And now, a word from our friend, Mr. Bach:
Having recently turned my attention to some of the organ
works of our dear Johann Sebastian Bach I thought I
would seek counsel in order to improve my approach to
these venerable works. It was nice of him to leave
behind some advice for the playing of the organ,
particularly since he was such an avowed master of the
instrument (his contemporaries heaped praise on him from
all sides) and since he himself ought to be a recognized
authority for the playing of his own works. I don't
think he will mind if I share his wisdom with you:
"[with regard to playing the organ]
There is nothing to it. You simply strike the right
notes at the right time, and the instrument plays
itself."
That's it. That's his
glorious advice. And I think he might still be getting
royalties for it.
Still, when a great master
says something, if at first it sounds simplistic and
stupid, like something anybody else could have said,
there might be a hidden depth, a profundity that can
only be grasped by those with insight. In other words,
you have to be something of a sage yourself. If you
are a card-carrying member of "the rabble" you won't
figure it out in a million years.
So I considered his advice,
which he refused to amplify. Bach let his music do the
talking.
Was there a bit of sarcasm lurking behind those words?
After all, it might look simple to somebody who didn't
actually play the organ. The woods are full of people
who thought piano playing was such a great
idea they'd try it themselves and then abandoned the
pursuit when it turned out to require some effort.
Maybe some enterprising lawyer will find a way to sue
concert pianists for making it look easy and thus
misleading the public into trying it at home where
their efforts might result in significant mental
anguish and a sense of failure when they couldn't get
the same results in 24 hours. And this from an
instrument that leaves two of your appendages free
most of the time.
It could be that Bach was
merely irritated when some well-meaning ignorant soul
wanted to know his secret, preferably short and to the
point. The same Bach who wrote such epic musical sagas
as The Well-Tempered Clavier and The Art of the Fugue
was being asked to distill his lifetime of wisdom into
a sound bite. So he bit.
Alfred Einstein--no, not
the guy who decided that E=mc2
--the musicologist. You're
thinking of Albert. Alfred had more respectable
hair.
Alfred Einstein wrote a book one summer
(doesn't everybody spend their summer vacation that
way?) in which he talked about greatness in
music. Mr. Einstein decided that one of the
give-away characteristics of great souls is that they
get irritated easily. Lots of clueless people getting
in the way of their artistic mission make them that
way.
So maybe it was just a
brush-off.
That wouldn't be terribly
helpful. Didn't Bach know he was going to be a
celebrity in a couple of centuries and that with such
celebritiness comes the responsibility to give the
public an up close and personal look into everything
they want an up close and personal look at? Somebody
wrote a book about Beethoven's hair, for crying out
loud. The least Bach could do would be to sit still
for an interview. Maybe spray some platitudes about
taking his preludes one note at a time and how great
his fans were.
Silence.
Well, this wasn't helping
too much. I needed some advice. Not that I couldn't
play his pieces without it, I just thought that there
was an awful lot of room to interpret some notes on a
page and that maybe he favored one way over another.
Did he play his own pieces differently depending on
his mood? Did he incline toward crisp tempi or
more leisurely? Did he favor reed stops or flute
stops? What about the articulation?
Just play the notes. hmmm.
I decided to take him
seriously for a moment. Bach's organ didn't do
dynamic swells. There are no indications of loud and
soft in Bach, and very few that deal with which stops
to use. There are also very few articulation marks.
When you are playing in a church the length of
reverberation depends entirely on the space you are
playing in. Sometimes you have to shorten the length
of the notes a little so that the piece doesn't sound
like noisy mud. You may have to adjust the pauses a
bit also to give separation between passages while the
echo dies away at its own pace. Like any professional
ballplayer knows, it is necessary to constantly
adjust. That is something one can't indicate on a
page. And since Bach's organ wasn't capable of gradual
changes in dynamics he couldn't indicate them. But he
could have indicated changes of registration, and he
didn't. Maybe he changed his mind a lot. Or didn't
want to give away his secrets. Or figured that since
every organ was different approximations weren't worth
pursuing.
Bach probably also subscribed to the prevailing
philosophy of his times. Society was well-ordered and
ordained from above. Kings were kings. Peasants were
peasants. There was no such thing as upward mobility.
People knew their place in the world. Things didn't
change that quickly. (Bach was from a family of church
organists going back generations) They were a
manifestation of the eternal. And the organ was
perfectly structured to give one that sense. It didn't
get louder or softer depending upon how the keys were
struck. It could sustain indefinitely in contrast to
the mortality of instruments powered by human lungs.
It was capable of building up masses of sound but was
rarely called to do so. Sound for sound's sake didn't
make sense. It was for the elaboration of an idea, the
spinning out of orderliness in sound. The universe was
a rational place, and music another craft with
definite principles. Follow those principles and you
had a piece worthy of the name music. As Newton's Laws
of Motion governed the universe, so the laws of
counterpoint, of the simultaneous combination of
separate melodies, governed the musical firmament. So
Bach probably wasn't kidding when he suggested that
simply following the written instructions would insure
the music sounded as it should. Interpretation? Individual
interpretation? A piece that sounds different when
somebody else plays it? Who are you kidding? The
eternal is the eternal. Period.
The splendiferous ness of
this thought is that everything that is necessary can
be perfectly represented on the page. Except the
tempo. If that matters. Maybe it doesn't. Only the
notes matter, and their relationship to each other,
not to the whole universe of sounds outside the
piece's view. I've tried this approach, but I'll
confess, sometimes it seems cold and impersonal.
Sometimes even my own recordings on this website
strike me that way. Perhaps if I added some swells, a
more affective leaning on certain tones, playing with
the rhythmic tension in the phrase. My organ has
technology that Bach's didn't have. Would he have used
it? If he had, would he have still been Bach?
I asked Bach's advice, and I got it. He lived in a
very different time and place, and his mind traveled
in very different directions than my own. He'd never
heard of existentialism; never had to put up with
postmodernism. There weren't many isms in those days.
Diversity? Points-of-view? How about Democracy?
Communism? Cell phones?
There are plenty of views
about how Bach should be played, which is convenient
since none of those views is Bach's own. There
have always been those who felt appointed to speak on
his behalf. Some favor a "notes only" approach.
Some claim the Baroque era allowed for quite a bit of
emotional fantasy. There are extremists and there are
moderates. And since Bach's fame is assured and since
there are literally hundreds of recordings of the same
works available to anybody who wants them, I don't
think I need worry about damaging Bach's reputation by
playing him the "wrong" way. In fact, the medium
of this website allows me to try out different
interpretations and to allow you to hear them instead
of commercially releasing only one. In keeping
with the times, you can decide which ones you like and
which ones you don't. Personally I've always
found most valuable those recordings which taught me
something about music whether I would have played the
piece that way or not. So I hope as you listen to these recordings
that you learn something new--or simply enjoy the
music--or...both!
Bach won't mind.
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