the leading tone

Why is Bach boss?

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.

Over the course of my life so far, J. S. Bach has moved slowly and steadily from one of a number of composers whose music I especially enjoy and admire to the center of my musical universe—and yet I often feel that I have the idea of motion backwards, that it is I who have been moving and not him. 

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. 

The American pianist and music critic James Huneker once wrote, “With my prying nose I dipped into all composers, and found that the houses they erected were stable in the exact proportion that Bach was used in the foundation.” 

When we examine the music of the Cantor of Leipzig we are looking over an enormous and varied body of work in which is there is, to be honest, relatively little innovation. Johann Sebastian Bach never grew bored with the dimensions of his worktable, and certainly never once felt oppressed by them. Rather, with his prodigious gifts of expression and with truly stupefying analytic and synthetic skill, he continually mounted an inner expedition through which most every conceivable corner was explored, developed, and left more beautiful and habitable than the adventurer found it. 

I think one critical key to understanding the central, uniquely paternal position of Bach in our culture can be found in the widely circulated graphical narration by Stravinsky, a detail from which we give here:

In Bach, as nowhere else before or after, the relationship between the horizontal and vertical attains perfection in proportion, clarity, and synergy. One does not need a degree in musicology or theory to understand this—it is inherent in the sound. The music of Handel, which in its exuberant craftsmanship provides us ample entertainment and refreshment, does not attain (nor really does it seem even to aspire) to such a height. But in Bach, there is a continual elaboration and expansion of the possibilities of the extant system which forms something like the DNA of Western music. And just as DNA requires only four bases to potentiate a bewildering array of forms, so the “foundation” Huneker speaks of, which has given and continues to give rise to so much, is formed from only a handful of ingredients.  

We see this uniqueness of stature, and the significance of the historical confluence which Bach represents, at work in the way in which his music affected later composers. Without Bach, Western music would have flourished yet, but not at all the same.

It is an artifact of the way in which music history is taught, I think, that we often suppose Mendelssohn to have singlehandedly called Bach forth from the crypt—and while it is certainly true that Mendelssohn was responsible for bringing many of Bach’s works before a large public for the first time, and establishing a certain Bach scholarship, the story is misleading. Decades before, Beethoven had been haggling with his publisher to try to encourage the publication of some of Bach’s output, and Bach’s scores were fastidiously studied by Mozart in the last years of his life especially. Indeed, toward the end of the careers of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms, we see in each an increased fascination with Bach’s craftsmanship which lent to their own works a startlingly fresh vigor and new depth. And Bach underpins the entirety of the poignant tapestry of Chopin, who believed pianists should play from The Well-Tempered Clavier every day. 

Bach is so beautifully expressive. It is my opinion, and you will hopefully forgive me my frankness, that listeners who would characterize Bach’s music as mathematical or mechanical are the very same who need a bass drum hit and a cymbal crash to tell them that a passage of music has become dramatic; who might require an entire string section singing in octaves to assure them that lyricism is afoot; or who would perhaps recall the spiciness of a dish only after an entire bottle of Sriracha sauce had been poured over it. 

The human utterances in Bach are not Faustian or Mahlerian—they are not man struggling against an indomitable, mechanical Jagganath of smokestacks below and stars above, and I think this sometimes makes it difficult for modern ears to relate to Bach. There is grandiose expression in certain of the cantatas and oratorios the like of which is hard to find, but to me those outpourings seem neither existentially ambiguous nor metaphysically cathartic. Such notions would have seemed quizzical to Bach. The great cadenza of Brandenburg 5 is not a depiction of the spewings of an Italian fountain—it’s just f***ing shredding, man. And the startling, sometimes heart-wrending and mind-bending sensitivity with which the man set a text was something he conceived of not as Olympian inspiration, but as Christian duty, in the same way monastic copyists painstakingly illuminated their codices. 

And this, as I think I have written before, is another key to Bach’s greatness—that all of this splendid marvel was born, as was the music of his contemporaries, from a humble yet frighteningly prolific tradition of service music, Gebrauchsmusik. Bach was doing a job. He was providing an essential service to his community, and he came from a large and ancient family which did the same, taking up said mantle much as the second half of the “Goldberg” aria simply picks up where the first half left off. There were cooks and liverymen and musicians, and Bach happened to fall into the latter category, and happened to do everything he did with a tireless and deceptively facile-seeming dedication to excellence. In 1730 writing to the town council of Leipzig, he said, “I find it strange that a German musician should be expected to play admirably in every style now known, be it Italian or French, English or Polish.” But this is precisely what Bach did: he was one of the greatest synthesists in all of Western culture, and not because of Byronic inspiration, but because of the tastes of his employers, which he smilingly and overwhelmingly obliged. 

There is no doubt that he was a genius of the first rank, a rank which he quite possibly occupies alone, but he would never have thought this way: “From an early age I was obliged to work quite hard,” he famously said. “Anyone who is equally industrious can expect similar success.” Bach was a devout Lutheran who believed in the primacy of hard work in subjugation to something larger than himself, and this is something I feel we can learn from—or let me speak for myself, at least—regardless of religious belief or a lack of it.

For in addition to everything he gave us, the man provided for an extraordinarily large family, continually haggled with employers over such details as fresh linens and salt, looked after the well-being (such as it was) and daily routines of dozens after dozens of wards in the cathedral school system of Leipzig, and managed, with little assistance, his own considerable personal and business affairs as a teacher and an artist. There simply was no time, and no need, to ponder the waxing and waning moods of the Muses. To Bach, nothing was cliché or blasé, and everything could be made “relevant”—there was just the question of the artful versus the mediocre, of craftsmanship versus the void. 

We no longer live in the 18th Century. But I believe that young artists struggling to find their paths can continue to take away a great deal from this. At least, I hope that I can. 

* - mixed metaphor!