BWV 772, 775, 778, 779 – Two-Part Inventions, Part I

Plus: Spotify and Classical music's "Stream"-lining, Warburg and Riegl's "milieus," and more!

It’s year-end list season (more on that later), and I went looking. What I found: this collection of lists from Native America Calling is full of stuff to explore, linking to a bunch of great songs and artists (some of whom have come up here) as well as three great radio shows focusing on indigenous music.¹ If nothing else, the lists go to show the depth of the field: only two artists show up on multiple people’s lists. One is Mali Obomsawin (remember her?), appearing both as solo artist and as one half of Deerlady. The other artist is Toni Heartless, who’s new to me.

Good timing. Toni has a new album with a New Years’ Eve release date, and it’s quite something. Not, mind you, music to celebrate to: it’s called constant pain, and it’s as bleak as you might expect. Toni’s new material inhabits a Joy Division-esque world of echoey, gated post-punk. The singing is super raw, and the lyrics are…well, you’ll get the idea when you see track titles like “tookmytrust” and “buryualive.” Happy New Year indeed.

All of that, mind you, actually makes constant pain a very cohesive listen and definitely the best of Toni’s stuff that I could find easily. Not that he hadn’t put out good music before. His previous 2024 outing, DARK DAYS, has some real bops. I’m especially keen on songs like “BLOOD BOND” and “COFFIN CLUB,” with their New Order-esque fusion of catchy synthpop and rasping or even screaming vocals. (Toni Heartless self-identifies his genre as melodic hardcore.) You may not love all of the rapping on tracks like “RESIDENT EVIL”—I think the verses could have used a bit more love—but there’s genuine wit in lines like “Now I’m trying to reconnect with my heritage / Resident Evil, feeling like an experiment.” Themes of heritage and residential life are much more prominent on DARK DAYS. And it’s certainly not as unremitting as constant pain.

Not that all music has to be autobiographical, but it’s easy to understand the tonal shift. Toni Heartless has fallen on hard times. I’m glad he’s still able to make music after his stabbing (assuming constant pain was recorded afterward), but it can’t be easy, not to mention the impact on the rest of his life. He could use our support. When you’re ready to kill the festive mood once and for all, give constant pain a go; and do consider taking a look at his fundraiser.

BWV 772, 775, 778, 779 – Two-Part Inventions, Part I

BWV 772 in C Major

BWV 775 in D minor

BWV 778 in E minor

BWV 779 in F Major

Before they were Inventions, they were Preludes. The thirty pieces now known as “Two- and Three-Part Inventions” began life as the culmination of Bach’s notebook for his eldest son. And really, the Klavierbüchlein is by and large a long series of preludes: Little Preludes (Præambulum), chorale preludes, early versions of material from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier (Præludium), and then the Inventions (Præambulum again). “Prelude” was a title that could mean anything and everything—as vague a word as the catch-all “Fantasia” that originally labelled the three-part Sinfonias. Just flipping through the Klavierbüchlein, or even a score of the Inventions, the diversity of the pieces is almost as striking as their commonalities. “Præambulum” was a license for Bach to do more or less whatever he wanted.

There also wasn’t really anything else to call these pieces. As basically every scholar who’s written about the Inventions has noted, this is a genre of music that Bach, well, invented. (Sorry.) Two-voice pedagogical pieces (bicinia) were a longstanding Germanic tradition, and Bach would have known two-voice fugues by Pachelbel. He also liked to teach from a volume of pieces for violin and continuo titled Inventions by Francesco Antonio Bonporti. But Bach’s pieces are something else. Like so much else by Bach, they combine dense, obsessively worked-out counterpoint with charming, fleet-footed musical material. They’re sort of like “free preludes.” They’re sort of like little fugues. What are they?

In classical rhetoric—or, for that matter, in modern patent law—an “invention” is a discovery, something that you, etymologically speaking, “come upon.” Before you can lay out your oration (dispositio), you must know what to say (inventio). Now, from a present-day perspective, that can sound like a process of waiting for a bolt of inspiration. So it almost reads like a paradox when Bach’s title page for the Inventions and Sinfonias says that the pieces are designed to provide “a strong foretaste of composition,” teaching the player how “not only to come upon good ideas [inventiones], but rather also to implement [durchzuführen] them well.” How can a piece of music show a student how to come up with good ideas?

I don’t think there’s any definitive answer to this question (and C.P.E. Bach’s obit for his father seems to imply that he just outright gave up on students who couldn’t come up with good ideas), but we can at least make a step in the right direction by removing “inspiration” or even “creativity” from the picture. Laurence Dreyfus’s Bach and the Patterns of Invention, despite its many exasperating qualities, does a great job re-setting the terms: invention is a process, a machine for composition. In the Ancient context—including its survival into Bach’s time—invention was very much about what you know, the mental storehouse of masterworks and ideas that you can draw from in martialing your arguments. The Inventions can teach invention by showing what it’s like to come up with the right stock musical figures, the right contrapuntal layout, or the right harmonic scheme to solve a given problem.

And Bach cannily gives himself problems to solve before he’s even begun composing. No need to pick keys for the pieces: Bach, in the Klavierbüchlein, sets up a tonal arrangement that goes up a C major scale via the smallest key signatures (D minor is in, E major is out) and then comes back down to fill in the eight remaining “four-accidentals-or-fewer” keys. He also sets a more or less ascending gradient of difficulty for the pieces (ever wondered why the C-minor invention is so much harder than C major?)² and confines them to a consistent two pages each.³ Each piece is to be worked out in a fairly similar way, taking a theme or combination of themes and having each hand give it a test drive in all sorts of permutations, harmonic contexts, and guises. The machine was finely calibrated, needing only a bit of musical material to get going.

Even here, Bach came up with extra compositional constraints, little ways to narrow the solution space to just a few possibilities. As he says on the same title page, the Inventions are designed to teach cantabile playing (whatever that actually entails), and a number of scholars have noticed that there seems to be a bit of a pedagogical program to how the pieces are laid out in the Klavierbüchlein. Georg von Dadelsen, for instance, comments on the fact that the C-major Invention makes the player get used to awkward patterns that skip around between weak fingers like 4, 2, and 5.

And he (like every beginning pianist who has learned these pieces) notes that the D-minor Invention is an exercise in running out of fingers:

You don’t have to be able to read music to see that this piece is built on a repeating pattern of six notes in a row, a somewhat awkward fact for those of us with five fingers per hand. If you want the tune to sound like a more or less straight line (cantabile?), you will need to learn how to move your wrist over both quickly and smoothly.⁴

Let me pause on this piece for a moment,⁵ not least because I imagine that a very big chunk of you have fond memories (or nightmares) of studying it as a beginner. Since you were a beginner, I bet that you learned it from an edition with fingerings printed in. And if you did, I bet they looked a whole lot like this:⁶

The fascinatingly overwrought edition by Bernhardus Boekelman even gives you breaks in the beaming to clarify the fingering:

…actually, what the heck does he expect you to use in the left hand??

OK, so let’s forget about Boekelman. The point stands: this piece has typically been interpreted as a way to teach “thumb under,” with the index finger passing smoothly over top.

Indeed, Bach does seem to have been an innovator of modern scale fingerings, which make some of their earliest appearances in C.P.E. Bach’s treatise on playing keyboard instruments (with credit given to dad). But leaving aside the question of whether you should ever really actually pass your thumb under while playing this kind of passage on piano,⁷ we also have pretty decent evidence that Bach himself—and basically every harpsichord player of his time and before—didn’t use this kind of fingering very much. Here’s the very first entry in the Klavierbüchlein that contains the Inventions:

(Coming to a Substack near you at some point in the future.)

There’s no reason to try to copy the fingering patterns of this Applicatio too closely—even though it’s very well documented, I still find the “backward” fingering in the left hand quite uncomfortable—but it does suggest that the “thumb under” approach isn’t what Bach taught. And teaching is what the Inventions are all about.

If you listen to my take on the D-minor Invention, you might be able to hear the alternative solution I adopt:

I make no claim to originality here; this kind of thing is pretty common in harpsichord playing.⁸ You take a figure that doesn’t lie completely under the hand and break it up in a way that follows the meter. Here, to be able to play two consecutive notes with the same finger, I move my hand between the fourth and fifth sixteenth notes. It makes a subtle little articulation that sets off the last eighth note of the measure from the preceding two. If I were Bernardus Boekelman, I might even re-beam the piece accordingly.

The really nice thing about playing the D-minor invention this way is that it helps bring out the piece’s swing. Like so many other pieces by Bach—including pieces for beginners—this one has some real rhythmic subtlety to it. So he gives you figures that cut a three-beat measure in half (0:09):

…followed immediately by music that cuts two measures into thirds (0:13):

(Those who have been reading for a while may be tired of me pointing out every instance of reverse hemiola and regular ol’ hemiola like this.)

To bring things back to fingering: if you look at that second example again, you may notice that the “cut” is placed in a position that would lie exactly between the consecutive “4-4” and “2-2” in the fingerings above. Move your hand and the hemiola will simply come to you.

So, to recap, the “seed” for the C-major and D-minor Inventions seem to have been a systematic exploration of keyboard technique. What about the next pair?

This is open to debate (and, conversely, it’s entirely possible that I’m just remembering something I read once upon a time), but I suspect that the E-minor and F-major Inventions are designed to introduce keyboard styles. The E-minor Invention, somewhat programmatically, begins with a measure full of little French ornaments (agréments—the little squiggles above the notes):

Indeed, the piece seems designed to evoke the style of an allemande specifically. (I probably should have taken it a touch slower; this performance sounds more like an Italian allemanda.) The opening descending gesture in the tune is very allemande, and so are passages like this that sort of just wander around the keyboard:

Meanwhile, the F-major Invention is as bouncy and Italian as it gets:

It’s so Italian that this piece can sound a fair bit like violin music. You can almost see the string crossings in up-and-down passages like this:

Indeed, even though his Inventions otherwise bare very little resemblance to Bach’s, it’s pretty easy to find passages in Bonporti’s Op.10 that have the violinist do similar things:

You should catch up a bit on my archive if you’re at all surprised to hear that this is my favorite of the Inventions.

Actually, the F-major Invention (along with the D-minor) is among my favorite Bach pieces, period. Because so many of us learned them as kids (especially these two?), it’s easy to let familiarity (and the clumsiness of novice performances) obscure their musical accomplishment. And because we encounter them as teaching pieces, it’s easy to forget just how dang fun they are, once we stop sweating about what our teacher will say about the evenness of our playing. As Christoph Wolff would have it (in Bach’s Musical Universe), the Inventions and Sinfonias can be seen as a culmination of Bach’s compositional career to that point: “The two-part and then the three-part settings emerged one after another as lessons for his oldest son, and also reflected the end result of the composer’s own learning process.” This music for beginners represented the final point of mastery for a mature composer. We all still have a lot to learn from these pieces.

What I’m Not Listening To?

December has struck again. Christmas music takes over the charts. Year-end lists are formulated and even published in the early parts of the month. (I’ve even seen some people push them out in late November.) Spotify Wrapped (and certain awards) stop tracking data. The stuff that gets released is usually not what labels really want to push. If it’s going to be good, it’s often going to be something weird like Aphex Twin’s surprise and basically unpublicized drop of Music from the Merch Desk (2016 – 2023). But the musical landscape is mostly pretty bleak.

OK, so there’s still some pretty great music that came out this December—I’ve given a few extra recommendations below to compensate—but I just can’t work up the desire to talk about any of it in depth. Yes, even K-pop: you know it’s bad when literally my favorite boy group INFINITE has a new song and literally my favorite girl group fromis_9 releases their farewell single and I have basically nothing to say about either. )I liked a lot of stuff on the new Stray Kids and TWICE albums, though.) In any case, the upshot is that there won’t be any screeds about historical performance practice this time, and no flailing around trying to learn about a world music tradition that I listen to in blissful ignorance. Look forward to all of that again in a month; I can only resist for so long.

What I can work up the desire to talk about is an excellent Harper’s article about Spotify by Liz Pelly. The article represents a key chunk of her upcoming book, which is already starting to get advance press. I look forward to reading the book, but I think I’d rather get most of my thoughts about the central topics out here. I wouldn’t recommend that you wait either: read the article now.

Pelly’s topic in this article is a phenomenon that’s familiar to readers of music journalism (or the work of Eric Drott), but which has never been explored in real depth: a lot of the most played music on Spotify—not quite BILLIONS CLUB material, but with tens of millions of streams—is by absolute no-name artists. As an absolute no-name myself, you’d think this would be cheering, but it’s painfully obvious that this music is mass-produced stuff designed to fill out playlists designed to accompany something else. If you use a streaming service, you’ve seen them:

And if you’ve ever clicked through, maybe you’ve wondered “Who are these people” when seeing a list like this:

I have to admit, my first reaction to this kind of stuff is “good grief,” but I’m weird and the people who listen to these playlists are not. We’ll get back to that.

Anyway, the point of Pelly’s article, as with so much other writing on Spotify, is that this music is a way for Daniel Ek and his ilk (Elk?) to divert money from musicians and into their own pockets. If you pay a contract musician a one-time pittance and keep the copyright for yourself, you can make a fortune. As these articles never tire of stating, Ek is probably richer than any musician in history, Jay-Z and Taylor Swift included.

It sounds like it should be illegal. Yet the same dynamic is familiar from the dawn of the recording (and, for that matter, publishing) industry. Even leaving aside the many instances of outright theft and horribly misleading contracts, you have the completely above-board and normalized structure of session musician pay; those of us who haunt obituary pages were reminded this year of all of the songs Herbie Flowers made (and I mean made) without seeing a dime beyond his union wages. What Pelly documents—what makes her article such gruesome reading—is the relentless expansion of this dynamic until no musician will make anything from their recordings. (And of course, there have long been lots of ways to make sure they don’t make money from anything else, either.)

I guess that my continued linking to Spotify, including below, demonstrates my cynicism with respect to this angle. It could be generational—I would wager that musicians my age, growing up amid the collapse of CD sales,⁹ basically all never expected to make any money from recordings to begin with. We also grew up with ubiquitous piracy, so the idea of not paying artists for music is pretty naturalized too. I know that Spotify is frankly way too cheap for the library it offers; but the Pirate Bay and Youtube rips are even cheaper.¹⁰

It could also be due to my specific field: how many Classical musicians go into it for the money?

And of course I do buy physical media where record labels incentivize it. Oh lord, do I; if “From” is truly the end for fromis_9, at least it’ll be the end of me feeling the itch to buy 30 copies of the same three-song album. (Don’t ask if you don’t want to know.)

To be clear, I don’t think it’s good that the Elk of this world are getting unfathomably wealthy at the expense of musicians. (And just like label execs in the “good old days,” he’s also getting rich at the expense of a whole lot of other people beside musicians.) It should not be the case that gigging musicians feel precarious enough to make playlist fodder on these terms; with a more secure social safety net, one can imagine that they would feel more able to turn down Spotify contracts in protest for not getting their share (any share) of the profits these songs generate.

Yet the problem isn’t just that musicians are in an economically precarious position. That’s the problem for society at large, maybe, but in terms of trying to negotiate within this specific dynamic, musicians have another, almost equally serious issue: their peers can basically all do what they’re doing. In the absence of unionization for all musicians everywhere (a good idea if it were practical), the premise is clear: if you don’t want to play it, then somebody else will. And they definitely can. It turns out that you have no bargaining position whatsoever when your assignment is to make the blandest, most generic music possible.

This is the point at which articles about streaming aesthetics usually start to sound pretty judgmental, where the moral case against the excesses of the Elk begins to turn into outrage about everyday listeners. This is why “streaming-ready” is a derogatory term in music media. Listeners to these playlists are typically deemed (implicitly, but often explicitly) to be sheep, blind followers of the algorithm. If you listen to mood playlists, you must not have taste. You’ll like anything. You’re ready for AI-generated music. (AI music will assuredly take over this kind of playlist at some point this year.)

I think these judgments misunderstand the kind of service Spotify is trying to offer. They also, I think, misunderstand how the vast majority of listeners interact with music. I have some major issues with the effects of streaming on how music gets made, but I don’t think these complaints are quite the right ones.

One of the things I look forward to most in Pelly’s book is how much it will engage with prior work on “mood music.” For musicologists, I think the classic book is Anahid Kassabian’s Ubiquitous Listening, but a much wider audience has seen similar observations in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Writing well prior to streaming (Kassabian’s key chapter dates back to 2002), both authors diagnose the constant flow of private music made possible by the Walkman and the iPod as a kind of security blanket, a way to feel plugged-in and avoid nagging anxieties. Long before the playlists that make Spotify into Pelly’s Mood Machine, Kassabian had already made “affect” into the first keyword of her subtitle. Ubiquitous music is there to make or help you feel something.

I guess most music is. To zoom out perilously far, it’s surely true that—with the exception of detainees and other victims of unwanted music—we listen to music to get something from it. And by and large, I would say that we’re trying to be either moved or edified. Moved in the sense of, yes, “made to feel something”; edified in the sense of being “improved” in some spiritual, moral, or intellectual sense.

There’s a long tradition of writers (writing is their first sin) complaining or worrying about listeners seeking too much feeling and too little edification—of listening to the wrong music or in the wrong ways; Augustine and Mengzi are two classics for this kind of sentiment. Certainly, people who like to promote Western Classical music—and let’s be real, Bach is the composer they’re likely to mention—like to claim that “their music” is edifying, that it’ll make you smarter or that you’re stupid if you don’t like it. (Swap in religious implications if you’re unhappy with the intellectual ones; Bach swings both ways.)

But plenty of critics will also mock or castigate listeners for feeling or wanting to feel the wrong things. (I’m sure I’ve lapsed into this.) If you write about pop music, you probably feel really strongly about it. Which means you’re the kind of person who tends to want music that makes you feel really strongly: if it’s dance music, it should make you dance (why do you think I like K-pop?); if it’s rock, it should rock; if it’s all about the words, the words should mean something; if it’s a ballad, it should drive you to tears or lift you to the skies. In other words, you really hate The Carpenters.

I can understand an argument for wanting people to listen to music for edification; I think it’s pretentious and elitist (and usually excludes far too much music from consideration), but I definitely understand it. On the other hand, at this point, I think that wanting people to feel differently, or listen for music that stimulates a different kind of feeling, is a little like asking people to want more strongly flavored food. A lot of people just don’t. Maybe most people.

Without going on a long historical tangent (I deleted two drafts), consider some of the most derided music there is: smooth jazz. Lots of people buy Kenny G, and lots of people love his stuff, because it’s reassuringly there and fits the kind of safe, warm vibes that they want in their listening environment. Maybe you wish people would be more adventurous. But if you complain about that, you might as well complain that people don’t want Teotihuacan murals instead of wallpaper. The whole point is to have something that they can almost ignore, but which is kind of nice in the background. Mood playlist music is nothing new; now it’s just being targeted with much greater precision, and monetized differently to ensure that there can never be another Kenny G. I can see lots (lots!) of problems with the monetization system, but I can’t fault the listeners.

Still, if you like jazz, you probably loath Kenny G and anybody who listens to him. After all, unless you’re a swing revivalist or something, the whole reason you like your music is because you want something at least somewhat “challenging.” (If it’s anywhere in the bebop lineage, it was indeed meant to be “challenging” in an intellectual and political sense.) You probably hate the idea that people could listen to Duotones or (sorry Keith) The Köln Concert and think that they’re “listening to jazz.” The idea that this dumbed-down stuff could represent the genre makes you break out in hives.

Fair enough for anybody who thinks they’re intellectually superior—that they’re being edified—because they listen to Kenny G. They ought to be taken off their high horse, but I doubt there are many of them.

On the other hand, for the Classical music equivalents of smooth jazz, I think there really are people who think that they’re smarter or better or improving as a person because they listen to Ludovico Einaudi and Max Richter. Or the “Indie Classical” types like Nico Muhly that Marianna Ritchey is so good at skewering. Or some unfortunate chunk of whatever the Met is putting on these days.

This music is a problem, not just because it’s crummy music—at least by the standards of the “edification” that its success is parasitic upon— but because its marketing deludes at least some of its listeners. It’s midcult; it’s kitsch. It sells really well because it’s just playlist and daydream fodder, but also in part because it pretends to be “better.”

It’s even a problem if you leave aside the issue of people inflating their egos by listening to Max Richter. As I said above, I have zero issue with people listening to mood playlists (or having daydreams in concert halls). But people give huge sums to Classical music institutions precisely because they value music that doesn’t necessarily sell all that well. It’s surely a massive waste (and quite rude) to turn around and use those (exorbitant!) resources to try and duplicate the musical effects of browbeaten, nameless contractors and generative AI.

All that said: for me, the worst symptom of “background classical” turning concert halls into mood playlist fodder is not Nico Muhly or even Ludovico Einaudi. It’s the impact this kind of music has had on performances of existing repertoire.

For decades now, the growing trend in Classical performance has been toward ever-whispier timbres, ever-smoother playing, and ever more even rhythm. (Related is the tendency toward extreme reverb among Classical recording engineers.) Some of this is probably the ever-tightening grip of competitions and orchestra/opera/choral auditions, which so often encourage maximum polish and minimum rocking of the boat. But I strongly suspect that the same market forces are at work, pulling for performances that do not challenge, even when the music itself is or ought to be quite challenging.

So this trend in Classical performances leads to exactly the same aural characteristics that people complain about in smooth jazz and “streaming-era” pop music. No “hard edges,” no gestures that stick out too much, nothing too raw or attention-getting, nothing too loud or sudden. It is absolutely stunning how Alice Sara Ott (before I trash her, let me say that I quite like her Lyric Pieces) and Deutsche Grammophon can turn the literal Transcendental Études, music that was designed to shock and awe, into something weirdly weightless, with even some of the blitzkrieg études sounding polite and docile.¹¹ So much playing now, including from very established names, kind of just skims along the surface of the music. It turns Schubert and even Liszt into something suitable for a mood playlist. It all sounds uniformly pretty. Uniformly.

Let me repeat one more time that I have no problem with sounding nice and no problem at all with listening to mood playlists. I don’t think music itself, or even any specific genre is “for” any one purpose. Max Richter’s artistic reappropriation of Vivaldi for the purposes of making sleepytime sounds are of course creatively valid enterprises, and at this point I’m genuinely fine with anybody listening to them. (Fine, that is, so long as nobody gets an inflated ego thinking that they’re being “edified” by what must be “great music,” because it’s “Classical.”) But I doubt that the musicians who exemplify the trend toward ground-down, lightweight performance think that they’re doing that kind of artistic transformation. Don’t be fooled: they are. If you want background music for a mood, go find your mood playlist; at this point, it’ll probably be really good at its job. But if you want to be challenged or uplifted or stimulated or whatever by music, don’t settle for a performance that’s designed to allow daydreaming, to fade into the background. Not all music should be fed into the Mood Machine.

But I still really liked…

Shoko Igarashi – Onsen Music

Poppy Ajudha – Poppy¹²

Lebeha Drummers – Biaha

Auntie Flo – In My Dreams (I’m a Bird and I’m Free)

Sarah Colburn and Lawrence Brownlee with Constantine Orbellian and the Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra – Bellini: I Puritani

Aboubakar Traoré & Balima – Sababu

The Innocence Mission – Midwinter Swimmers

Lucie de Saint Vincent – Des Dentelles à l’Échafaud: Hélène de Montgeroult and Marie Bigot

Lauren Mayberry – Vicious Creature

Andrés Barrios – KM.0

What I’m Reading

I’m still not entirely sure how to explain what Margareta Ingrid Christian’s Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900 is about, but maybe that’s the point. I can tell you that it’s about “air” and “outsides,” but there’s no one word that really captures what Christian is talking about. It’s possible that there can’t be.

Loosely, Christian’s subject is German-language art theory around 1900. Aby Warburg makes a star appearance, as does fellow Left On Reed favorite Alois Riegl; the lineup is rounded out by Rilke (as both art critic and poet) and, refreshingly, Rudolf von Laban—the dance theorist of Labanotation fame. But it’s not really about any of these figures. With the exception of Rilke—only because his two “Apollo” poems are given in full and discussed at length—I doubt you could come away from this book with a particularly strong idea of what any of these writers had to say, even if most of their keywords and major works dutifully show up. Rather, Christian reads for subsurface connections, for trends, for hints.

That’s because her topic is something that is never quite explicitly thematized by any of these authors. One way to think about it (encouraged by her Coda) might be to recognize that these theorists were all writing at the inception of formalism in art theory.¹³ Christian’s project is to uncover an antithesis of form that is not formlessness, but rather something like a form’s constitutive outside. Objects in Air is about all the stuff that surrounds but crucially is not the artwork or the artist, the environment that defines them by exclusion if not negation. I told you it’d be hard to explain.

Part of the problem is that we have different vocabularies for this concept at different scales. So for a statue, the outside is the actual air (of the book’s title) around and depicted by it. For an artist, it’s their milieu, their intellectual context (a word I wish had gotten some attention—isn’t this the time period when people start talking about it?). Making matters even more complicated, Christian recognizes that conceptions of the and sociointellectual milieus were profoundly shaped by (popular) science and (incipient) sociology, and therefore does her best to draw connections with phlogiston theory, Hippolyte Taine, and a whole lot more.

Did I mention that the book is a well-illustrated 148 pages? Objects in Air surely bites off more than it can chew, but I’m not entirely sure that that’s a problem. Rather, it feels as if the book is constantly sending you off to see for yourself, to make further connections, to read the text under discussion instead of taking her word for it. It’s also quite dense, but in a loving kind of way. Yes, you’ll need to slow down to contemplate the etymological meaning of a word like “ecstasy” (“standing-out”), but nothing feels jargony or gratuitous—just very finely woven. Indeed, this is one of those rare books that’s in large part about Heidegger and Benjamin where the references make perfect sense without any shred of didacticism or mysticism. (I promise you don’t need to have read any Heidegger or even Benjamin beforehand.)

I don’t want to sound too breezy. Objects in Air not a perfect book; some of the “background connections” (Taine, Uexküll, even Heidegger) can get weirdly repetitive across chapters, an especially salient bug for such a short book. It is a slow read, even if I found it quite enjoyable. You will sometimes get into the weeds, remarkably far given the amount of space. Conversely, you will very often feel that the discussion has stopped just as it was getting going. Still, I promise that the book’s worth it. The concept that Christian has worked through is novel and genuinely fascinating, both for the period she discusses and in general. If only there were an easy way to explain it.

A few others:

• Chemistry World – A mouthful of mouthfeel

• Segregation by Design – los angeles: old chinatown

• Defector – A Capsule Wardrobe Won't Save You

• Boston Globe – MIT paid $1.3 million for a landscape artwork by Maya Lin. Then it forgot to tell anyone

• The New Yorker – The Hidden Story of J. P. Morgan’s Librarian

• Common Edge – On the Value of Miniatures and Scale Models

Thanks for reading, and see you again soon!

1. Check out Indigefi as well, even if they’ve stopped updating their main website.

2. Note that he completely abandoned this part of the scheme for the three-part Sinfonias; the B-minor piece that comes seventh in the Klavierbüchlein is a wicked challenge, sometimes foiling even a pianist like Glenn Gould.

3. Even if that means squashing in an extra system for pieces like the A-major Invention.

4. The screenwriters of Gattaca must have had this piece in mind when they decided that the piano virtuoso of a eugenics-based dystopian future would have twelve fingers. On second thought—listen to the extra notes they add to that Schubert Impromptu, and try to imagine where the sixth fingers would have to be….

5. If you want a blow-by-blow of the C-major invention, Dreyfus’s Chapter 1 is your ticket—although it’ll also probably give you a good sense of some of the things I find “exasperating” about that book, essential though it is.

6. Credit (?) to Ebenezer Prout for using the very creative fingering 1-2-3-1-2-3 in his edition.

7. You can find any number of videos about this topic on Youtube; these two seem good at first glance.

8. The other obvious solutions would be to do 3-4 3-4 all the way up like the Applicatio or to do something like 1-2 1-2-3-4; I think Masaaki Suzuki does the latter in his recording.

9. Not that good sales necessarily ensure that the artists see any of the profit either; apologies for his language, but the best article I know about this is by Kpopalypse.

10. YouTube Music and Amazon Prime music, by bundling in a comparable library with other services, are also cheaper than Spotify Premium.

11. Her “Paysage,” to be fair, is exactly as pretty as it’s supposed to be.

12. NOT to be confused with the band Poppy—also very good.

13. Which just makes me wonder how Wölfflin fits in.