BACH
Likewise, in some of his simpler pieces, such as the Prelude #4 in E minor, Chopin lays out his most intimate self in the arrangement of tone and the hesitations between the chords.
To listen to these pieces is to feel the personalities of these composers, dead now and gone for so many years. Talk about immortality, the Singularity: these pieces reproduce parts of their composer’s personalities in each receptive listener, again and again. |
Listening to these pieces I can feel honored and a little at a loss, as I might should a great person open his or her heart to me. Sometimes I can even feel that my pleasures are surreptitious, as they might be should I overhear a sinner’s confessions.
Bach’s music is of another sort. At times his music is gloriously impersonal. A vast system operates beyond his work, snatching it from the page or speakers and translating it to something as large and complex as Nature itself. |
And of course it should be this way: with his 18 children, his pedagogical responsibilities as Kappelmeister at the Thomaskirke, and the endless demand for more and more music placed upon him. Music under these circumstances must be partially, at least, impersonal. It would have to tap into some larger intricacy, some pattern in nature or chemistry or religious belief.
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This is the Thomaskirke in Leipzig, where for 27 years Bach worked as Kapellmeister, producing work after work, every week.
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Thomaskirke, interior. Bach’s music can seem architectural. I think of the nameless medieval stonemason, engineer or carpenter for whom this building is an expression of faith, rather than an expression of self.
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That was the function of sacred music in Bach’s day, as James R. Gaines points out in his quite beautiful book Evening in the Palace of Reason. Bach was, after all, the final and greatest master of the elaborate old system of counterpoint: part science, part metaphysical conviction that the intertwining of voices and themes might reproduce the folding of the divine and earthly realms. Counterpoint represented a nearly alchemical power, and its secrets were jealousy guarded (and fell out of fashion by the end of Bach’s life – its mystical powers not holding up well in an age of reason).
Counterpoint was a means whereby humans might replicate and partake in the Grand Design, the means whereby the music of the spheres might resonate within each earth-bound listener.
And Bach makes me believe in the alchemical dream, the transmutation of mortal experience into something celestial. Listening to some works of Bach I can feel my self dissolve, a little, into this magnificent pattern. My own points and lines seem to vibrate in accordance to an other, unheard melody.
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I have written elsewhere about the appeal of being overwhelmed by vastness. Standing at the edge of the Lauterbrunnen valley, feeling the immensity of the Eiger commanding fully half of my visual field: my sense of self drains from me. For a while, at least, I am whole.