March 21st of each year is the date on which I celebrate the birthday of J. S. Bach. For those who are interested, a curious set of circumstances arranged that for many years, while the Vatican decreed that the Catholic world must adopt the Gregorian Calendar, Bach was born in a region where the dates were different, and so there is some disagreement about exactly when we should celebrate Bach's birthday. In the past, I have tried to describe in greater detail the calendric details of the problem, but this year I will focus on the composer himself.
Johann Sebastian Bach's family contained a large number of musicians. It also contained a large number of individuals named Johann, in fact almost every eldest boy in the family bore that as his first name. In family conversations, our favorite composer was known as Sebastian, for that reason.
After the death of Bach in 1750--a date that is used also as the date of the death of Baroque Music--it became necessary to catalog Bach's enormous output, and this huge job was taken up by one Wolfgang Schmeider. Rather than number Bach's works chronologically (so that his first composition was numbered Opus 1), Schmeider numbered Bach's work structurally (according to genre); that is, all the cantatas were numbered 1 through 200 or so, after which came the motets, then the masses, then the passions, and so on.
Most of Bach's most popular works--at least his best known works--have the property that they sound very ordinary, but skillfully composed. This is probably because Bach was such a consistent and logical composer (don't ask me what I mean by logical) that it became reasonable to create a system whereby anyone who wanted to write harmony that sounded correct could do so, following certain rules and principles. In a sense, modern harmony is harmony according to Bach. Even Beethoven, Brahms, and many of the romantic composers write Bachian harmony, except when they needed to stretch those principles in order to be more expressive, according to romantic musical needs. Many great composers referred to Bach as the father of them all, sometimes with adoration, and often with frustration.
Musical Journalism
In the time of Bach, composers were expected--required--to compose new music for every occasion: birthdays, funerals, marriages, and even for each Sunday. So composers were not expressing their deepest feelings in each composition, but rather delivering music for a deadline. (In spite of this situation, many or most of Bach's pieces stand up well against the most inspired compositions of other composers, though Bach tended to wish that he had the leisure to write music that was truly his personal expression.)
Bach very often recycled his non-church music into music for church (but seldom or never the other way). The amazing B minor Mass, which contains movement after amazing movement of gorgeous music, contains a great deal of material borrowed from other Bach cantatas or concertos. This procedure is called parody composition.
The Gloria of the B minor mass is a particularly grand movement. Bach was an extremely religious person, almost to the extent that he was defined by his beliefs. In another man, this could have been seen as a failing, but the teachings of Jesus expressed his world-view so well simply because he explored them in such detail. More than half the volume of Bach's musical composition was in his 200+ cantatas, and the ideas in them--even if formulaic to us in the 21st century--covered a wide gamut of religious thought for his times. Furthermore, these cantatas are only the ones that have survived; when I surmise that Schmeider began his cataloging process in 1942, possible 2/3rds of Bach's Cantatas were already lost.
Secular Compositions
Bach had several sons, almost all of whom were musicians. (We know little about his daughters; which is not unexpected from a time when the achievements of women were considered insignificant. We do know that one of his daughters was married to a man named Agricola, who served as an assistant to Bach in his later years.) One of the reasons that Bach's sons were important is that when Bach moved to Leipzig--a city of great significance to music, since Telemann, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wagner all lived and worked there--he found himself in charge of the musical activities of the famous Zimmerman's Cafe. The musical evenings of this venue had become famous, and Bach was happy to take up the directorship of the music, because it afforded an opportunity to display the talents of his musical sons, who were capable keyboardists. Bach wrote many concertos to be performed in this place, including rewrites of existing concertos for violin and oboe and so on. We are fortunate indeed for this set of circumstances, because the music of many of those concertos for oboe, etc. are now lost, but the music for the keyboard versions remain. The history of Zimmermann Kaffeehaus is interesting. These concertos, as well as the concertos Bach wrote as calling-cards for various German nobles, are the closest things to Symphonies that Bach wrote, except perhaps for his set of four Ouvertures, which are dance suites after the model of music composed for the French kings in Versailles.
Academic Compositions
Bach had his theoretical side, which led him to compose sets of pieces in the most common keys; for instance his two-part inventions. There are 15 of these, in the keys of C major, C minor, D major and minor, E Flat major, E major and minor, F major and minor, G major and minor, A major and minor, B Flat major, and B minor.
You might wonder whether the keys that are omited have to do with the difficulty of the key-signatures. You would not be exactly right; these keys were the conventional ones in which sets were written (yes, other composers also wrote sets of works), but the problem was with tuning. In Bach's past, instruments were tuned in such a way that two notes a perfect fifth apart, for instance, had frequencies in the ratio of 2:3, and which therefore sounded smooth when played together. But by Bach's time, the ears of people had become accustomed to a little roughness in the sounds of chords, and it was possible to play music in quite distant keys; in fact all these 15 keys. Bach, in later years, devised a tuning system, or developed an existing system, using which it was possible to write pieces in all twelve keys. Some writers believe that Bach's tuning was that of Equal Temperament, which is the tuning we have today, in which none of the fifths are perfect. Others believe it was a very creative compromise in which some fifths, and some thirds were in integer ratios, and did sound smooth. The set is the famous 48 preludes and fugues for keyboard, called The Well-Tempered Clavier. They are by no means merely academic works; almost every one is a masterpiece. Many experts agree that they were intended to be played on a clavichord, an interesting type of keyboard instrument that is very rare today, and was probably not common in Bach's day either. But the compositions are titled as for the keyboard.
There are also a set of 15 Three Part Inventions, or Sinfonias; 6 Trio Sonatas for Organ, a set of 21 organ preludes and fugues (or sometimes fantasia and fugue), a set of 6 concertos for ensembles ranging from large to small--the Brandenburg Concertos; and a set of fugues, The Art of Fugue. The last is emerging as a compilation of fugues Bach wrote throughout his lifetime, based upon a particular subject, and not a final project he undertook in his declining years. These sets were intended to be instructional, to give examples of the possibilities within a particular form.
While the large-scale pieces of Bach are beautiful, the small-scale pieces are beautifully intimate as well, and display Bach's counterpoint well. Counterpoint is the art of combining different melodies concurrently together. Listeners new to this device find it confusing at first to hear every part seemingly going its own way. Eventually, though, the different melodies seem logical and right, and it is possible to hear the melodies in the lower voices as adding texture, so that it is possible to ignore them as melodies, and to know that they are present, and to feel that their presence is welcome. A particular instance of counterpoint is Imitation, where a lower voice imitates a melodic fragment from a higher voice. Contrapuntal imitation is practiced by composers even today.
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