Week 19: 4 March 2024 – The “Wedge” and Lent 3

Plus: are Chorale Partitas for public consumption?, Erika de Casier x TWICE, Adrian Nathan West's Lost Steps, 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. 

I’ve (belatedly) been discovering Nishnaabe singer-songwriter Ansley Simpson’s work, especially the excellent sophomore album She Fell From the Sky. It’s a concept album, telling a story of the Sky Woman Gizhiigokwe, creator of the world, returning to the present and trying to pick up the pieces. That overarching plot makes it hard to convey Simpson’s sense of storytelling from a single song, but the three-song arc from “Moon” through “The Wake” to the instrumental “We Strayed Too Far From the Mouth of the River” shows their ability both to build up dramatic tension and to give us space to breathe when the dam finally breaks: “Wake” genuinely rocks out, while its followup “We Strayed” is wonderfully atmospheric with some lovely sonics. Read Simpson talking about this album and their work in general here.

Week 19: 4 March 2024 – The “Wedge” and Lent 3

Please save applause for the end of each set

Prelude and Fugue “Wedge” in E minor, BWV 548

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Gott ist mein Heil, mein Hilf und Trost, BWV 1106

Trio in D minor, BWV 583

Von Gott will ich nicht lassen, BWV 658

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Ach, was soll ich Sünder machen, BWV 770

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If you really forced me to pick one piece to show somebody who’d never heard any Bach organ music before—let’s pretend they somehow haven’t heard Toccata and Fugue in D Minor—I think I’d probably go with the “Wedge.” I don’t mean to say that it’s the “ultimate Bach organ piece” (if such a thing could exist) or my “all-time favorite” (I wrote about that one here), but in a lot of ways it represents all the characteristics that have come to define this music and its place in the repertoire. High drama coupled with dance styles; Vivaldian harmonic pacing, rhythmic vivacity, and ritornello forms; fully independent and fleshed-out pedal writing; careful and intricate counterpoint; and blazingly virtuosic writing for the hands. 

It also helps that, of all the Bach preludes and fugues—for any instrument—this might be the one where the two halves of the piece are the best match for each other. My notes for this series have probably made it pretty obvious when I’m playing favorites (some chorale preludes have gotten less than a sentence—sorry!), and that’s especially noticeable when there’s just a lot more to say about a prelude than a fugue, or about the different movements of a trio sonata. This piece will not have that problem. 

Start with the prelude, in which three themes rotate in and out: ritornello form, in the style of a concerto. Like a Vivaldi concerto, the prelude alternates between grand “orchestral” passages (the crashing chords of the opening) and “soloistic” passages in three voices (including both trio passages with the pedals and the parts when the feet take a breather). Like a Vivaldi concerto, there’s a nice plotting out of keys, interspersing the harsh minor-key sections with gracious major interludes. Like a Vivaldi concerto, once the sixteenth notes arrive, they don’t stop comin’ except to open a clearing for reprises of the main theme. And like a Vivaldi concerto, there’s a constant sense of forward motion, driven mainly by judicious repetitions and sequences. You can usually see what’s coming about four measures in advance, yet the effect is less “predictable” than “edge-of-your-seat.”

Part of that sense of expectation is driven by Bach’s use of the organ. Two of the piece’s themes are basically just scales. The keyboard-only interludes, for instance, are Escher staircases, using the interaction of the parts to create a sense of going up to infinity:

(Since this is Bach we’re talking about, this music later gets flipped upside-down—and the final time it comes in, it alternates going up and down.)

Another theme has precisely the opposite effect, using a combination of downward scales and motion “down” the circle of fifths (flatward) to make you feel like you’re falling into the abyss. The last time this theme comes around, Bach takes us down from the literal top of the Baroque organ keyboard to the very bottom:

Between these passages and the general play of textures, the prelude thus gives a sense of infinite space, a sound that’s truly massive without feeling oppressive.

Then there’s the fugue. In case you were wondering, this is the namesake Wedge:

The bottom half of the Wedge is the so-called “lament” bass (you might remember it from the D-minor Canzona), while the top gives it an equally spicy chromatic harmonization. Look at all those accidentals ♯ ♮! If that’s the fugue subject, then the whole piece must be harshly chromatic. 

Sort of. As it turns out, this fugue is also written like a concerto, and thus intersperses music based around the Wedge with…well:

Those thirty-second notes at the end of the run in m.68 are a pretty big hint as to what Bach’s going for: it’s OK if the ending of the scale is a little bit of a smear, because the overall effect is more important. In these episodes, like in the last movement of Brandenburg 4, you have to say that Bach’s primary goal is to feel like Lightning McQueen:

I’ve already used this piece to illustrate what Bach’s like at his most “pure virtuoso,” but a couple of specific passages are worth pointing out. Take this section:

This is…just ascending scales, keyboard warm-up material. And that goes for both the hands and the feet. Still, the harmony (going “sharp” ♯ along the circle of fifths) constantly ratchets up the tension, and it’s an undeniably cool effect to have the two sets of scales simultaneously going up at different speeds. 

And then there’s the climactic page, before the opening fugue section returns:

This episode begins much the same way, with scales zooming up and down the keyboard. It ends with the scales creatively broken up between the voices and hands. But at a certain point in the middle, Bach finds himself out of room and starts running around in circles:

I love this measure; it’s like watching a dog chase its tail. And it also has zero musical motivation except to keep the rhythm going. (Although subsequent measures “justify” it by echoing some of its figuration.) This is the sound of a virtuoso revving his motor. I am speed.

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“Gott ist mein Heil” is another strange early piece from the Neumeister Chorales; juxtaposing it with the “Wedge” makes for a particularly striking contrast between old-fashioned and “modern” harmony. Still, it’s not quite as amateurish as last week’s “Nun Laßt,” and as usual shows a fun degree of musical restlessness on the part of the young Bach. For instance: try to track the chorale tune throughout this piece. (It’s always the part in long notes.) You’ll notice that it starts out in the tenor, then moves up, before again being pushed into the middle of the texture for a brief spell. Similarly, Bach can never quite make up his mind what to do with the figuration in this piece. Sometimes it’s all flowing sixteenths; sometimes it’s stop-and-start. It’s exactly the opposite of the consistency and uniformity of pieces like the “Wedge.” Maybe not “representative,” but an interesting foil nonetheless.

Along with Bach’s arrangement of an actual Couperin trio, the D-minor Trio is one of the best opportunities to hear Bach trying out the French chamber style at the organ. To be fair, that style was itself derived from Italian music—Couperin did write an Apotheosis of Corelli, after all¹—so this piece has many of the same sequences and figures that you might expect in a Corelli or Vivaldi sonata. But the bite-sized phrases and profusion of ornaments are distinctively French. Along with the Couperin Aria, this is the only Bach piece where he writes quite so many little ornaments for the feet; you can hear me try to stop the pedals from clattering away here:

Then back to Bach’s “greatest chorale hits” (the “Great Eighteen”) with “Von Gott will ich nicht lassen.” It’s a curious piece, one which would sound rather lively if it weren’t in the harsh key of F minor: practically the whole piece is dominated by an upbeat dactylic (“long short-short”) rhythm in the hands, against the slow hymn tune in the pedals. And indeed the tune may originally have been a German love song. Bach probably wouldn’t have known that, but some of that same “folk” or “popular” style still makes its way into this piece. At least, until the ending: holding the final note of the hymn tune, Bach lets the other voices pile up on top of it for the final cadence. Even after all the dark F-minor harmonies that have gone before, it’s still a bit of a shock to finish with this almighty crunch.

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Another week, another chorale partita. As usual, I’ll start by sketching the lay of the land. The main beats of the plot will be pretty familiar by now:

• I: Slightly decorated hymn setting

• II: Two-part variation, with a cello-like bassline against an ornamented version of the tune

• III–VI: variations in running sixteenths, based on various patterns of scales and arpeggios. Some sound like lute music; others look a bit like violin writing

• VII: jig

• VIII: variation with distinctive thirty-second-note rhythms

• IX: grand, slow variation in the style of a sarabande

• X: big finale with all sorts of interludes and changeups.

And as usual, rather than going variation by variation, I’ll stick to one highlight. Probably my favorite moment in the piece comes at the beginning of the fifth variation. I’ve boxed in all of what I construe as “groups of three” in this line:

For the most part, they’re used to break up the symmetry of the rhythm: 4 sixteenth notes partitioned into 1+3. Sometimes (like at the end of the first measure), Bach reverses the pattern and does 3+1 instead; placed consecutively (1+3+3+1), that gives a cool, vaguely syncopated effect. But Bach then lets the 3s run away with him, putting five of them in a row before snapping back to the 4-sixteenth-note grid. That’s the kind of thing happens all the time in “free” passages of Bach preludes—places where there’s only one thing happening—but to hear it in a chorale-based piece, with chords being thumped out in the left hand, is exceptionally cool.

Chorale Partitas, Public and Private

What is a partita anyway? 

If you’re a Bach-a-holic, you probably know this word from the Sonatas and Partitas for violin, or maybe the harpsichord Partitas that Bach published as his Opus 1. In that context, you know exactly what “partita” means: it’s a synonym for “suite.” Which, if you think about it, just means “sequence.” (When Couperin uses the term “ordre” instead, it’s a pretty close synonym.) So that kind of partita is a more or less set sequence of dance types. Allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue, you get the deal.

That’s clearly not what “chorale partita” means. For that meaning, you have to go back a bit further, to the sixteenth-century works by Vincenzo Galilei and others that first used the term partite to designate sets of variations. Think of the word purely as a cognate with “parts”: each partita sopra la romanesca is then one chunk of a bigger piece on the same bassline. (Thus the modern Italian meanings of “game/match” and “item/entry.”) For that matter, that’s also where the meaning of “partita” as “suite” came from: Heinrich Biber chunking his Mensa Sonora into parts (Partien), which were then interpreted as suites. 

Still, there’s not as much of a gap between these two meanings as it would seem. For their part, Baroque dance suites, especially around 1700, often resembled sets of variations, and theorists like F.E. Niedt showed how to construct a suite from a single bassline or theme. And in the opposite direction, chorale partitas like Buxtehude’s Auf meinem lieben Gott could resemble dance suites. So when Bach’s chorale partitas all include movements that look like jigs and sarabandes, the two meanings of “partita” start to blend a bit.

By the way, all of this is a potential red herring: there are no autograph manuscripts of Bach’s chorale partitas, and no evidence that he ever used the term himself. So why bother going down the rabbit hole?

Well, for one thing I think it’s worth reassuring anybody who has “secular” associations for the word “partita.” These pieces aren’t like chorale preludes or fantasies. They have no obvious liturgical function. Heck, they might not even be for the organ.

In some ways, that’s an obvious suspicion for any keyboard piece that doesn’t have a pedal part. Unless it has an obvious liturgical purpose, we all know that any piece without pedals is suspicious, that it’s not “real” organ music. And it’s not helped by the fact that chorale partitas like Ach, was soll ich Sünder machen have whole variations that look for all the world like harpsichord music:

This kind of style brisé writing is incredibly natural on the harpsichord, but frankly awkward and extremely difficult to pull off on the organ. All those held-over arpeggios become thick swells of sound; other notes tied for extra resonance sound weirdly syncopated. On the other hand, the chorale partitas sound pretty great on harpsichord. Just ask Andreas Staier.

Switching instruments also help resolve the question of “function” for these pieces. 

Organ music is for the public. The term “recital” may be a Lisztian invention (and its modern format may be due to Clara Schumann), but organists had been playing something like recitals for centuries prior, both prior to or following services and for other special occasions (like dedicating an instrument). Bach, as director of the Collegium at Zimmerman’s café, was just at the beginning of modern “public” instrumental music culture; he had to invent the harpsichord concerto for them.² But his organ playing had been a public concern for decades before then. And this shows up in the music. Bach organ fugues are usually very clearly delineated, making entrances of the subject mostly easy to hear; meanwhile, his harpsichord fugues often try to hide the entrances as much as possible. 

If the chorale partitas are actually harpsichord music, and thus not as “public” as the chorale preludes, then the fact that they all use solemnly devotional hymn tunes begins to click into place. Even though it’s “sacred,” this may be music is for “private” use, possibly during Lent. (That’s why they’re all jammed in here.) 

Maybe. I’m not sure that it’s really possible to make Sei gegrüsset sound good on pedal harpsichord or clavichord. And at least one early copyist even thought that Ach, was soll ich Sünder machen, despite its “obvious” harpsichord writing, was written for the organ:

Just as lines between the two types of partita could be blurry, public music and private music weren’t always so carefully distinguished. And we should probably try more harpsichord pieces out on the organ.

What I’m Listening To

Ann O’aro – Bleu

I don’t really have a vocabulary to describe Ann O’aro’s music. Working with materials from Réunion’s traditional maloya music, she layers in trombones, piano, and heartwrenching poetry of personal and colonial violence. (See this interview.) This album, for much of its length, strips away the traditional percussion and musical bows that animate both maloya in general and O’aro’s previous two records, although “Lak Otab,” “Saple,” and “Vane lo Sor” bring them back in. In their place, we get small-combo jazz songs (“Bleu,” “Les Ailes du Cafard”), piano ballads with electronics (“In Utero Militari,” “Lanbordaz”) and sometimes trombone (“Lacrimosa”), and even one track (“Bouyon lo Rosh”) for bare vocals.

That still doesn’t really tell you much about how it sounds. And, like I said, I’m not really sure how I’d convey that. It doesn’t sound much like any of the maloya musicians listed on the genre’s Wikipedia page. Nor is it much like most small-combo jazz, or most ballads, although there is an occasional French-movie-soundtrack quality to it. I’ve spent all week puzzling over it. But that’s been no hardship: this music is hauntingly beautiful and sonically fascinating. Bleu might be my record of the year so far.

La Morra, Teatro dei Cervelli, and Francesco Corti – Music in Golden-Age Florence: 1250–1750

Having read Anthony Cummings’ new book on Florentine music a couple months ago, I was eagerly awaiting the companion CD. Now that it’s here, I can confirm: listen to the album first, and go to the book when you want to look up something cool you hear.

You might end up just going through the whole book anyway though, since most of the songs here are fascinating. (The performances are uniformly very good as well.) Cummings, Corti, and Co. have done a great job of picking excellent pieces that aren’t done to death. It would have been easy or safe to load up on the standard anthology pieces for each era, but instead, practically everything on this album is somewhere between underexposed and completely obscure—even in relatively well-known genres and time periods like the 16th-century madrigal. I would consider myself a fan of trecento music, but they found a very nice Landini that I didn’t know at all. Similarly, I had never heard these 17th-century monodies by Antonio Brunelli, Giovanni Pietro Bucchianti, and other names that aren’t “Caccini” or “Monteverdi.” And the later music is similarly revelatory. There’s a lot to learn from this album

Erika de Casier – Still

I’m not writing real record reviews here, so I don’t usually feel the need to say anything about albums I don’t like; I’d rather vouch for something fun or interesting instead. Put this album in the latter category, I guess: I hated it pretty much all the way through, but it’s fascinating why it’s so awful.

Even more than on her previous album, de Casier’s whole schtick here is to take the worst tendencies of ‘90s R&B—songs that go nowhere, vocal noodling, tunes and chord progressions so formulaic they’ could put a cookie cutter to shame—and take out all the things that made that music good: no punchy beats, no gripping or soaring vocals, barely any hooks at all. (The music critics who’ve compared this album to Aaliyah deserve to be fined.) She’s hardly the only singer making sanded-down versions of “Y2K” music, drum and bass songs that sound like they were sung into a pillow to avoid waking their parents up. But at least PinkPantheress’s songs move; “Lucky” is the only song on this album with a pulse, and de Casier sings it like she just downed a bottle of cough syrup.

OK, so what’s interesting about that? Well, consider de Casier’s most recent prior musical project:

I have not been kind to NewJeans here (and de Casier wasn’t involved in their best song to date), but “Super Shy” (and, I guess, “Cool With You”?) is at least aggressively catchy. It’s memorable. That’s part of what can be aggravating about their music: you won’t forget it, even though there’s barely any music in it. I think de Casier forgot the part where you make people actually care about what they’re hearing. And perhaps her NewJeans cowriters and producers (dare I say Min Hee-Jin?)—or even just the creative environment of writing for a K-pop group instead of herself—deserve more credit than we thought.

TWICE – With YOU-th³

TWICE’s new album is a fascinating counterpoint to de Casier’s, because it jumps on exactly the same trends that NewJeans have helped spread in K-pop, but with completely different musical results.

TWICE doesn’t have particularly great singers. Of course, that’s kind of beside the point: their sometimes amateurish singing can be kind of charming (or “relatable”), in ways that are presumably meant to fit the perspective of the lyrics. And I like plenty of groups with worse live singing; the studio recording is most of what I’m listening to anyway (vocal processing tech is awfully good at at this point). But TWICE’s lack of strong vocals is certainly noticeable, both in live clips and even in studio recordings. 

And yet, JYP has consistently pushed TWICE up to near the top of their ranges; the choruses (typically led by Nayeon or Jihyo) will sit around C5, while near the end of songs Jihyo often has to wail something around F5 in the background. Sure, it can sometimes sound a bit rough (the high notes in “Dance the Night Away” are about as strained as I can take), and their voices often crack in live performances. But obviously there’s intent behind having them consistently squeak out these notes. Just like when IVE are given songs that are “too high.”

As it turns out, climactic moments are generally good things for songs to have. Not that every song has to have a big high note. But for high-energy music like most of TWICE’s singles, having that energy come across in the vocals is a huge part of the effect. When you hear somebody work to sing in their upper range, it really gets your blood pumping (whether or not the sound is grating to you), just as a great beat gets your muscles moving almost involuntarily. A singer doesn’t have to have Whitney Houston hair-standing-on-end power to deliver a climax; beside, the overall high range of the chorus is just as relevant as the actual “high note.”

TWICE’s new album doesn’t disappoint in this aspect of the production. The vocals are delivered with plenty of intensity. Jihyo has to sing an A♭5 (head voice, but still) at one point in “I GOT YOU” and she has a high C in standout album track “BLOOM.” The nine member’s voices are blended and harmonized to produce a big vocal sound with a lot of punch. It’s vintage TWICE.

Except for, well, almost everything else about the music. “ONE SPARK” and album track “RUSH” are both built around variations of a sped-up “Funky Drummer” break—aka the “Powerpuff Girls” drums, aka the “Super Shy” drums. For good measure, both throw in a Jersey Club beat (“ONE SPARK” around 1:40; “RUSH” throughout). When it comes to tunes, they’re also both significantly more muted than songs like “TALK THAT TALK”; “I GOT YOU” is so melodically subdued that I thought I’d missed the chorus the first time I heard it. It’s very trendy music, with the fingerprints of Erika de Casier and her ilk all over it. 

The fascinating thing to me is that this album ends up feeling almost like a photo negative of NewJeans. There’s a lot of fun stuff happening in the music, lots of energy and excitement in the singing. There are tunes instead of catchphrases; the songs have chord progressions, multiple clearly delineated sections, and almost a full minute more music than Get Up’s tracks, on average. 

And yet…none of it is particularly catchy. (A shocking statement for the group that brought us “LIKEY” and “FEEL SPECIAL.”) Even though I liked the song, it took me three or four listens to be able to remember the tune of “ONE SPARK.” Good musical bones but a slightly less than memorable result: despite working with the same musical materials, TWICE managed to come out with the inverse of “Super Shy.” 

Also liked…

Residente – LAS LETRAS YA NO IMPORTAN

Amanda Majeski, Simon O’Neill, and Katarina Dalayman with Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra – Janáček: Katya Kabanova

Aziza Brahim – Mawja

Kalaha – Nord Havn

Natascha Rogers – Oneida

Mina Cho and The Gugak Jazz Society – Greekorea, “Greeting the Moon”

What I’m Reading

It’s been a while since I read a ton of novels in general, but I especially haven’t reread one in something like a decade. Partly, that’s because I don’t normally obsess too much about new translations (although if it’s of a book I haven’t read, that can get me to actually finally sit down with it). But the reviews of Adrian Nathan West’s new version of Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps were awfully encouraging. And frankly I went through the book way too quickly last time; I barely remembered any of the specifics. 

The Lost Steps is also just a good book to revisit for someone like me—and probably for you too—because it’s surely one of the very best “music novels,” at least when it comes to classical and traditional musics.⁴ Carpentier, along with maybe Mario de Andrade, had the best musicological and musical training of any canonical author since Sor Juana, and it shows. So even if the Beethoven in E.M. Forster, Milan Kundera, Clarice Lispector, and Thomas Mann is justifiably famous, Carpentier simply knows more about this stuff than them, making his chapters about listening to the Ninth Symphony (near the middle) and rediscovering the desire to compose (near the end) worth the jacket price on their own. Plus, it’s fun to read Carpentier half-mocking older scholars’ attempts to speculate about “the origins of music”—and when his protagonist revises his thoughts on “primitive music” after going into the jungle, the results are in some ways strikingly (suspiciously?) close to what later ethnomusicologists who “went to the jungle” (Tony Seeger, Steve Feld) have had to say. 

In any case, “showing that he knows stuff” is a big part of Carpentier’s “Baroque” style in general. The Lost Steps’ range of reference is pretty dizzying, and not just in music (although how many other novels bring up Albéric Magnard and André Schaeffner?); the laughably erudite party scene near the beginning is especially trippy. And the form of the text can also be pretty Baroque, sometimes in vocabulary but especially in the torturous, longwinded sentences, endless paragraphs, and fragmented storytelling. Don’t necessarily expect to be able to figure out what’s going on until a couple of pages into a given chapter.

All of that does indeed come across better in West’s version: it’s much harder to read than the old Harriet de Onís translation, but in a way that doesn’t feel gratuitous. As far as I can tell (or have read), the new sense of difficulty is a result of being more faithful to Carpentier’s style in Spanish, as opposed to deriving from “foreignizing” literalism like (so I’m told) Pevear and Volokhonsky’s Russian. I was much more impressed by the novel this time around: it’s now easy for me to understand why it has such a reputation. 

That said: man, does this translation ever fail when it comes to music. It’s galling to read West crow about the howlers of other translators in his introduction, only to give us pathetic errors like “partitur” for “score,” “a fifth of horn” for “horn fifth,” “preamble” for “prelude,” and “oratory” for “oratorio.” Obviously, not every translator can be a music expert (I don’t entirely blame John E. Woods and his editors for writing “Bohemian flute” instead of “Boehm flute”), but it’s just sad that a translation of a novel so centered on music wasn’t looked at by somebody who knows what an oratorio is. It also made me (with my limited Spanish) hypervigilant for other (nontechnical) false cognates, which did seem to appear now and then.

So, a good novel, and a useful translation—read it! But I hope it’s not the last word. Or at least give us a revised edition, one that’s been looked over by someone who knows half of what Carpentier did about music. 

A few others: 

• Smithsonian Magazine – How the Memory of a Song Reunited Two Women Separated by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

• South Side Weekly – Dreams of Work and Play

• London Review of Books – Lady This and Princess That: On Buchi Emecheta

• Sapiens – Replacing Plastic Prayers With Biodegradable Blessings in the Himalayas

• The Verge – The direct influence of Twin Peaks on Zelda

• Esquire – Pierre Thiam on Sustainable Ingredients and Beer

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

1. Really, it’s true of French Baroque music in general: Lully’s birth name was, in fact, Giovanni Battista Lulli.

2. Brandenburg 5, to be fair, did come first.

3. I just realized what the title is doing, and I’ve never been sorrier for figuring something out.

4. Carpentier’s own Baroque Concerto—no Bach, but Vivaldi is a character—also goes on the list.