Week 28: 13 May 2024 – G-major Prelude and Fugue and Easter 7
Plus: What I've Learned, 2NE1 15 years on, Indigenous Music in North America and more!
A logistical note that I’ll be repeating for the next few weeks: in order to round out the count of recitals at 30, there is going to be one “extra” concert on Wednesday 22 May, same time, same place. There’ll be a reception afterward—see you all there!
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.
To the anonymous reader who filled out my form exclusively (!) to complain about this section—this one’s for you!
I’ve spent much of this week enjoying Craig Harris’s Rise Up! Indigenous Music in North America, a delightful, thought-provoking, and very uneven book. Rise Up! is both more and less than the survey its subtitle suggests. “More” because Harris correctly recognizes that it’s unwise to put strict boundaries around the idea of “music” and what it means, or who counts as a “musician,” and therefore includes a goodly amount of material on history, cosmology, sociology, foodways, and other kinds of “context.” He also doesn’t try too hard to legislate about what counts as “indigenous music,” in terms of both the Who and the What. There’s no restriction to Traditional Music, or even stuff that would necessarily be called World Music. Peter LaFarge is in, along with Buffy Sainte-Marie (although the book was released before her controversy blew up last year); and there’s even a whole chapter devoted to White anthropologists and other figures who played a role in documenting and disseminating Indigenous musics in the early part of the twentieth century.1
That’s all on the side of “more,” of inclusion. It would be petty to try to harp too hard on the “less,” since it would be impossible to even try to be comprehensive in a book like this. Still, I think it’s fair to point out that this is almost entirely a book about Anglophone North America: Mexico only shows up on the periphery, and there’s certainly no attempt to include Nahua or Maya or Zapotec musics. For that matter, the emphasis is palpably placed on U.S. musicians, and even more specifically on the Lower 48; no Hawaiians, and (surprisingly, given their prolific, excellent, and reasonably well-known musical production) no Native Alaskan musicians. Even if the book does a good job of avoiding the sometime tendency to make “Indigenous culture” mostly about the Diné and Lakota, it’s hard not to long for what’s left out. A decent number of the musicians I’ve plugged here are featured or make appearances (I wish Frank Waln had gotten more than a guest feature!), but Chicago makes relatively few appearances in the book. In sum—and in case it wasn’t blindingly obvious: this is an exceedingly rich musical landscape, and 300 pages can’t even scratch the surface.
Above, I credited Harris with (or blamed him for) what’s in this book, but that’s not really a fair representation of its content. Aside from the brief opening chapters—on Indigenous musicians who helped shape America’s “mainstream” musical forms, on those anthropologists, and on the histories of assimilationism and Native American stereotypes—the book consists almost entirely of autobiographical reflections from Native musicians. These are necessarily uneven. I think it’s to his credit that Harris doesn’t appear to have made much if any editorial intervention, which leaves the musicians free to speak about whatever matters to them. But of course the things that matter to them vary massively, so that some people give relatively straightforward career surveys, while others go into deep histories of cultural forms, and still others focus on behind-the-music autobiography.
Most of the joy of this book (for me at least) comes in these personal stories. Calvin Standing Bear’s Sun Dance story, one of the longest in the book, is wide-ranging and grippingly told. (His singing and flute playing is wonderful.) It was certainly, um, intriguing to read about Diné-adopted Korean singer Callie Bennett, and her path to singing Navajo gospel and Christian rock. (Between the quotation from her parents that her adoption meant “You had no people or country. [After] we took you in…you are Navajo” and the fact that her sister is apparently named “China,” I have so many more questions, and I’m afraid to know the answers to almost any of them.) And in general, these narratives testify to the broad range of experiences that inform the variety of Native music-making in the states.
On the other hand, structuring almost the entire book around a parade of individuals does have its limitations. Tautologically, it means that the content is going to be, well, a series of individual stories, and even where they tie into broader themes (they always do), they still mostly tell us about music where it makes sense to single out individual “creators.” (Or where such a creative structure has been imposed on the music.) The larger organization of the book might also play into this. The main chapters are about instruments (flutes and drums and their players) and then genres: country/bluegrass and other “roots” music, then rock, reggae, and classical.2 A different kind of thematic organization might have encouraged different ways of thinking about music-making and the role individuals play in it.
I usually use this section to plug cool music that I’ve been hearing—getting even a handful of new listeners to these musicians is a much better use of everybody’s time than a rote land acknowledgment by itself. So let me not make this week an exception. Even if there’s not very much Chicago in Harris’s book, it does feature several excellent Anishinaabe musicians. I especially enjoyed getting to know Wisconsinite Ojibwe songwriter Bobby Bullet’s songs. He does a great version of old-fashioned country-folk—in the book, he mentions Hank Williams and Guy Clark as major influences—and has a real knack for storytelling with songs. That goes both for autobiographical material like “Lac du Flambeau Reservation” or “Strawberry Island” and historical tales like “Shades of Mississippi,” an absolutely searing ballad about the Fish Wars. He really does have the perfect voice for this kind of music, with his snarl matching both the fuzz and pitch bends of his guitars and the trenchant lyrics of the songs. If it’s true that he once called his group “Custer’s Last Band,” that’s pretty great too.
Week 28: 13 May 2024 – G-major Prelude and Fugue and Easter 7
Please save applause for the end of each set
Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend, BWV 632
Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, BWV 633
Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, BWV 706
O Herre Gott, dein göttlich Wort, BWV 1110
Nun danket alle Gott, BWV 657
Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend, BWV 709
Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend, BWV 655
Trio in C minor (after Johann Friedrich Fasch), BWV 585
i. Adagio
ii. Allegro
Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, BWV 754
Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, BWV 730
Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, BWV 731
Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend, BWV 726
Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 541
Raise your hand if you had “Liebster Jesu” on your bingo card as one of Bach’s favorite chorale tunes. I’m actually not even playing every Bach setting of it; pace Peter Williams, BWV 634 looks for all the world like an earlier version of BWV 633 (unaccountably, the BWV catalog numbers these two pieces backward from their order in the Orgelbüchlein), although it’s somewhat odd that Bach would have left two pages blank in the manuscript for such a short tune. But even ditching BWV 634 leaves us with an impressive number of chorales on this tune.
Even more remarkably, Bach’s “Liebster Jesu” settings are all quite similar. That’s not intended as a compliment (a very backhanded one at that), but rather to point out something that’s literally worth remarking. With other chorale tunes, Bach usually seems to have had some desire to change things up, to try a new approach. But apparently he couldn’t shake one particular approach to “Liebster Jesu.” I’ve tried my best to space them out to avoid fatigue.
Basically all of the “Liebster Jesu” settings are “ornamented chorales,” slowish hymn settings with some decoration in the tune, the inner voices, or both. To jump ahead a bit, BWV 730 and 731 are both exactly in this vein, with the tune on top (lavishly ornamented in the latter) and gorgeous harmonies underneath; think “O Mensch bewein” or “Das alte Jahr.” (And to skip to our “other” tune for this week, the BWV 709 “Herr Jesu Christ” is also quite similar, and even in the same key.) BWV 706 keeps the tune plainer, instead letting the inner voices do the moving, before repeating the tune for a completely straight-ahead hymn harmonization. (In other words: BWV 706 is two chorales in one.) BWV 633, the Orgelbüchlein setting, is probably the most distinctive of these, since it plays the tune in canon at the fifth. But if you didn’t know that, you might just think it’s a slightly harmonically strange cousin of BWV 706—hopefully playing them consecutively points up the contrast.
Leaving BWV 754 aside for the moment (you’ll see why soon!), I have to say that even these pieces can all kind of blend into one another. BWV 730 and 731 are in the same key (G major) and use a lot of the same harmonic tricks; BWV 706, 633, and 634 are also all in the same key (A major). The similarities aren’t quite as stark as between the two Orgelbüchlein chorales, but these are certainly cases where you can almost hear the various pieces as different “realizations” of an underlying template. Again: this is unusual. “Liebster Jesu” must have been special to Bach (or useful as a teaching tool) for him to actually put all of these pieces, with differences more of nuance than of conception, to paper.
“Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend” isn’t far behind “Liebster Jesu” in terms of organ settings, although that’s for liturgical reasons in this case: like “Allein Gott,” this tune was sung every single Sunday (in this case right before the sermon). Also like “Allein Gott” (and unlike “Liebster Jesu”), these four settings couldn’t be more different, presumably reflecting the overexposure or even boredom of hearing and playing the same hymn every week. I’ll save the others settings for later, but—in this first set, we get BWV 632, as classic an Orgelbüchlein chorale as there is. Tune on top in quarter notes, intermittent bass in eighths, and the other two voices exchanging sixteenth-note figures in the middle. The tune itself is a little square, so the piece’s combination of somewhat plain figuration and rhythmic bombast can sound almost a bit funny to me. Still, it’s a fun piece and a nice change of pace from “Liebster Jesu”-world. And for that matter, so is the Neumeister chorale “O Herre Gott,” a 9/8 jig that breezes through the tune without much fuss.
Structurally, “Nun danket alle Gott” is one of the most straightforward of the “Great Eighteen” chorales. In a somewhat old-fashioned way, it goes through each phrase of the tune using Vorimitation: there’s a little fugato where each part plays that phrase and then wanders off into a string of sixteenth notes, before the treble comes in and sings out the tune in long notes. Each phrase rounds off and the texture clears (partially or completely) before the next strain comes in. The result should sound overly cut-and-dried, stodgy, or sectional. But it’s the exact opposite: grand and even propulsive, the piece has an impressive sense of forward momentum. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d chalk that success up to a combination of careful harmonic planning (alternating between weaker and stronger final cadences) and addictive rhythmic figuration. When played with sufficient bounce, it has some of the same instrumental character as the chorales in Bach’s early “sacred concerto-style” cantatas, e.g. Christ lag BWV 4 and Gottes Zeit BWV 106.
I said last week that we were done with trio sonatas but I didn’t say anything about trios more broadly. The “Great Eighteen” “Herr Jesu Christ” is almost an identical twin of the third “Great Eighteen” “Allein Gott,” which is to say that it’s a very string-y trio indeed: light, breezy, fun, and full of delightful play between the parts. It’s a bit shorter and less involved, but this piece even has exactly the same plot twist as that “Allein Gott” setting: it hides the tune until the very end, when the pedals bring it in in long notes. You have to wonder if his congregants got wise to the trick after the first time.
And speaking of trios. I contemplated playing a trick on you all and just advertising BWV 585 as a half-trio sonata by J.S. Bach. It’s possible to tell the difference, but it’s not super easy. Fasch, after all, was a major composer in his time, one who probably would have gotten Bach’s Leipzig position if he hadn’t withdrawn his application; he also trained his son Carl Friedrich Christian, who was Berlin’s most important composer in the second half of the 18th century, and a major early influence on both Beethoven and the Mendelssohn siblings.
There’s no need to be relativist or disingenuously positive about now-obscure contemporaries of Bach and Handel. A lot of the time, listening to their music, you can pretty much tell why nobody cares anymore. I spend a little bit too much of my time trying to sift through this stuff; having wasted an hour this past week listening in vain for anything at all fun or interesting in a new disk of Heinichen cantatas, I can confirm yet again that history got this one right. And Heinichen was more important than Fasch.3
That’s not to say there isn’t excellent music by these composers. It would be kind of shocking if there weren’t, considering that Heinichen was also more important than Bach while he was alive. (He died young, 21 years before Bach.) Reinhard Goebel has dug up some Heinichen and Fasch gems. Their music is identifiably different from Bach or Handel, and never quite “astonishing,” but these were serious composers who had a lot of well-honed musical tools at their disposal. Their fame in their lifetime was perfectly justified.
What’s the difference between those unlistenable cantatas and the best of Heinichen’s output? Crudely, I think a lot of it boils down to the quality of the musical ideas. A by-the-numbers piece by Telemann or Quantz will be perfectly grammatical but have absolutely nothing distinctive about it, nothing that makes you want to pay any attention. (Telemann, to his credit, has a higher hit rate than any of these guys, although he was of course a volume shooter.) But when they’re on, they lead off with something that has some kind of shape, a musical idea with an interesting contour, nice rhythmic variety, a satisfying or surprising continuation, judicious harmonic variety, or—preferrably—multiple or all of these factors. It’s all about the hooks, man.
And I think that’s what Fasch did pretty well in these sonata movements; they’re certainly well above his average. I suspect the quality of the inventio, the ideas, is what drew Bach (or whichever Bach student du jour) to make this arrangement. The interchange between the two violin parts isn’t nearly as dense as in a Bach trio, and the harmonic pacing isn’t quite as precisely calibrated; but that’s true for a lot of Handel too and nobody minds that at all. (Or maybe they do, but I don’t make a habit of talking to anybody quite that stodgy.) There are a few awkward moments, where a phrase turns around a bit too suddenly or the counterpoint falls apart a bit, but that’s true of a decent number of Bach cantata movements. Fasch isn’t Bach (or even Telemann), but, at his best, he could write pieces good enough for Bach to want to make them his own.
If you were keeping tabs up above, you may have noticed that I left out BWV 754 from my “Liebster Jesu” discussion. Well, listen to it and find out why:
There’s absolutely no way this piece is by Bach. We don’t have a clue who actually wrote it, and Bach’s name is on a couple of sources, but there’s no organ piece by him that’s quite this simplistic, or that has quite the cringing awkwardness of those disastrous leaps in the second half. I suspect that we may never know who wrote this piece, because the composer never became famous.
So why play it? Honestly, it’s kind of charming, in an amateurish way! The composer of this piece had a good handle on how to write smooth, sweet trio textures using standard galant harmonic progressions, and they occasionally had a nicely snappy rhythmic sense. I’m not even sure we can confidently say that this piece is necessarily by a Bach student, but you’re never going to hear it outside of a context like this. For many spurious Bach chorales, I’m fine leaving them off anyway (i.e. ensuring that most of you will simply never hear them at all), but this one has just enough juice to be worth a spin. Plus, it’s completely different from all the other “Liebster Jesu” chorales.
Also a nice change of pace is our final “Herr Jesu Christ” setting, yet another of those loud and harmonically obnoxious hymn settings with flashy interludes that must have annoyed the Arnstadt consistory so much. This one has some particularly gruesome chords near the end:
Your eyes are not deceiving you: that last chord includes both a B-flat and a B-sharp at the same time. It sounds even crazier than it looks.
Finally, a piece I’ve been teasing since the literal beginning of this series. I didn’t intentionally make the two G-major preludes and fugues my bookends for the genre (there are still fugues to come but no preludes), but hey, let’s pretend I did.
Let me reprint the check I made out in that first program note, before cashing it in more fully:
BWV 541 gets all the press (and, as I remember it, is seemingly ubiquitous on competition programs among advanced high school organists), while I’m not sure I’ve ever seen BWV 550 programmed. And I get it: BWV 541 has a good story attached to it, and it’s in a refreshing Vivaldian concerto style.
So, let’s get on with the “good story” and the “concerto style” bits. (No further comment on “advanced high school organists.”)
The story: it’s 1733 and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach is auditioning to be the organist at Dresden’s Sophienkirche. He has to show off two things: his overwhelming command of organ technique, especially the pedals, and his ability to fit into the up-to-date (Italian) style popular at the Saxon court. So he asks his father (or maybe Dad insists—it wouldn’t be unlike him) for an audition piece that can display both. Sebastian Bach obliges, and sends him away with this piece, written out on paper otherwise only known from letters sent between Bach family members. W.F. Bach passes his audition and keeps the manuscript in his possession for the rest of his life.
We can’t be quite sure that this is what happened (there aren’t surviving “audition recital” programs or letters to substantiate it), but the evidence is pretty convincing. And it certainly explains the style of this piece. Aside from Bach’s actual concerto arrangements, this is his most direct evocation of Vivaldian orchestral style. And he wrote one heck of a showy pedal part for it.
The orchestral imitations start at the very beginning, with an opening gesture about as famous as any in Bach’s organ works:
This is really just a violin solo. If you mentally transpose up an octave (which would match what Bach does in arrangements like the “Grosso Mogul” concerto), then you can even hear the open D string resonating in measures 4–6. And what happens next is an absolute trip: figuration that cuts against the meter in two completely opposite ways. We’re in 3/4, three quarter notes per measure, but starting in measure 7, the figures group naturally into sets of half notes, the big accents now coming 50% faster. And then he kicks the metrical complexity up five or six more notches with giddily ascending arpeggios that group into dotted eighth notes, a rhythmic value not commensurate with the preceding half notes (⅜ of their value), and representing something like a “double reverse hemiola” of the overall meter: he divides a measure of three beats into four equal parts. Combined with the line’s upward sweep, this metrical chaos feels something like being sucked up by a musical tornado.
Vivaldi does a lot of crazy things in his opening violin solos, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him do that. Instead, it sounds to me more like the kind of crazy gear-shifting you can hear in stylus phantasticus pieces like the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue. (I illustrated the shifts between groups of four and six there.) To be sure, the metrical context is very different: in that Toccata and pieces like it, there’s basically no steady sense of pulse, which is part of what enables chaotic switch-ups like that. In the G-major Prelude, by contrast, the beat is as well-established as it could be (not least by those repeated “open Ds” I mentioned above). So, while you could describe this passage as something like “Bach taking ideas from old-style German organ writing and translating them into modern Italian style”—and you’d be essentially right!—the effect of this translation is far more drastic than it sounds. I can’t think of another composer whose metrical play is this destabilizing until the Schumanns.
I guess I should say something about the rest of the prelude too. In terms of figuration, I think it’s also possible to see writing like this as a marriage between German organ style and Italian string writing:
Those repeated notes are not exactly native to the organ, but the alternating-toes pedal writing absolutely is, and is an excellent way to, say, give your son a way to show off how fast his feet can play. That said, the rest of this piece’s musical language—its harmonies, its motives, its structure—are almost entirely Italian. It’s fun.
Unusually, that goes for the fugue as well. If you squint, you can see in this fugue subject a reminiscence of the kind of “repeated notes in the pedals” writing that makes the D-minor concerto transcription such nightmare fuel:
And certainly the harmonic language of this fugue is pure Vivaldi. Albeit more intense and crunchy than what we get in the prelude. The last page of this fugue is spectacularly dramatic, first screeching its way to a halt in the parallel minor:
And then (starting in the last two measures above), letting the fugue subject pile up on itself in stretto, all accompanied by tightly-wound, even claustrophobic sixteenth-note figuration:
Bach really empties his bag of tricks on this page, manipulating every musical parameter at once to make for the most exciting conclusion he can. (Just look at the range the pedals have to cover in mm. 77–78!) Regardless of how he may have failed Wilhelm Friedemann otherwise, this fugue was a pretty good piece of parenting.
What I’ve Learned
A reminder about last week’s Google Form: make your voice heard!
There’s a really boring version of this post where I talk about how much my organ technique improved from the discipline of practicing for a new recital program every week, how I got much better at sightreading counterpoint (shocking, I know), how I significantly improved on fingerings and pedallings for pieces I learned in high school and undergrad, how I arrived at fresh interpretations of pieces like the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, how really nailing down all three of the Bach/Vivaldi arrangements helped me play pop song transcriptions, or how I finally feel truly comfortable with the Reneker organ. I guess I just gave you the boring version anyway, or a sketch of it (I am fond of paralepsis, sorry!), but I think we can do better.
I could also write a version all about, well, the actual process of writing this blog, which has undoubtedly sharpened my ability to write about music. It’s been a delightful challenge to take pieces I really like, isolate the moments that really make them shine, and try to come up with both an explanation for why they work so well, and some language to describe how they feel when done right. That’s sort of the goal of music analysis in general, but usually scholarly writing (justifiably) has broader goals than just saying “man, this piece…this part rocks, let me try to tell you why.”4 That goes for all the kinds of music I’ve been writing about; honestly, finally going through my accumulated list of Chicago-adjacent Native music has probably been the most rewarding part of the whole series. (Have you listened to Aysanabee yet??)
But you’re probably waiting to hear what I learned about, well, Bach. I have to admit that that also mostly came through writing (and reading—I didn’t make any effort to be comprehensive, but I did take my first prolonged dip in Bach scholarship since high school for this series). In trying to sum up what works in Bach—why this series is worth doing at all, really—there were a couple of surprises, and I would definitely say that I learned a few things. About Bach, or maybe about myself; it’s hard to say.
Going in, I knew there were a few themes I was going to harp on. My list of absolute favorite Bach organ pieces has basically not changed at all since around 2014, and it was pretty clear to me what makes those pieces sing. If you’ve been reading along, including this week, you’re probably ready to name one of the big “things Jacob likes”: in a word, Vivaldi. Sure, cool stylus phantasticus surprises are fun too, and it’s definitely true that Bach’s prettiest chorales have nothing to do with Italy. But the rhythmic grooves and harmonic progressions that animate the Trio Sonatas, the best Preludes and Fugues, and (duh) the Concertos, are all borrowed tools. I have long thought that these pieces are terrifically underplayed (even the most famous of them), and they have always gotten me the best audience responses, including during this series. Bach would still be a pretty great composer without having learned Italian, but I doubt I would have been compelled to do this series in that universe.
Another theme brought up by the G-major Prelude: I knew that I appreciated the metrical complexity of pieces like “Schmücke dich,” the A-major fugue, and the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, but I didn’t expect it to crop up quite as often as it did in my notes. I honestly think that this kind of play with meter—especially Bach’s love of overlapping hemiolas and his habit of cutting triple-time measures in half—is a generally underexposed feature of his style, and not sufficiently brought out in most performances, regardless of instrument (including singers and choir directors).5 I suppose that’s an avenue for future research.
But really, what I’ve landed on for “what makes Bach work” is, well, the litany of “what makes a good [Baroque] musical idea” I gave in the little excursus on Fasch above. (“Oh, he actually wants us to read all that stuff about Fasch??”) I’m not going to repeat myself—I have faith in your ability to scroll up—but, essentially, I do think it kind of just boils down to having a profusion of good musical ideas (or weeding out most of the blah ones) and knowing what to do with them. In the grand scheme of things, Bach is not an exception; his music works for the same reason any good music works. Great hooks and all that Italianate rhythmic action and manipulation of harmony: when it’s good, this music is just satisfying.
I also think that’s the biggest part of the appeal for what I increasingly think is the most overhyped part of Bach’s style: his use of strict counterpoint. A piece like the Canonic Variations is cool in a kind of avant-garde way, but it’s mostly cool because it refuses to sound good in the ways Bach’s music (or Fasch’s for that matter) normally tries to. The counterpoint may be ideologically associated with that—both for Bach and for us—but it’s not why the piece sounds so weird. In other words, I don’t think there are that many people who like even a piece like the Canonic Variations for the counterpoint per se.
Let’s be real: strict counterpoint in general is overrated. In particular, it’s just not that hard to write. Lest I sound condescending or gatekeep-y with a statement like that, let me add that canons and complex fugues are really just a matter of working out (or more likely learning) a bunch of relatively simple rules that tell you what you can do. There’s a reason that 16th-century musicians could improvise canons and fugues (and, as Peter Schubert and Julie Cumming have shown, you can teach modern musicians to do the same pretty easily). You just need a table like this:
I used to think Donald Francis Tovey was just showing off when he called technical showpieces like the inversion fugues in the Art of Fugue “straightforward.” But I now actually think he was trying to demystify a little bit, to pierce the veil. There’s a reason that the majority of composers of really arcane strict counterpoint have always historically been hobbyists. (That includes in Bach’s day, when he joined the counterpoint club of Lorenz Christoph Mizler, an enthusiastic amateur.) It’s musical Sudoku.
Plus, the musical results of the most complicated canons are incredibly boring. This is the canon Bach put on his own self-portrait, BWV 1076:
And here’s the almost laughably simplistic 8-part canon BWV 1072:
Nobody wants to listen to or perform this music; you can barely even buy a score of these pieces. (I ended up getting photocopies of them bound at Kinkos when I was rounding out my complete set of Bach sheet music.)
On the other hand, I do really love a lot of Bach fugues, and of course their counterpoint is a big part of what makes the music work. I don’t want to deny that counterpoint is important for Bach. But I think that its impact is most often a rhythmic effect: when a fugue subject or imitative figure comes in, it gets our attention and thus creates a big accent. Manipulating the density and spacing of those accents is what makes Bach fugues (and Orgelbüchlein preludes) so fun. We saw that in the G-major fugue above, but it’s especially true in choral music, where those entrances are connected to repetitions of the words, to a literal clamor of voices (start at 2:17):
I would hazard that, for most listeners, and certainly for myself, it doesn’t particularly matter that this is actually in strict counterpoint (although it’s definitely more satisfying for the players and singers that way). Instead, it’s this cascade of overlapping entrances that really makes the chorus rock.
It’s that part—writing a fugue that’s actually engaging—that definitely is hard, for all the same reasons that writing good hooks in general is hard (and with the added constraints of what works for a fugue subject). Bach was unquestionably better than any composer since Josquin des Prez at writing contrapuntal music that’s also memorable and satisfying, and to the extent that you like those cool rhythmic effects that strict counterpoint makes possible, you’ll think their music is pretty great.
I suppose that all gets back around to a question I’ve dodged since the FAQ I posted even before this series began. “Why Bach?” Suffice it to say I don’t really care about the purported “intellectual rigor” of his music, although I do think his music is (mostly) pretty great, including for the reasons laid out above.
Let me add one final reason to that list. I’m not sure it makes Bach “great,” but it certainly adds to the appeal of doing a series like this, and it’s good for the fans: Bach wrote a lot. This is not news to anyone; and it’s true that his surviving output is dwarfed by Telemann’s. But especially when it comes to keyboard instruments, his works were consistently longer, more complex, and more numerous than anybody else’s. (This is a point usefully emphasized in Christoph Wolff's 2020 book on Bach's music.)
Really, I don’t have a better answer to “Why Bach?” than the knuckleheaded “Because it’s there.”6 There’s no organ composer of even a remotely comparable level who wrote so much for the organ; Messiaen caps out at about half the length, Buxtehude at a third. Even the mega-prolific French organist-improviser types, whose music is mostly the kind that only an organist could possibly like, don’t match up; Marcel Dupré, for instance, is multiple hours behind Bach. I’m sure I’m just ignorant, but I can’t name even a bad organ composer who wrote more.
Of course, it matters that Bach is a relatively consistent composer; he’s not one of those people who has a massively steep dropoff from his best to his average. (If Beethoven wrote 18 hours of organ music at a quality distribution roughly matching his works as a whole, I probably wouldn’t put on a series like this.) And it matters that I think much of it is excellent, and especially that I really like a lot of it. But those are reasons to play a lot of Bach, not everything.
Not every piece on today’s program is the G-major Prelude and Fugue. But together, they all add up to a genuinely monumental collection of organ music. No other organ composer enables you to put on a series that satisfyingly covers the entire academic calendar (even on the quarter system!). Why Bach? Because nobody else would do.
What I’m Listening To
Fieri Consort – The Excellence of Women: Casulana & Strozzi
Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata – Wonder Women
Two new albums covering similar musical ground. One is straightforward, polished, and a tiny bit boring; the other vibrant, risky, and somewhat gimmicky.
No prizes for figuring that Pluhar’s latest is the gimmicky one. L’Arpeggiata have made a whole career out of trying wacky stuff with Baroque music. Sometimes their orchestrations overlap with the conjectural “reconstructions” that a lot of other groups try—the added percussion and gradual crescendo that Barthold Kuijken mocked as the “Boléro effect.” But to their credit, they don’t try to pass this kind of thing off as “historical”: when they use 20th-century Latin pop rhythms, you at least know that they also do bluegrass Purcell and jazz Handel. With a lot of other groups, I worry that they think they’re actually being “authentic.”
I’m not sure that every L’Arpeggiata experiment works (both albums linked above have massive misses and surprising hits), but you can at least say this: they’re extremely good players, full of musical ideas, and they always sound fantastic. (They’re also—to undermine my own lament from last week—one of the most reliable ensembles to use Baroque harp.) And they’re especially good at using Baroque instruments to play other kinds of music.
That comes in handy on this album, which somewhat bizarrely juxtaposes Latin American and Italian folksongs about women with a small Greatest Hits of Strozzi, Francesca Caccini, and Isabella Leonarda. Really, if I have a complaint about this project, it’s that they weren’t adventurous enough with these parts of the selection. “L’amante segreto” and “Che si può fare” are great pieces, but again? At this point, by recording those works, you’re no longer “expanding the canon,” but just getting nods from people who recognize the couple of pieces that have already gotten their feet in the door.
The Fieri Consort disk doesn’t have this problem at all, not least because Casulana recordings are still in pretty short supply. I made lots and lots of discoveries on this disc: aside from “O Notte” above, the album also includes knockout large-scale Casulana madrigals like “Bella d’Amor” and “Ovunque volgi,” alongside fabulous renditions of Strozzi pieces like “Donne belle.” The singing and playing is excellent.
Still, there’s not the same palpable sense of excitement that you reliably get from a L’Arpeggiata joint. So, I’m a bit torn in deciding what to recommend. Of course, in an ideal world you’ll listen to both (won’t you?), but if you have to pick one…well, go with whatever sounds appealing from the above. The L’Arpeggiata album is guaranteed to be entertaining, and maybe somewhat perplexing. You’ll have to work harder to get into the Fieri Consort album, but I think you may be more likely to find some new music to really love.
Kamasi Washington – Fearless Movement
By his standards, it’s almost minimalist. Sure, this album is longer than a standard CD can give you (86 minutes), but it’s not a triple album like his debut (sure, call it The Epic if you’re gonna do that), or a “double album plus, oops, just kidding here’s more music” like his follow-up. (Does that make Heaven and Earth Washington’s Tortured Poets Department?) And, sure this album is utterly awash with sound—two drummers constantly going at it, underpinning thick layers of keys, sax, brass, guitars, and bass—but there’s very little of the movie-music choral stuff that made his previous albums sound so massive.
Honestly, I prefer the massive Washington, but a lot of this album works pretty well. Of course, the playing is all superb and virtuosic, but especially impressive is what Washington gets out of his collaborators. Let me single out the middle of the album, which I assume is the first time George Clinton and André 3000 have appeared next to each other on a tracklist since Aquemini. I don’t love D Smoke’s verses on “Get Lit,” but the rest of the track is stupid groovy, fully living up to Clinton’s voice and the P-Funk legacy. And I actually can’t believe that Washington got me to enjoy Dré’s flute playing. It turns out that giving Dré a proper sparring partner (Washington himself on sax) and fitting his playing into a more rhythmically active, uptempo synth groove is all you need to give his music some direction. The best part of New Blue Sun was the track titles; Washington has managed to prove that Dré still has something to offer musically as well.
Jessica Pratt – Here in the Pitch
This is my first rodeo with Jessica Pratt, and it’s a hell of a ride. She almost spookily recreates the Phil Spector/Brian Wilson L.A. sound (even if her musicians aren’t quite a Wrecking Crew), from the exact bass, snare, and mellotron sounds, to the studio sound itself. And she knows what musical figures and harmonies to give to those sounds: the opening tracks of this album are almost like hearing depressed, slightly bossa nova-ified outtakes from Pet Sounds. It’s weird, and pretty cool.
The “bossa-fied” element only intensifies as the album progresses, and Spector’s influence recedes. Everything still sounds uncannily ‘60s to the end, but the “depressed singer-songwriter” persona only intensifies, at least until vaguely upbeat closer “The Last Year.” I should say that Pratt’s singing is captivating throughout, and several of the songs are really good: “Empires Never Know” is a big highlight. Still, I just don’t know what to make of this album as a whole yet. I like a lot of “sadgirl music” and goodness knows I love ‘60s pop, but the combination of the two is gonna take a while for me to get my head around.
15 Years of 2NE1
Even the “I’m just here for the Bach” crowd might remember 2NE1. In particular, they might remember the nuclear opening riff from “I Am the Best,” since we all heard it on TV for a couple of years in the mid 2010s:
And, in some sense, even though they disbanded almost 10 years ago, we still haven’t stopped hearing new 2NE1 songs. It’s not exactly a secret that YG Entertainment rolled out exactly the same formula for BLACKPINK’s debut as what they’d already been using for 2NE1:
Same opening gambit, same “Oriental” instrumentals, similar melodic construction in the prechorus, same overall structure. And since YG ended up having Teddy Park basically retread that exact formula for every lead single from “DDU-DU DDU-DU” onward (also not a secret: high schoolers have produced thorough dissections of BLACKPINK’s formulaic song construction), you were still hearing a version of 2NE1 in 2021 with “Pink Venom.” Or rather, now that YG (without Teddy) is doing diet BLACKPINK songs for BABYMONSTER, we’re still hearing a very dilute version of their music today. For that matter, given that BLACKPINK’s version of “girl crush” was clearly the conceptual inspiration for ITZY, EVERGLOW, æspa, and a lot of other groups, you could say that 2NE1 is practically everywhere now.
But, honestly, these songs, the badass “girl crush” image, represent the musical side of 2NE1 I’m less interested in. Look, the “I Am the Best” opening really is great; that detuning on the synth is perfectly calibrated to be impossible to pinpoint in pitch space without sounding too weird or harsh. CL has real personality, and everything is timed to change up at exactly the perfect time: Teddy cleverly manages his resources, saving the big guns until he really needs them (at around 1:23). This song is a classic for a reason. And “Fire” (released 15 years ago this week, in case you were wondering why I’m writing this now) is pretty good too, even if its heavy autotune sounds incredibly dated.
Still, the best music 2NE1 put out was all in a completely different vein. That started with their very first release. The three tracks after “Fire” have seemingly “girl crush” titles, from “I Don’t Care” through “In the Club” to “Let’s Go Party”—but listen to these songs. All three are nostalgic, vulnerable, midtempo ballads; you’ve never heard somebody sing “Let’s Go Party” to such sad music.
And it’s this sense of vulnerability that I really miss in mock-2NE1 music from more recent groups. BLACKPINK did have one song in this vein very early on, and it’s one of their best; it was also confirmed to be a rejected 2NE1 track. (The same goes for two of their other best songs.) They also have “Lovesick Girls,” which is a great song but feels weirdly disconnected from its emotional content. I like the tune and the production, but it doesn’t sound very, well, lovesick.
What BLACKPINK don’t have—and presumably could never have thanks to their branding—is a song anything like “Ugly”:7
It was remarkable enough for a 2011 K-pop girl group to have lyrics that mean anything at all (it’s still not necessarily that common), but it’s astonishing that Teddy didn’t try to give them any kind of verbal “redemption” arc at all: no discovery that they’re secretly pretty, no declaration of self-acceptance. (Doubly astonishing given that 2NE1 were constantly called “ugly,” including by YG himself.) Instead, he lets the music (and the video) do all of this work for the song: the gradual build from those reversed piano samples and beeping synths to full-on pop-punk guitars in the choruses. (“Ugly” is a masterclass in gradually bringing in different layers of drum machine beats.) The lyrics may be genuinely depressing, but those anthemic choruses tell you everything you need to know about how 2NE1 (or at least their persona for this song) really feel.
And I’m really not sure when we’re going to get another song like Bom’s solo “You and I”:
You’ll probably want the lyrics again to understand what this song has to do with this video.8 (I know the first minute is bad; persevere.) Again, it’s just hard to imagine BLACKPINK or any of their derivatives doing anything like this. And that’s a shame, considering that this is a pretty great song. You’re not liable to forget the tunes any time soon, even for the verses, and the instrumentals have an incredibly subtle degree of rhythmic interplay (listen, for instance, to when the thirty-second notes enter in the synths vs in the hi-hats). Even if the song is a ballad, those instrumentals are surprisingly punchy, and the song moves surprisingly fast. But for 2NE1 that was almost the rule rather than the exception: you could say exactly the same things about the beats on those three ballads from their first mini album.
The worst thing about “You and I” is also the best thing about the song: Bom’s singing. Despite being the group’s main vocal, she definitely doesn’t have the world’s best technique (Jisoo and Rosé are both better), which means that the low notes are often pretty unsupported and she just kinda shouts out some of the high notes. But not having much technique also means she can’t rely on technique either: you can hear that she’s just trying her best to have her voice match the emotion of what she’s singing. For me at least, that’s a lot more effective than a good singer just nailing the notes, or applying technical tricks where they think it’s appropriate.
The same really goes for any of 2NE1’s songs, no matter where on the emotional gamut they lie:9
These two songs, probably 2NE1’s best, do not feature particularly good singing from just about anyone, but that’s part of what makes them so effective. “Hate You” never devolves into screaming or snarling; instead, it lets the singers’ raw, somewhat coarse vocals do the work, bringing across that the song’s lyric persona is really hurt, and not just spiteful. And, oddly, they get a similar effect on “I Love You”: 2NE1 couldn’t do “sweet” (“pink”?) vocals if they tried, and so instead you get a song that actually sounds…lovesick. At a moment when K-pop vocals are more controversial than ever, it’s good to remember what you can do with “bad singing.” Great songs don’t need to be chopsy or technically perfect: it’s good enough when the singers sound like they mean something. 2NE1 always gave us that.
Also liked…
Mdou Moctar – Funeral for Justice
Manfred Cordes and Europäisches Hanse-Ensemble – Musik der Hansestädte, Vol. 2: Musik aus dem alten Danzig
Nubiyan Twist – Find Your Flame
Ali Doğan Gönültaş – Keyeyî
Benjamin Alard – Johann Sebastian Bach: The Complete Works for Keyboard, Vol. 9 “Köthen, 1717–1723 – The Happy Years”
Jack Walrath – Live at Smalls
What I’m Reading
Enough book talk up above, but here are a few others:
The Fader– Steve Albini, “The Model,” and the lingering power of mistakes
Grist – The surging demand for data is guzzling Virginia's water
LA Times – The temperature inside these L.A. museums is changing. Why that's a win for climate action
The World – Once the epicenter of hydraulic engineering, Mexico City is now running out of water
Andscape – Oklahoma City Thunder guard Luguentz Dort brings Haitian pride, lockdown defense to NBA playoffs
The Baffler – Feeling Blessed: At the Habsburg convention in Plano
Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!
I have to say I’m interested in a lot of that work and would have appreciated more than the capsule biographies Harris offers—but that might have thrown the balance of the book too far off.
There are no interviews with composers, which I imagine is a byproduct of Harris’s own connections and “scene”; the “roots” chapter is almost a third of the whole book by itself.
Of course, as a music theorist, Heinichen was stellar.
To the extent that, as Schoenberg supposedly once said to Heinrich Schenker, “Where are my favorite notes? Ah yes, there—the little black ones.”
There are exceptions: Jennifer Koh, unsurprisingly, does a good job revealing the rhythmic complexity of the G-minor Violin Sonata’s final movement.
I have no interest in going anywhere near Mount Everest, thanks for asking.
There’s obviously a lot to critique about how the video represents disability purely as a curse and a burden. Forgive me for focusing on the song instead.
If you think these titles are repetitive, wait until you find out about “Missing You” and “BABY I MISS YOU.”