Week 13: 22 January 2024 – Trio Sonata No.3, Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue: Epiphany 2

Plus: The Reneker Organ (part 2), OnlyOneOf's dOpamine hit, Tlingit art, and more!

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. 

As far as I can tell, she has nothing at all to do with Chicago, but I couldn’t resist plugging a musician I found in this week’s highlighted book (“What I’m Reading” below). You can imagine I was intrigued reading the introduction “Haida lawyer, writer, singer, and visual artist Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson,” accompanied by this example of her work:

 What kind of music does she make?

Sonically, Williams-Davidson’s songs aren’t quite as out-there as her art, but it’s still pretty great stuff. Roughly, she goes between folk and blues, with elements drawn from Haida music; you can get a good sense of her singing here. Or for bluesier sounds (blues flute!), maybe “Red: Indigenous Rising.” And it looks like Williams-Davidson has a new album, which isn’t on Spotify yet. If you’re not sick of Christmas music (and other solstice-themed songs), consider giving it a go.

In any case, it’s inspiring to see an artist who’s thoroughly integrated so many different aspects of her creativity: Williams-Davidson’s visual art and storytelling complement her music, which is intertwined with her activism and legal work. A great demonstration of how none of those practices form an “either/or.”

Week 13: 22 January 2024 – Trio Sonata No.3, Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue: Epiphany 2

Please save applause for the end of each set

Prelude and Fugue in A, BWV 536

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Ach Gott, tu dich erbarmen, BWV 1109

Wie nach einer Wasserquelle, BWV 1119

Trio Sonata No. 3 in D minor, BWV 527

i. Andante

ii. Adagio e dolce

iii. Vivace

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Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564

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You don’t hear or hear about the A-major Prelude and Fugue too often. That’s a little surprising, given that it checks a lot of the boxes for fame. It’s full of red meat, by which I mean it’s obviously flashy in all the standard ways: for the hands, the prelude begins with a bang and follows up with plenty of fireworks; and both the prelude and the fugue have vertigo-inducing pedal solos. It’s also a very refreshing and upbeat piece, sticking mostly to major keys (although not so much as to become boring) and perky rhythms. The fugue tune is hummable and dance-y. What gives?

To some extent, I have to just throw up my hands and say that notoriety is random—and not every “big” prelude and fugue can make the A-list. (That’s all I can say, for instance, about the C-minor Prelude and Fugue BWV 549.) And lack of fame can be self-reinforcing: this piece is quite difficult, and its unknown status makes it a bit more uncertain of an investment. Will the labor that goes into learning and performing this piece be rewarded with audience enthusiasm if they don’t know it? (This, I suspect, is what has kept the G-major BWV 550 and the G-minor BWV 535 from getting performed too often as well.) 

The nature of that difficulty might also be a factor. Yes, the fugue is flashy—you’ll hear plenty of jogging (and hopefully not too much pedalboard clacking!)—but a major part of what makes it tricky is the rhythm. Compare the opening of this performance:

To this one:

They almost sound like different pieces! That’s because the opening (“long short short long”) is quite ambiguous by itself: you can group it in a big three (LONG, SHORT-short, LONG) or two small ones (LONG-short, SHORT-long). What’s written is the latter, but a large part of the piece’s fun comes from a kind of will-he-or-won’t-he play with the ambiguity: sometimes, there are ties across barlines that force one voice to do one big three (LONG, LONG, LONG) one short bar later than another big three. Writing “sh” for the short notes, that means you get effects like this:

Or, in staff notation: 

(If you want an alternate explanation, I gave a slightly different description of the same effect in my notes on “Schmücke dich.”) This may look confusing: good; it sounds confusing too, and it’s easy to get tangled up as the player. You often find yourself wanting to give a strong impulse to a certain beat in the pedals—losing the beat with your feet is tantamount to death—but the other parts may rhythmically contradict the pedal part, and they may even contradict it in different ways. As a listener, I find the result groovy and kaleidoscopic; as a player, I have to write in reminders to relax and breathe.

The beauty of all this complexity—aside from the push and pull it makes you feel—is the payoff it enables when the rhythm gets sorted out. The moments of relaxation in this piece feel doubly rewarding after all this hard work, like cycling downhill after a long climb. Enjoy the breeze on the way down.

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Two more short chorale preludes from the Neumeister collection. “Ach Gott” is certainly the more intricate one, including little chorale fugues before several lines of the hymn; and it’s also the one that required teenage Bach to solve the most problems. There’s a reason no other piece by Bach uses this tune (he planned to write one for the Orgelbüchlein but never got to it): it’s weird, evoking multiple keys, scales, and modes. Correspondingly, this piece never quite settles down harmonically. By comparison, the more dance-like “Wie nach” is always quite clear, and thus forms a nicely approachable complement.

In the most basic sense, “andante” means “going.” I think this sense often gets lost when musicians equate it to “walking” (another meaning for this word), i.e. a slowish tempo. That’s especially misleading for Bach. Or any Baroque music—but performers of Handel mostly seem to have gotten past the modern meaning of “andante.” After all, choruses like “For unto us a child is born” from Messiah are marked things like “Andante allegro,” and sound best at a correspondingly zippy tempo. (“Ev’ry valley” is a plain Andante!)

I need to get this out of the way first because so many organists play the third trio sonata as if it had two slow movements. Trust baroque violinists to know better: the first movement of this sonata is as exciting and dynamic as the first movements of any of the other trio sonatas. (And really, it’s quite a bit more dramatic than last week’s Sonata No.1.) Especially fun is the diversity of rhythms in this movement: sixteenths, triplets, quick flourishes, syncopations, and a bassline that alternates between flowing eighths and punctuating quarters. This movement sure does “go.”

Letting the first movement be quick also opens up room for contrast with one of Bach’s most meltingly pretty slow movements. The Adagio, though not without tension and dark moments of its own, mostly adopts the musical language of love duets. And—for those who can remember back a few months—it pretty clearly shows what Bach learned from transcribing Couperin. Which of course means that the last movement can again form a contrast by speaking Italian: a Vivaldian jig that adopts some of the same rhythmic tricks as the first movement.

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Really, “Vivaldian jig” is also about as good a description as I could give for the Fugue from BWV 564. We might as well start with last things first then: this fugue is about as frivolously catchy as Bach gets. And yet it also plays with some of the same rhythmic devices as the A-major fugue; these complications come to a head near the end:

(Good grief!)

Actually, this piece has been playing with rhythmic groupings since the beginning of the Toccata. Since it’s written in a “free” style typical of the stylus phantasticus, the Toccata’s opening is able to group and regroup its torrents of fast notes however it wants. So, first we get almost excessively clear groups of four:

Followed by a devious switch-up into groups of six:

Followed by a return to fours. All of that keeps you on your toes throughout the opening—although the organist is going to be much more on their toes (groan!) in the pedal solo that follows.

Probably even more than the F-major Toccata, this is Bach’s most notorious pedal solo. While that Toccata is relentless and unceasing, this one includes flourishes that were probably unprecedented in Bach’s time:

Think about executing this with your two feet: both the triplets (low-high-low, lower-low-lower) and the thirty-second notes (low-higher-highest, higher-highest-highestest) make you quickly cross one foot behind the other. And they both force you to alternate which foot lands on the strong beats; it’s sort of like trying to march to a waltz. Try alternating which foot you lead with while running—and make sure to send us all a video of the result!

Like the A-minor prelude and fugue, this Toccata follows its “free” section with yet more music in the style of Vivaldi. And this time, for a change, we also get a Vivaldian slow movement—if you were there for either the D-minor concerto or the A-minor, this Adagio may sound strangely familiar. But that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful: a contemplative lament between two raucous pieces of party music.

The Reneker Organ (part 2)

I hope everybody in Chicago has done OK through the recent cold snap. As the brave few who made it to the 15 January concert will remember, Bond Chapel’s heating has not fared well with the cold at all (it’s been roughly 40°F during my practice sessions), and the organ is complaining. But don’t worry: all will be well by Monday!

In any case, maybe it’s a good time to remember some sunnier days, when the reeds were in tune and the windchests on the positive weren’t leaking. So here’s a little audio tour of the Reneker from October, just after it had been tuned. I have short clips illustrating each stop, which I’ll go through along with short explanations. For those who’ve been able to come, hopefully this will illuminate what you’re hearing; for those who can’t, maybe this will help you imagine what it’s been like. You can follow along with the specifications here; for more details on any of the terminology, I highly recommend the Encyclopedia of Organ Stops.

(Please forgive my off-the-cuff improvisation skills: I am not Sophie-Véronique Cauchefer-Choplin.)

We’ll starting with the Rückpositiv: literally “Back-positive,” the organ behind the player. This part:

First the 8’ Gedackt: a stop that sounds “at pitch” (low C sounds like a pipe 8 feet long) that’s been “stopped” by having a cylinder inserted into it. (“Gedackt”=“covered.”) This means that the pipes actually only have to be 4 feet long (saves money!), and has the nice benefit of making them sound flutey and pretty.

Then the Quintadena, another stopped flute, but this time built to emphasize the third partial (“quint”), which makes it sound nice and reedy or stringy. Here it is together with the Gedackt:

Then the 4’ Rohrflöte, a flutey stop with a little “chimney” at the top of each pipe to give it a mellow sound. It sounds an octave higher than I play, thus “4 foot” (half as long is twice as high):

Next, the 4’ Principal, which is the “octave-higher” version of the sound you probably associate most with organs:

The 2’ Doublette goes another octave higher, with the same kind of “principal” sound:

Then the Nazard, which sounds an octave and a fifth higher than where it’s played. This stop is rarely used by itself (never in Bach), so here it is soloed out with first the 8’ Gedackt and the 4’ Flute; then the 4’ Principal; then finally with the 2’ Doublette;

Another “mutation” stop, the Tierce (should be “1 ⅗’” on the specifications) sounds two octaves and a third above where it’s played. This stop is usually used with the Nazard to form a Sesquialtera, or with the Nazard and the two principals to form a Cornet; here are both options:

And now you know what Ravel was imitating in this variation of Boléro (7:44 in this version):

Next the Scharff, a mixture that throws in three higher-pitched sounds at once:

And the Larigot, an even squeakier mutation (two octaves and a fifth up) that can add a little sparkle to a flutier sound:

Finally, rounding out the Positive, we get a reed sound, the Crumhorn. Here it is, first with a little vibrato (“Tremolo,” which makes the wind pressure fluctuate), then without:

Now onto the Hauptwerk (Great). Here’s the basic sound of the organ, the 8’ Principal. I think it’s exceptionally pretty on this instrument:

Next, the 4’ version (Oktave), first by itself and then with the 8’:

And up another octave for the 2’ (successively adding 4’ and 8’). Believe it or not, I used this stop by itself for one piece (the Vivaldi D-minor):

Next, the softer sounds; first the chimney flute (8’ Rohrflöte), then reinforced by the string-y Viola da Gamba:

Then the higher flute (4’ Koppelföte):

And the Quinte, at the same pitch as the Positive’s Nazard, but this time as a loud principal, not a quiet flute:

Now for some fun! A little fanfare on the Trumpet:

And whatever I was trying to do here, played on a “plenum” (all the principal stops with the high-pitched Mixtur added; the low 16’ Bourdon comes in halfway through):

Last but not least, the pedals, which have their own 8’ principal (Oktavebass):

And indeed their own 4’ principal too (Choralbass)—a wonderful solo sound for hymn tunes:

But most of the time, the pedals are undergirded by the 16’ Subbass, which sounds an octave below pitch:

The pedals also get a trumpet at 8’ pitch:

And a bassoon an octave lower; here it is with the mixture (Rauschpfeife) added at the end:

Let’s put it all together! In successively louder iterations of “full organ,” here’s “How lovely shines the morning star”:

What I’m Listening To

Kali Uchis – ORQUÍDEAS

There are a gazillion places where you can read about this album, so there’s no point in me “introducing” it. But I did like it enough to want to recommend it, if with some qualifiers. 

My feelings about Kali Uchis have changed a decent amount over time. I really liked Isolation when it came out, and I still think it’s a very good example of what it does. But my appetite for somewhat dreary, tranquilized R&B has gone way down in the meantime. That’s partly because pop music in general has gotten a lot drearier and more tranquilized. More importantly, though, I think it’s because I started listening to more global indie and R&B. Practically every release you’ll see featured on a site like Korean Indie is similarly hypercompetent, rather uninteresting R&B with all the sharp edges sanded off.

So I’ve vibed less and less with Kali Uchis’s new releases. Luckily, this one bucks the trend by leaning hard into Uchis’s “Colombia” side. I definitely like the effect of the reggaeton, merengue, salsa, etc. elements that dominate the second (much stronger) half of this album; the eclectic mix can produce some pretty great results, like the “Get Ur Freak On”-esque “Muñekita.”

But I’m not sure that this album really entails a break with her “Virginia” side; certainly not as much as all those articles might make it sound. Forget about the more obviously “Virginia” first half; as exemplars of their genres themselves, the songs from the second half are all just a bit disappointing. They’re still often reverbed/washed out, with Uchis typically holding back vocally. Give us the goods! And who asked for a Peso Pluma synthpop song? Even if the result is pretty good by itself (and certainly very creative), I don’t think this is exactly using him to optimum effect.

Maybe the nice way to put it would be: this is a fantastic “hipster pop” album, not least because of its Latin influences. I really like it and I hope Uchis keeps going in this direction (and I definitely enjoy it more than her previous music, which is saying something). But I can’t escape the nagging suspicion that this may not quite be the album people have said it is.

Sofia Diniz and Fernando Miguel Jaloto – L’echo du Danube

“Finally!” I can hear you all shouting. “A complete recording of Johann Schenk’s Echo du Danube! The neglected masterpiece of the viol repertoire!”

No? Fair enough; I won’t overhype this music, which is good but maybe not spectacular. But here are some reasons to care:

• Find out what Dutch composers were up to in the Baroque era!

• Hear some of the few major pieces for unaccompanied viol! 

• Sofia Diniz gives excellent performances of these pieces; her sound is wonderful!

pinponpanpon – PinPonPeaceProject

未来少女 薄荷水晶 – babyMINT Loading... FUN!

I’m not an expert in the current state of J-pop or Mandopop; for that, you should seek out the excellent

Patrick St. Michel

and Michael Hong (

Mando Gap

), who have great writeups on pinponpanpon and babyMINT respectively. But I still think it’s interesting to discuss these two albums together (they came out a day apart), since they share a lot of musical DNA. 

To me (in my ignorance), pinponpanpon sounds like the latest version of the vaguely insane, highly autotuned, chiptune-ified strand of J-pop that fed into hyperpop.¹ But everything here has been turned up to 11, not least thanks to the influence of hyperpop itself (as St. Michel points out). This music is a wacky good time; the lyrics doubly so.

babyMINT, I think, is something more than that. For sure, it reflects some of the same TikTok-y, memeified, deep fried insanity:

And indeed, “Hellokittybalahcurrihellokitty美味しい” begins in Japanese (if the title wasn’t a hint), and it isn’t so far off from the soundworld of pinponpanpon. That by itself would already be notable: I (again in my ignorance) don’t know too much other mandopop that tries this hard to evoke J-pop. But even wilder are songs like [searches for Insert Special Characters] “ICKY! °( ╭╮ )°.” Forget its name: this is a K-pop song, and a pretty up-to-date one at that.² The singing, beats, tunes, harmonies, everything that’s worked in South Korea is successfully imported here—and they can also do a fantastic Yoasobi impression in “2023: BBMeme ODYSSEY.”

It’s absolutely wild to hear this whirlwind of styles from the successor group to S.H.E. And the results are sometimes even weirdly good music by themselves. If you’re not careful, you may end up chanting “Hellokittybalahcurrihellokitty美味しい” yourself. 

OnlyOneOf – Things I Can't Say LOve

Before going too far off the rails, maybe it’s good to say something about the music? I really like elements of OnlyOneOf’s sound. Their “art pop” (no, really, art pop) style invariably produces fantastic, captivating backing tracks, full of off-the-wall sounds, harmonies, and rhythmic layerings. They really run with some of the noisier and more experimental sounds tried on by Stray Kids and NCT; like so many groups with Jaden Jeong at the helm, what they do is always at least intriguing. And when they put it all together in “libidO,” you get a stupidly groovy, ear-catching song.

“dOpamine” gets pretty close to that for me, especially in its instrumentals. It’s certainly a good pump-up song, with a propulsive beat and some nice power in the vocals. Still, the topline writing is pretty lacking for me—I don’t know if I really gravitate toward the tune in any OOO song—and without the cronch and squelch of the “libidO” synths, it’s hard for the chorus to pull me in to quite the same extent. Good song, but I bet they can do better again.

All that said, if you actually clicked through on any of those music video links, you probably have a lot of questions, and none of them about the music. Surely the most famous, or notorious thing about OOO is their “concept”: as Wikipedia translates it, the initial branding was “ubersexual,” and even their tamest music videos (like “dOpamine”) put Taemin’s recent photos to shame. Crotch grabs, while of course common in Western pop music performance, are a pretty bold statement in K-pop. Doubly so when the choreography involves grabbing your groupmate’s crotch. 

To be more direct, OOO’s videos and choreographies are often, to put it as neutrally as possible, “gay-themed.” And practically anything written about them in English (e.g. SeoulBeats’s review of this album) will begin by either praising OOO for queer representation or lambasting them for queerbaiting. (Let’s be charitable and assume that the latter are talking about OOO as “fictional personas” and not overextending this term to refer to the idols themselves.)

I think that both of these perspectives may be missing the bigger picture. To be clear, if it turns out that [some of] the OOO members are in fact queer and wanted to use the concept to express themselves, more power to them. And of course it would be exceedingly hard for any of them to come out in South Korea as it currently is; it would be a commercial death blow. (Or at least every K-pop agency seems to think so, given the miniscule number of idols who have actually come out.)

That commercial pressure to keep idols in the closet might already be a hint that 8D entertainment may not simply be trying to hint that [some of] OOO is gay. Besides, considering things from a marketing perspective already offers another option: OOO isn’t necessarily targeting gay listener at all. Or if it is, they’re a side interest, not the main target. 

Consider slash fic: a large number of primarily straight women produce a huge corpus of fanfic for each other featuring romance between their favorite male characters. Or the widespread consumption of gay pornography by straight women. And the reverse (men seeking out and producing girl-on-girl content) is equally well-known. And there are certainly fairly notorious examples (if less explicit than OOO’s videos) in K-pop:

(Sorry to make everything about Chuu again, but LOONA was, after all, directed by the same Jaden Jeong who came up with OOO’s concept.) The point being that, while it’s certainly possible that the more gay-coded idols (like Moonbyul and Amber) may actually be gay (Amber’s been evading the question for fifteen years), it’s just as likely that they were encouraged to go with their particular styles in order to appeal to straight women and men who happen to be looking for an “alternative” idol.³

Obviously that’s all very cynical, and I don’t mean to take anything away from anybody who sees themselves represented in any of this. But I’m also sympathetic, to draw an analogy, to Arwa Mahdawi’s “Why obsess over Taylor Swift’s sexuality when there are more openly queer musicians than ever?” Just as with Taylor Swift’s lyrics and vague hints, most of the “representation” (genuine or not) in K-pop is at its core pure marketing; and queer listeners are, I think, not even necessarily the primary target.

No harm, or course, in fangirling and daydreaming; most (?) queer K-pop fans, like the ever-popular “kpop moments that could kill a sapphic,” don’t discriminate between straight-coded and gay-coded idols. But getting too invested in marketing concepts like OOO’s is probably, in the end, a recipe for disappointment.

Also liked…

Aron and the Jeri-Jeri Band – Dama Bëgga Ñibi

Miraidempa – init

Bill Ryder-Jones – lechyd Da

Fei – TAKE A POSE

Hrdza – Čo mi je, to mi je

What I’m Reading

I picked up Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast while in Sitka last year for the Uncommon Music Festival; I had a head full of Boas from a paper presentation, and was excited to see some new perspectives on Tlingit, Haida, and Salish art. Obviously I got a little derailed since then, but I did finally get the chance to get through it this week.

As Aldona Jonaitis points out in her afterword, most of the essays in this collection don’t really follow the Boasian mold (by which I actually mean formalist art criticism, not anthropology), and that’s probably for the best. Really, there isn’t a particularly strong throughline in either method or subject matter, even if multiple of the essays do address themselves toward “unsettling” (i.e. decolonizing).

Instead, what this book offers is a really great sampler of up-to-date perspectives on a goodly array of topics in Northwest Coast art. So you get thorough, well-written appreciations of individuals like Jim Schoppert (wow!), Ellen Neel, and Louis Shotridge. You learn about fascinating and hilarious stories like the William Seward shame pole rebuilt as a countermonument to his 150th anniversary bronze statue. Some chapters cover histories of materials like argillite; others address “contextual” factors like the role of art in society, the role of women in artistic production, and cosmological or totemic significance of objects. Multiple articles survey recent exhibitions and other artistic activity; there are several chapters by artists, and a nice selection of poems.

I would recommend the book for all of these, for its reproductions of some pretty stunning objects (you saw one at the top of this post!), and for Jonaitis’s excellent survey of the literature on Northwest Coast art. But most of all, I’d recommend it for the final main chapter, “Tlingit Art” by (friend of the Uncommon Music Festival) Ishmael Hope. Hope, too, is a poet, and his writing is gorgeous; but even more impressive is how he synthesizes history, cosmology, language, and practically everything else into a holistic understanding of Tlingit art. I’ll be returning to this essay, and I hope you do too.

A few others: 

• Phys.org – When newspapers close, nonprofit executive salaries go up. Way up

• The Kitchn – Why Are Florida Grocery Stores Filled with California Oranges?

• Hell Gate – People Hated Pitchfork Because It Mattered

• The Chicago Maroon – West Virginia Chicago is happening to you. The fight for the modern university.

• The Ringer – How MLB Starting Pitcher Usage Killed Off the “Innings Eater”

• Nunatsiaq – ‘Historic moment’: Nunavut signs devolution agreement with Canada

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

1. Alternatively, to me, it almost sounds like a hyperactive version of the “Japan” in the heads of the White dudes who came up with Kero Kero Bonito.

2. “Ocean Bomb” also lives in the post-NewJeans world, as Hong points out.

3. Another parallel might be how “cutesy” concepts in K-pop and J-pop may in fact appeal to some tween girls, but mostly as a side effect of being directed for creeps. There’s a reason I link to audio or live stages instead of music videos for a lot of songs.