Black Polos and Sweaters

Why is Bach boss?

leadingtone:

Suddenly I had to stop—I had screwed up a turn in the harmony and wasn’t moving toward the goal of G minor anymore. I had embarked upon a Neapolitan odyssey which was now gone quite awry.

“Why do you suppose,” my teacher asked, breaking the extremely uncomfortable silence, “that Bach can be so difficult to memorize?” We were working on the C minor keyboard partita, BWV 826. 

“It’s because nothing can be moved out of place,” he continued. “Not one thing—not one note in a sequence, not one chord in a progression may be disturbed without shattering the whole, nor can one element in any vertical texture be shifted by the slightest degree. Everything is exactly where it should be, and you will never find a way to improve upon it while continually discovering new means such as this by which to destroy it.”

A short time later I would play that particular work for the great Rubinstein pupil Dubravka Tomsic, who spent the first fifteen minutes of our very public time together fussing over voicing and timing in the opening French flourish and the other fifteen minutes repeatedly demanding that I play the first phrase of the ensuing andante with absolutely perfect evenness in front of God and everybody. It was delightful.

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“Today, to what I think is a much more enthusiastic and violent degree than ever before, young creators often concern themselves first and foremost with being iconoclasts—they want nothing more than to push the envelope, heedless of the fact that the surface on which it rests must surely have some edge beyond which there is only free-fall.* Our imaginations are limitless even when our skills are often sharply less so, and this is a good thing, with certain careful caveats. “ 

Musician readers MUST read this, because at times, we get so eager to make something that is uniquely our own that we miss the point of studying the classics; I know I do sometimes. Also because this is a beautiful essay.