Week 27: 6 May 2024 – “Ich ruf zu dir,” Trio Sonata No.2, and Easter 6
Plus: What comes next?, SOLAR power, Xhosa sound archives, 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.
Good timing. I had Anishinaabe singer-songwriter Leonard Sumner on my list to dig into at some point, and I managed to pick the week that he released a new EP. Travelling Light is a quick listen (16 minutes), but a nice one, showing a good deal of Sumner’s range. His music often rides the line between hip-hop and spoken word, with backings blending from country to folk-rock. That’s all on display here: on opener “Tulips & Begonias,” he lays down relaxed autobiographical bars over an R&B beat; by contrast, the remaining three tracks deliver heavier material about history, memory, and land over rock-type instrumentals. (There are also some sounds from indigenous percussion, and—on “From the Ashes”—a dose of reggae.) It’s hard to build a recognizable musical identity as an independent artist, but from 2013’s Rez Poetry to this album, Sumner has stuck to his guns and managed just that.
Week 27: 6 May 2024 – “Ich ruf zu dir,” Trio Sonata No.2, and Easter 6
Please save applause for the end of each set
Ach Gott, von Himmel sieh’ darein, BWV 741
Ach Herr, mich armen Sunder, BWV 742
Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesus Christ, BWV 639
Trio Sonata No. 2 in C minor, BWV 526
O Gott, du frommer Gott, BWV 767
“Ach Gott” is kind of a crazy piece. Most obviously, it’s written to sound huge, in thick four-voice writing that expands to five when a second pedal part enters on the final page. Not many Bach chorales specify “organo pleno” registration (although many sound great on full organ): he, or at least the copyists that have handed the piece down to us, had to be sure that the piece would be loud and in your face.
But probably more important is this chorale’s harmonic language, which goes beyond “crunchy” and into territory that sounds almost modernist. Consider these measures:
Notice how many of the F♯s here don’t go back up to a G, but instead jump around bizarrely to another note. In m.15, for instance, an F♯ in the left hand is held gratingly against a G below and a B♭ above; yet that voice simply leaps away from the dissonance, landing eventually on an E♭ an augmented second away. Stunningly, the right hand then comes in with another F♯, which “resolves” to an E♮. You can parse these harmonies if you want (Gm, F♯°4/3, Eø4/3, Aø, thanks for asking!), but it’s almost impossible for the ear to make sense of them in the moment. Mozart’s "Dissonance" quartet has nothing on this.
If you waded your way through that description, you might have noticed that, in some sense, the harmonic strangeness of this piece is actually a product of melodic strangeness. Some of that strangeness comes from the kind of meandering melodic line that Bach liked to write throughout his career:
And oddly, almost none of it comes from restrictions of counterpoint, which is often the culprit for Bach’s weirdest and most off-putting music. There are passages that, I think, are meant to sound kind of like canons or fugatos:
But these are just two free melodic voices, and the top one is simply strange because it wants to be. There is no good reason for this voice to jump from a dissonant F♯ (above a B♭) to an equally dissonant A. It’s unlikely to be simply amateurish clumsiness—amateurs are less likely to write such provocatively non-normative music. Why exactly the piece adopts such a strange musical language is hard to say. But it’s a very cool effect, and uniquely dissonant even in Bach’s world of “strange tones.”
BWV 742, a piece “reattributed” to Bach when the Neumeister collection came to light, could not be more different. “Ach Herr” is a pretty piece, and pretty in very predictable ways. Based on a relatively by-the-book chorale harmonization, the piece goes through a series of different ways of ornamenting its solo voice, each reasonably standard and reasonably crowd-pleasing. There are some egregious “errors” in the counterpoint (a long series of obvious parallel fifths in mm.9–10), but if one were to judge harmonic “maturity” by normativity, you would have to assume that BWV 742 was written by a better-studied composer than BWV 741. Some scholars have tried to insist that BWV 741 was either by child Bach, or by another, less competent composer. But you can judge for yourself which of these two pieces you think is by the more experienced composer, by the older Bach.
That’s as good a segue as any for “Ich ruf zu dir”: I once had a friend tell me that their parents insisted on this chorale being a deathbed chorale, the sound of Bach repenting over a lifetime of sins. Of course, this piece is from the Orgelbüchlein and was thus actually written when Bach was no older than 32 or so. And likely quite a bit younger.
Still, it’s not hard to see why this piece sounds like it has a lifetime’s weight behind it. Forget about organ recordings—this is the one you need to hear:
Lipatti, somewhat poetically, was 33 when he made this recording, potentially matching the age of the piece’s composer. Sadly, unlike Bach, he wouldn’t live to make any more music. Maybe that’s where the story came from; I wouldn’t blame anybody for linking this piece that strongly to Lipatti.
The one thing the piano recording can’t do is convey how strange of a fit this piece is for organ. Not only is it in the stressfully-tuned key of F minor, but that bassline—those repeated eighth notes—resembles nothing more than one of Bach’s pulsating cello lines. This piece arranges so well (it has to be one of Bach’s most-performed organ pieces by sheer dint of its popularity among other instrumentalists) in part because it already seems like an arrangement. It probably wasn’t, but it maybe shows the impact that arranging other music (Vivaldi concertos) for organ had on Bach’s style.
Speaking of string music for organ. Since we’re reaching the end of the series, we’re going to be saying goodbye to a lot of genres. Here, at long last, is the final trio sonata.
Even more than usual, this trio really does seem to have been a sonata or concerto for string ensemble. The writing is deliciously idiomatic for strings, and makes extremely good sense when actually played by them.
The obverse is that it’s also often beyond awkward for the organist. Ungainly stretches and leaps:
Pedal passages that seem to ask for one foot to bounce around while the other stays in a different register:
Rapid-fire disasters for the left hand:
And of course the notorious pedal part in the last movement, which asks you to rapidly cross the feet behind one another, and often stays in an uncomfortably low register for whole measures at a time:
This last movement, written in the extremely fast time signature of “cut 2” (not cut time, not 2/2: cut 2) is the D-minor concerto’s only serious competition for the title of “most technically challenging Bach organ piece.” A full-fledged fugue engaging all three parts, this movement is as exciting as it is bewildering for the organist. Those sixteenth notes in the hands can almost give you whiplash as they snap past, and it’s genuinely thrilling when the pedals come in with the theme. The tune begins with two long notes, just long enough for you to process: “Is that music even possible for the feet??” Yeah, it is.
I’m getting ahead of myself. The previous two movements are equally compelling in their own ways. Certainly, the first movement has its own kind of athletic propulsion, and includes some of Bach’s most elaborate extensions of Vivaldi’s harmonic techniques. Take this passage:
That’s a whole four-measure phrase (and then some) elaborating a single C minor chord. Most strikingly, this passage comes after an identical copy in G minor: Bach has spent these pages moving…very…slowly.
So when the harmony snaps back to life with sequences on the next page, it’s one of the most satisfying moments in any of the trio sonatas:
What a way to return to the home key—to set up the recapitulation! Bach doesn’t normally perform such long-range manipulations of our sense of time. This piece is special.
So is the slow movement, albeit in less flashy ways. I couldn’t point to a specific moment in the slow movement and say “see, this explains why the piece is so pretty, so moving.” The ending is very nice, and a touching change of pace. The opening theme is graceful and flowing. And what comes in between expertly modulates harmonic tension, ratcheting up and down in gradually paced increments. But I can’t really do it justice with a description. Just listen and enjoy.
Another genre to finish out: O Gott, du frommer Gott is our last chorale partita. Like the others, I’ll start out with a skeletal overview of the variations. And like the others, the structure will seem pretty familiar:
Partita I. Full, keyboard-style harmonization of the chorale
Partita II. Two-part variation (bicinium), with ornamented fragments of the tune in the right hand. Some cool echo effects for good measure.
Partitas III–VI. Variations in running notes, first distributed over all the voices (III), then just the right hand (IV), again distributed, but in longer strings (V), and finally in the left hand (VI).
Partita VII. Slow, elegant variation in triple time.
Partita VIII. Even slower, expressively chromatic variation. Think Goldberg Variation 25.
Partita IX. Grand finale, with all the usual tricks: sudden tempo changes, echo effects, repetitions up and down the octave, the whole kit and caboodle.
There’s no point in going through the variations in any more detail, but I would like to single out the left-hand Partita VI. None of Bach’s other chorale partitas have a variation or line quite like this one. That left hand part is remarkably distinctive, not least because of how Bach positions the left-hand tune against the harmony: it’s constantly made to create suspensions, to get a harmonic impulse to kick-start the line’s journey off a syncopated longer note. Without being particularly fast or active, the result is wonderfully propulsive, a perfect mini-climax before the more contemplative Partitas VII and VIII. (But just you wait for the real climax in Partita IX.)
What’s Next?
I’ve been getting two versions of this question since almost the beginning of this series. Let me take them in turn:
“Do you have any plans to bring back the recital series next year?” No!
Although if somebody knows of an institution that would be interested in making a hire with this job description, I’m all ears!
I do have future solo organ projects, of course, and I don’t plan to stop playing Bach anytime soon.
To answer a surprisingly common question: “complete Buxtehude” is not on the docket, again unless somebody would like to sponsor such a project. I might as well just list the “post-Bach backlog” I’ve gradually dreamt up (saying this publicly can only be a push to actually work on these pieces!): pieces by Jehan Alain, Grażyna Bacewicz, Miriam Gideon, George Frideric Handel, Jennifer Higdon, Libby Larsen, Felix Mendelssohn, Shulamit Ran, Max Reger, Fela Sowande, and the rest of Florence Price’s organ works. (I am not committing to playing any of these immediately.)
“Do you have any plans for this blog after the series is over?” Maybe!
Somewhat vexingly/amusingly, the Venn diagram of Left on Reeders and Bach at Bond attendees is more “Mastercard logo” than “blurry circle.” Clearly there’s some audience for writing here irrespective of actual recitals.
So I’ll leave it more or less up to you what my next steps here are. I wouldn’t want to keep writing at anything like the same volume or pace,1 but there are comparable and related projects that I can imagine which might fit this space. —With the caveat that they would only be worth doing for, well, an actual readership.
That means: if you’re for some reason interested in more of this, feel free to make your voice heard and fill out the poll below!
https://forms.gle/5yxh53ckK8rmojud9
What I’m Listening To
Dua Lipa – Radical Optimism
This is a solid, good pop album. It feels important to stress that because, by Dua Lipa’s standards, a merely good album is a massive disappointment, and that’s kind of an unfair reaction to this music.
There are compelling touches all over this album, and I was especially taken with some of the material on the back half. The thirty-second-note anapests and heavy syncopations on “Falling Forever” really push things forward; it’s a great dance track. The mix of acoustic and electric instrumentals on “Maria” is a fun change of pace from Dua Lipa’s sound to date, and they create some great energy in the prechorus. And I love a lot of what’s going on in the synths in “Happy For You,” even if they get buried in the mix and the song never keeps up any of the effects for long enough.
Still, Dua Lipa has set higher standards for herself than “some cool stuff!” The hooks on the three singles are okay, but they don’t hold a candle to any of the hits from Future Nostalgia or even her debut. It’s not like she’s changed her style much: it’s still mostly disco-derived electropop. And even the main collaborators are the same: Caroline Ailin, who co-wrote “New Rules” and “Don’t Start Now” is now back for almost every track.
Maybe that’s part of the problem. Part of what animated Future Nostalgia was the feeling that you were getting the best material from a dozen songwriters all at once. It certainly had a unifying vision and sound, but all of those creative voices gave it a sense of variety and freshness throughout. It’s one of those albums that feels like a greatest hits compilation, full of ideas.
Even the individual songs on Future Nostalgia are more internally differentiated than anything on Radical Optimism. On a lot of the new songs, the production (and sometimes even the writing) doesn’t change all that much from verse to chorus, so that the songs can feel weirdly flat, even if they do build an arc into their harmonic or melodic construction. It couldn’t be more of a contrast with the big build in “Physical,” the massing of backing vocals in the choruses of “Levitating,” or the gradual layering of strings, guitars, and percussion in “Don’t Start Now.” This is pretty good music, but Dua Lipa can do a lot better, potentially even with this exact material.
Riccardo Pisani and La smisuranza – Harpa Romana. Arias & Cantatas by the 17th-Century Virtuosos
François Lazarevitch and Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien with Julie Roset and Lucile Richardot – Doux silence
Two albums of “vocal chamber music” from the two halves of the 17th century, both full of material that’s less than likely to be familiar. They’re both excellent and surprising, albeit in very different ways.
The harp was a major continuo instrument in the earlier seventeenth century, but I practically only hear it in Monteverdi opera recordings and performances. This album fixes that, offering a good selection of solo repertoire alongside voice-and-harp monody that’s not quite like anything I’ve heard. The “big names” here are composers like Luigi Rossi and Marco Marazzoli (you’re officially in too deep if you said “Oh, of course, Marazzoli!”);2 the rest are truly obscure Roman composers like Orazio Michi, Giovan Carlo Rossi, Vespasiano Roccia, and Mario Savioni. I won’t claim that they’re capital-g Great composers of monody like Francesca Caccini or Barbara Strozzi, but they write fluently in the style, and many of the arias are genuinely expressive or danceable. I had a great time discovering this music.
And the harp. (Let me be clear: I’ve heard and even performed with Baroque harp before, but never in such an extended dose.) I had a bit of cognitive dissonance while listening to this album, since the sound of a Baroque harp ends up almost exactly halfway in between harpischord and theorbo. That goes for the literal sound, the resonance and attack of the strings, which can have some of the plush and gentle pluck of a lute, or can also lean toward with the wiry or even metallic harpsichord sound. But it especially goes for the figuration, which (if you think about harp technique) can lie somewhere in between the two—the strumming patterns, the use of scales versus arpeggios, the filler notes. Harp continuo has its own sound and we should hear more of it. (The playing, suffice it to say, is lovely—and so is the singing.)
We should hear more of the repertoire on Doux silence as well. The air de cour repertoire includes some absolutely ravishing music, and barely any of it is widely known. Chabanceau de la Barre, featured on the opening track, is sort of a known quantity among Baroque sickos, but Bertrand de Bacilly, with lovely songs scattered throughout the album, had never crossed my radar before.
But probably the bigger selling point of this album is what Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien do with it. Obviously the playing and singing is great, but there’s also a lot of fun to be had in the arrangements. You don’t have to particularly love the bagpipes to appreciate what the musette adds in some of the more “pastoral” tracks. (On the other hand, when the bagpipes are done playing: “doux silence” indeed.) The playing is vibrant and imaginative throughout, really adding juice to composers like (cough) Lully, who can really use it sometimes…
SOLAR – Colours
I wonder if Solar actually wants her albums to sound like a hot mess. To be clear: a lot of the songs, both here and on 容 : FACE are genuinely great. But they make absolutely no sense together. 容’s unholy clash of R&B, electropop, house, and (inexplicably if you don’t know MAMAMOO’s discography) big band within the span of five tracks is sort of like being served a slice of chocolate cake as part of your salad course—and the salad includes meatballs for some reason. The cake (“HONEY”) is really good but the overall effect is beyond jarring.
COLOURS has an extra track to work with, so there’s even more going on here. House verging on psy-trance on “Colors” gives way to acoustic-driven pop-rock on “But I,” in turn followed by power-electropop on “Empty.” (I like all three songs, and I’ll have more to say about “But I” below.)
I do generally like and praise musicians for “genre-bending” music or albums that include a lot of variety. Hell, I even extolled an album by Solar’s groupmate Moonbyul for exactly those reasons. But I don’t think I’m being inconsistent by complaining about whiplash here. There’s a problem with this albums’s diversity beyond its collisions of genres.
I think the biggest shock comes from the contrast in vocal styles. Solar (like fellow MAMAMOO member Wheein) is one of the relatively few K-pop idol group singers with real pipes, which is to say with traditionally excellent vocal technique and a lot of power to put behind it. Part of that technical competence is an ability to do a lot of types of vocals well, including types that sound like they’re coming from completely different people. It’s downright weird to hear the “children’s music” gentle vocals of “Easy Peasy” (a dead ringer for IU’s “Drama,” sung in the same style) right before the Amy Winehouse impression on “Blues.” Solar’s rapping on the early tracks probably doesn’t do her any favors here either.
Still, if I just put them on by themselves, there are some great songs here. “But I” is Radiohead’s “Creep” up a half-step, with its quiet-loud guitar contrasts distributed over a whole band. It might not have Johnny Greenwood’s guitar blasts, but it does have a compelling rhythmic chug to it, and shows off Solar’s vocals brilliantly. And “Blues,” for all of its second-order sonic bluesface, is a pretty showstopping performance, one that she’s justifiably proud of. Put these songs on playlists and try to forget that the album exists.
IVE – IVE SWITCH
Having run out of confusing album titles (I’VE IVE, I’VE MINE), Starship are now being a bit more direct: IVE are changing things up. A “new concept” and a “new genre of music”—although Leeseo’s follow-up to that last comment is a delightful non-sequitur:
If that’s a new genre of music, sign me up.
In reality, I think it wouldn’t be possible for IVE to name the new genre, because it’s not a genre at all: most of the “new sounds” on this album are transparent imitations of other popular girl groups, especially (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) the sounds HYBE has given to LE SSERAFIM, ILLIT, and of course NewJeans. It wouldn’t be their first time trend-hopping: “Off the Record” (and to a lesser extent “OTT,” also from I’VE MINE) was an obvious knock-off of “Cupid.” (If maybe a better song than the original.)
Here, instead of that midtempo melodic groove with some rap thrown in, we get all of the “2024 K-pop” sounds at once: Jersey club beat on “Accendio” and “Blue Heart”; drum-and-bass sped-up drum samples on “Blue Heart” and “WOW”; stuttering repeated-word/syllable choruses à la “Magnetic”3 on “Accendio” and “RESET.” (You could also convince me to hear some attempt to use sounds from NMIXX with the harmonic structure of “HEYA”—or even some ITZY influence in the doom-horn stabs in “Accendio.”)
That litany of trendy sounds must sound pretty negative. In reality, I basically like this album, although not as much as any of their prior releases. Certainly, musical “knockoffs” don’t bother me—and if that were a reason to criticize this music, it wouldn’t explain the distance between “Off the Record” and “HEYA.” (Or for that matter why Chuu’s take on the “Cupid” style can’t match up to IVE’s.)
I think the bigger problem is that, in adopting these styles, IVE lead producer Ryan Jhun has been forced to mute one of the keys to their musical success to date: memorable melodic writing. The main possible exception to date, “Baddie,” had a rhythmically distinctive and memorable chanted hook, and a nice tune in the post-chorus to boot. By comparison, “HEYA,” as great as its beat is, and as compelling as Liz’s singing can be in the prechorus, just doesn’t have anything quite as sticky.
The contrast is even bigger between “Accendio” and “Kitsch.” The two share a lot of formal DNA: a big melodic buildup leading to a sudden break and a chanted chorus over an almost industrial beat. (This formula really works for me—“Kitsch” was one of my three or so favorite songs of 2023.) But the melodic material in question is completely different. “Kitsch” is built on relatively simple, catchy melodic phrases over a tried-and-true harmonic progression. In other words, it’s built like a classic pop song, at least until the chorus. “Accendio,” on the other hand, is a lot more complex in each of its elements, making them pop less individually and muting the overall effect. It’s still a good song—and maybe it’ll grow on me—but it’s not as overwhelmingly immediate as IVE’s best.
And how could it be? The whole point of IVE’s “new genre” is that it’s a little muted, that the edges are all rounded off, the hooks a little dulled. Like TWICE, I think they’ve done a good job avoiding the least musical results of these styles, the bland nonsense that so many groups are churning out. But it makes me wish they’d just stick to what works.
Also liked…
Microwave – Let’s Start Degeneracy
Kyab Yul-Sa – Murmures d’Himalaya
Bill Laurence and The Untold Orchestra – Bloom
Elim Chan and Antwerp Symphony Orchestra – All These Lighted Things
自由ヶ丘 & 三月 – シンドローム
Stefan Plewniak and Il Giardino d’Amore with Jakub Józef Orlinski, Elsa Dreisig, and Fatma Said – Gluck: Orfeo ed Euridice
What I’m Reading
Ethnomusicology has archive fever of late: everybody seems to want to think about the nature of archives and how they shape our relationships to music and other sound objects. Sometimes this can feel a little navel-gazey (every ethnomusicologist I’ve met happily cops to this as a feature of the field, although they’d probably use the word “reflexive”). But sometimes a book will come along that really shows what you can do with archives.
Enter Noel Lobley’s Sound Fragments. Truth be told, I thought this was a different book when I bought it. Not that I had it confused with something else, but just skimming the description and introduction, I thought it was a book about Hugh Tracey’s work compiling the Internation Library of African Music.
Sound Fragments is in fact a book about that, but thank goodness it doesn’t stop there. Two chapters about Tracey turned out to be more than enough. In that half of the book, Lobley gives an excellent overview of Tracey’s collecting activities, the scope and nature of the collection, and his place in ethnomusicology. He also, as you could only expect, critically evaluates Tracey’s position as a White dude in (for the latter portion of his life) Apartheid South Africa, with direct ties to unsavory exploitation of Black labor in the mines. While Lobley does present a reasonably favorable view of Tracey—who tried his best to fight racist criticisms of African music, even if he often succumbed to stereotype and essentialism himself—he, smartly, doesn’t try to apologise for Tracey. Or, for that matter, to make the case for a posthumous prosecution: he just gives the portrait in all its complexity and then moves on.
It’s a smart move because it decenters Tracey and lets us focus instead on the incredible musical archive he compiled. And this is where the book really heats up. Tracey is dead, and you can’t do much with or about him. But you can do things with the archive. And Lobley, with his colleagues, has done incredible things.
The basic premise of the activities documented in this part of the book is to “repatriate” the archive. In some cases, that can be as simple as wheeling stereo systems into communities and playing the music for people, letting them express their own perspectives and memories in relation to it. That has benefits for the White ethnomusicologist too, of course—if they used these encounters purely as ways of extracting further knowledge out of participants. But Lobley and Co. don’t seem to have operated in that spirit.
And in later experiments with the archive, they really do let go of the reins, handing the materials Tracey collected over to Xhosa activist musicians in order to produce new music. Lobley has a background in curation, and he enables these musicians to curate their own heritage in creative and surprising ways. These later chapters are packed full of fun stories, models for what might be possible with other such archives.
Beyond its content, Sound Fragments is remarkably well-written, occasionally even verging on “exciting.” If you skip the introduction, you won’t feel a particularly heavy presence of theory or disciplinary protocol. And amid all sorts of debates on what to do with colonial collections, it’s a useful intervention. It may not be possible to do exactly the same things with physical artifacts as with sound recordings, but Lobley shows that such objects don’t have to remain static or “tainted” forever—they can be given new life in the right hands.
A few others:
NY Review of Books – How Bondage Built the Church
Places – Black Capitalism and the City
The Verge – The drinking fountain button is tragically misunderstood
JSTOR Daily – But Why a Penguin?
Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!
Unless you all manage to conjure up a couple hundred more paying subscribers, I am not going to keep writing 6000 words a post, and almost certainly not a post every week.
There’s a Frescobaldi thrown in there too. I’m sure it’s because the A&R people said “I don’t hear a single.” Sell-outs!
You won’t catch me dead linking that music video!
The comment about melodic and harmonic strangeness could be much expanded in the context of music like bebop/post-bebop and Bartok Str Qtt 3…but not for a post in a weekly publication!!