what constitutes a “new version” and what constitutes a “different piece.” If you’ve ever sorted my spreadsheet of the Bach organ works by BWV number, there’s a chance you noticed a slight glitch in the middle of the Orgelbüchlein: I skip from BWV 630 to BWV 632. That’s not because there’s some reason to doubt that Bach wrote BWV 631; rather, it’s because BWV 631 is contained almost wholesale in the “Great Eighteen” chorale prelude BWV 667. I don’t think the BWV catalog should be considered some kind of end-all be-all authority on what Bach’s “works” are—but the fact that two versions of this piece get individual numbers is telling. Being collected in an Opus will turn a version into a Work.

On the other hand, I think it’s worth being a bit cautious about putting too strict of a dividing line between different versions. In most cases, it seems pretty clear that the differences between surviving sources are due to spur-of-the-moment changes, more along the lines of “What if we tried it like this today?” than “I’m revising the piece.” And, given that Bach was notorious for adding to and otherwise changing the works of composers when he performed them,⁴ there’s no reason to think that his performances of his own works would have been any less free in their treatment of the score. 

And that’s when he was even performing from a score. Given Bach’s chops as an improviser, it seems likely that he only wrote out solo works for two main purposes: either as teaching material, or to work out particularly complicated or systematic musical techniques. But that doesn’t mean that the written-out “solutions” (the pieces we have) are necessarily definitive or final. Rather, it often sounds to me like he’s trying out different ways of executing the same basic plan. As I’ve referred to a few times in my notes for these recitals, this can make the various chorale preludes on a given tune sound like different drafts of the same piece. 

Every time, I’ve stopped short of saying that these actually are just versions of the same piece—just like I only joke that “...Baby One more Time” and “Oops!...I Did It Again” are the same song. In some sense, they pretty much are; I actually think it’s possible to defend a notion of the musical work that broadens the idea of “recomposition” to that extent. But I won’t go quite that far. My point is only to show that the line between a “different version” and a “different work” is much blurrier than you might think.⁵

The two versions of “An Wasserflüssen Babylon” are right on the line for me. In some ways, these really are the same piece: same length, key, rhythm, harmonies, melodies, and treatment of the hymn tune. But the changes are much more drastic than the basic description “simplifying from a double-pedal part to a single line” might suggest. Even if the bassline stayed mostly the same, and even if the tune remained in the same places, the rest had to be completely reworked: Bach even moved the chorale from the soprano to the alto. (Taking advantage of the interior space opened up by removing the second pedal part.)

The result is significantly more streamlined than the original, much less thick and (to some ears) less cluttered. Every organist I’ve spoken to about this piece thinks that the revision is much more beautiful, and prefers playing it. It’s the rare case where more really is just more, and where organists recognize the value of a little restraint.

Still, I have a soft spot for the original version,⁶ for all of the interesting solutions Bach had to devise for writing in this unusual texture—and for writing two pedal lines that are each (mostly) playable with one foot at a time. So even if I might agree that the later version of “An Wasserflüssen” is prettier and more elegant, I find it hard to give up the double pedal version.

Let me be honest, albeit probably very predictable. The only reason I’m not playing every available version of every piece is simple practicality. (Isn’t this series long enough as-is?) In fact: there’s only one piece where the merits of the different versions compelled me to play both. In every other case, I felt like it was pretty easy to choose which one to play, and didn’t feel too bad about omitting the other(s). Here, I couldn’t bear to choose. So, I hope that’s a strong enough endorsement for “An Wasserflüssen”—both versions.

What I’m Listening To

Invoke – Evolve and Travel

On first glance, I wasn’t prepared to like this album very much: it combines two types of music (young White dudes playing bluegrass+Brooklyn-esque post-minimalism) that I’m usually either indifferent or even hostile toward. But I was really charmed by the music (I haven’t yet gone back and listened to their earlier stuff), and maybe you’ll like it too.

Invoke is, more or less, a string quartet where two of the members also play banjo and violin; they also all sing. I appreciate that they try neither to overly “countrify” their bowed string playing or singing, nor to overly “classicize” the plucks: instead, a lot of this music exists in something like a mixture between the styles. “Doorway” is probably my favorite demonstration of the resulting sound. The vocal harmonies sound like Appalachian folk singing (without, thank goodness, any attempt to mimic the accent or vocal timbre of Appalachian singers), and some of the violin playing uses fiddle technique and ornaments. But the underlying music chugs along with minimalist (verging on indie folk) grooves. It’s a little bit like if early John Adams (when he was still trying) and Julia Wolfe were played by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, on string quartet. Or maybe that’s underselling it. Like I said, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like this music when I read the descriptions; there’s only one way to know for sure.

Evgeny Sviridov and Ludus Instrumentalis – Benda: Sonatas & Capriccios

Kristin von der Goltz, Andreas Küppers, Hille Perl, Christoph Dangel, and Thomas C. Boyen – Francesco Geminiani: Sonates pour le violoncelle et basse continue, I–VI

Wolfgang Brunner and Salzburger Hofmusik – Michael Haydn: Die Ährenleserin / Ninfe inbelli

Claudio Astronio and Theresia Orchestra – Joseph Martin Kraus: Overtures

Hermann Max and Das Kleine Konzert+Rheinische Kantorei Soloists – Telemann: A Christmas Oratorio

I think there might have been some error with how Presto Music indexes releases from CPO. In any case, it seems like these recordings mostly came out late last year, but I didn’t see them until this week. That’s probably for the best anyway, since I’m not sure I would have wanted to discuss any of them individually; but as a collection, they make for a nice set of recordings to some widely neglected music.

There’s never been a better time to explore lesser-known works of the eighteenth century. That includes the eighteenth century itself, when the majority of this music would have circulated in manuscript parts, and thus been heard only a couple of times, in select locations. Am I about to tell you that Joseph Martin Kraus (the “Swedish Mozart” apparently?) is going to blow your mind and rocket to the top of your lists? Not really, but it’s entertaining, decent music that—like  Sinfonie Milanese after the French Revolution—helps fill in some of the holes in how music history is commonly taught. (Sturm und Drang in music!) And Michael Haydn, Geminiani, and Telemann have at this point acquired significant fanbases and defenders of their own. Hille Perl’s playing alone makes the Geminiani worth a listen, but the playing on all of these albums is very good.

Franz Benda may have fewer fans. (Don’t confuse him with his brother Georg.) But Evgeny Sviridov must be one of them—his playing on this record is fantastic and enthusiastic, deeply engaged and very sensitive. I mostly knew Sviridov from his stylish and passionate work as concertmaster of Concerto Köln; it’s nice to see him bring the same energy to Benda as he does to Vivaldi. And his playing is certainly an inspiration for me in approaching Bach’s string-type music for the organ.

ITZY – BORN TO BE

NMIXX – “Run for Roses”

You’re a record label executive. What do you do after you’ve come out with one of the biggest girl groups in the world?⁷

You probably got there by adopting a concept, including musical and visual stylings, that appeals to as many people as possible—a “default” or “mainstream” approach. So, if you want to keep producing new artists (pop music, after all, constantly demands novelty), you need to make a change. 

In K-pop, there have been a few solutions to this conundrum. Most infamously, you can just disband your existing group at the peak of their fame and hope that fans will carry over to the new one. So, 2NE1 was disbanded to make way for BLACKPINK; and, on a lesser scale of popularity, CLC was ditched in favor of (G)I-DLE, while GFRIEND was dropped for LE SSERAFIM. If you do this, you have the added advantage of being able to recycle concepts and even shelved songs from the old group.

The other clear option is to make the new group “alternative” in some way. Thus, when Girls’ Generation took over the world with a textbook “innocent”/cute concept, SM Entertainment followed them up with f(x), a group featuring two Chinese members, a tomboyish rapper, “art film” promotional material, unusually good songs often verging on the bizarre, and a concept that might best be described as “getting bullied by the cool girls in high school.” f(x) was everything Girls’ Generation wasn’t: after all, SM had already captured almost the entire audience for an SNSD-type group. The best way (they thought) to get new fans onboard would be to appeal to the kind of person who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to “Gee.” 

JYP Entertainment was presented with almost this exact conundrum after the massive, globe-spanning, smash popularity of TWICE. Like SNSD, TWICE started out with what was then a thoroughly “mainstream” K-pop girl group concept—which is to say, cute stuff. As they aged, it made sense to pivot to a more “mature” image and music. Just like SNSD did.

Just when TWICE was completing this pivot, JYP was ready to debut its new group, ITZY. With both the “cute” and “adult” lanes covered already, ITZY was left with something in between: “teen.” And ITZY was going to be everything TWICE wasn’t. TWICE often attracted criticism for their singing ability, their lipsyncing, and for only having a couple members who can dance well. So naturally ITZY was going to be a group of “all-rounders” who can really dance,⁸ really sing, and preferably do both at the same time:

That may not sound like much of an accomplishment for a pop idol group; if it doesn’t, you should click through and watch the actual choreography. I’m not sure I’d be able to keep my breath doing a dance routine this athletic, let alone do a credible job singing a song like this at the same time. (I can’t do that credible of a job singing this particular song anyway, but you get the point.)

And now that I’ve got your attention, you can hear what kind of music ITZY mostly got early on: brash, loud, noisy, intense, dancy. (“Teen crush.”) I even hear elements of f(x), but the biggest point is: not TWICE, not me.

But JYP still had talented trainees in their pipeline. So with NMIXX, they leaned even harder into the branding of “talented performers,” with extremely complicated choreographies and tough vocals. And as for the music, there was nowhere to go but…weirder:

“Mixxpop” thus became an exercise in smashing together bits of songs, the more clashing the better, for the sake of making something different. This is polarizing enough already—especially since the sections are often of wildly varying quality—but subsequent songs have added elements that have to be weird just for the sake of it. So the lyrics might be downright hilarious (“I’m so freaky fresh fresh like a tank”) or the song might randomly interpolate “Frère Jacques.”

Meanwhile, making NMIXX the “weird group” meant that ITZY had to lean harder into “teen.” And it turns out that “teen-themed” songs are not always a recipe for musical or popular success:

ITZY lost an awful lot of fans with these songs. The actual teens in their audience felt pandered to; everybody else cringed. Their other good releases got lost in the shuffle.

Something had to give. So it’s good to see that JYP has returned to more “serious” music and concepts in their most recent album. “UNTOUCHABLE” may not have quite as fist-pumpingly anthemic of a chorus as “WANNABE,” but that’s an awfully tough comparison; there aren’t many choruses that good period. On its own terms, “UNTOUCHABLE”—along with standout B-side “Dynamite” and solo tracks “Crown On My Head” and “Run Away”—is a great release.

Actually, given JYP’s track record and resources, I honestly think that this course correction was basically predictable. What I wasn’t expecting was for NMIXX also to get a basically “normal” song, and a good one at that. To be sure, there had been signs of a potential pivot, but “Run For Roses” feels like more of a statement. 

Part of the reason to think that NMIXX’s switch-up might be more durable is because “Run for Roses” still retains some elements of how JYP has promoted NMIXX in the past. In particular, the song still mashes together styles in deeply surprising ways. For starters, it’s one of the very few K-pop songs to try on country stylings at all, from the opening guitar riff to the fiddle in the prechorus, to the mandolin (?) in the chorus. But that chorus is also drenched in synthpop backings, with a hint of a “Caribbean” dembow riddim. Obviously, American country has always been more stylistically hybrid than people give it credit for—and especially since the one-two punch of Lil Nas X and Morgen Wallen—but this is still a characteristically MIXX’d up sound. And, as usual, JYP really want you to hear that Lily can sing, although they don’t give her much to do other than wail away in the song’s postchorus. 

The most encouraging thing about these releases is that all signs point to JYP feeling able to continue with these trajectories. After all, maybe now that the hype around TWICE has gone down to a dull roar, JYP will try less hard to pigeonhole ITZY; at this point, they can just give them good music. And the same may even be true of NMIXX. Maybe I’ll finally be able to look forward to their releases now.

Also liked…

Nitai Hershkovits – Call On the Old Wise

Sama’ Abdulhadi – fabric presents Sama’ Abdulhadi

LEE CHANHYUK (AKMU) – “1 TRILLION”

Silvia Frigato and Aldo Orvieto – Fano: Canti

What I’m Reading

Russell Stinson should get a blog. I hope that doesn’t sound condescending or self-serving—I’m definitely not saying that he should do what I’m doing. Instead, all I mean is that so much of what Stinson puts into his new book, The Afterlife of Bach’s Organ Works, is a series of blog-sized observations. 

Again, that’s not meant to diminish those observations: Stinson has spent loads of time in archives and German scholarship, and he has loads of goodies to share with us. I would certainly subscribe to that newsletter. But it comes across a little oddly in the context of a book. Stinson constantly interrupts his writing to give “and that reminds me…” paragraphs about a nice tidbit of reception history or manuscript transmission; the effect is especially funny (or pedantic—Stinson is definitely an organist’s idea of what a musicologist is) when he’s reviewing other people’s work.

Some of those reviews can be pretty bizarre by themselves. Stinson is especially concerned with keeping tabs on who thinks what is “great” music, and he constantly takes his nineteenth-century critics to task for disliking “great” pieces. But at least he’s consistent: he also seems to have a ledger of less “great” pieces, and David Yearsley thus gets a rap on the knuckles for enthusing over the A-minor fugue. I have to take Yearsley’s side here.

It may be a strange and somewhat disjointed read, but there’s a lot in this book. If you’re really invested in what later Germans thought about Bach’s organ music, and if you don’t have the German skills or patience to go through volume 6 of Bach-Dokumente yourself, you’ll find plenty of tidbits here to appreciate. And it’s a smooth and fairly breezy read. This book may not be quite as focused as Stinson’s earlier The Reception of Bach’s Organ Works, but it’s a nice series of addenda and sequels. Looking forward to his blog.

A few others: 

• The New Yorker – How Classical Is Indian Classical Dance?

• The Guardian (Jonathan Wilson) – Franz Beckenbauer was a player out of time who made football evolve with him

• Science– Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon

• Smithsonian Magazine – Descendants of Black Civil War Heroes Wear Their Heritage With Pride

• Rest of World – How Bosun Tijani, CcHub’s co-founder, became Nigeria’s tech minister

Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!

1. Before you write in or comment: his name is spelled both with and without a “c” in contemporary sources.

2. There are longer pieces broken down by verse, section, or variation from earlier in the seventeenth century; Matthias Weckmann’s Es ist das Heil uns kommen her is probably the longest of these, given that one of its verses is over ten minutes long by itself.

3. Most famously Henri Mulet in 1920.

4. Aside from the reports of him adding whole lines while realizing continuo parts, there’s evidence like the extra viola part he wrote for his arrangement of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater.

5. I know that I’m sidestepping a gigantic amount of writing on what a musical work even is here. For what it’s worth, my favorite position in that debate is Gavin Steingo’s.

6. Maybe I don’t recognize the value of restraint.

7. I’m specifying “girl group” here because the dynamics of fandom are gendered pretty strongly, especially (but not only) in K-pop. To follow a traditional oversimplification: boy groups are almost always marketed to create undyingly loyal fans who will purchase albums and merchandise and concert tickets; girl groups are generally marketed to become popular among the general public, who will stream their music and purchase products that are marketed with their faces. (Thus—to keep painting with a broad brush—why pop girl groups like Destiny’s Child tended to have better music than boy groups like *NSYNC.)

8. Or are least willing to put up with intense choreographies; there’s a reason Lia has repeatedly had to take breaks for her health, including for the whole BORN TO BE promotion cycle.