Bach Books
The Musical Discourse of Servitude
Discussions - Part 3

White Chapter 3, "The Steward of Unmeaning Art: Bach and the Musical Subject"

Continue from Part 2

William L. Hoffman wrote (April 1, 2021):
The Harry White comparison of specific textual affinities in three Da capo arias each by Fux and Bach, respectively,¹ illustrates "the continuity as well as the distinction between servitude and autonomy as agents of musical discourse" in his study, The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the Work-Concept in Fux, Bach, and Handel. This discussion continues in Chapter 3, "The Steward of Unmeaning Art: Bach and the Musical Subject" (Ibid.: 110ff). The shift to Bach from Johann Joseph Fux (Wikipedia) shows that Bach as the "The Steward of Unmeaning Art," according to Charles Burney in 1789,² today is the subject of debate in reception history concerning "its allegiance to Bach as the shining exemplar of an emancipated musical imagination," says White (Ibid.: 18), who sides "with a vigorous affirmation of Bach's musical autonomy." "Those questions about the conflict between intellect and obedience which Satan muses in Paradise Lost are fundamentally reformulated in Bach's compositional behavior," says White (Ibid.: 111). His reading of "Bach's emancipation of the musical subject from 'the very church composer against whose office his music rebelled" (Theodore Adorno)³ "requires me to take account of the sea-change in Bach reception history which has taken place over the past thirty years, because (unlike Fux or Handel) Bach has occupied such a formative role in the development of postmodernist musicological thought."

"The 'either-or' condition of recent Bach reception history, in which his imaginative autonomy is either rigorously deconstructed or taken for granted, expresses a more general crisis in the narrative understanding of western musical culture, especially in Anglo-American musicology of the past thirty years," says White (Ibid.: 111). Burney's judgement, from a Handelian perspective, was that Bach could have achieved greatness by yielding to "popular taste. If only he had simplified his willful self-absorption with the musical subject and the complexities of his own compositional technique, he might have amounted to something," says White (Ibid.: 112). We "cannot condemn Burney's appeal to the aesthetics of entertainment as an impertinence, given the primary role of these aesthetics in current Bach reception history." Instead, "we want to reinstate the historical integrity of Bach's autonomy against the tide of postmodernist critique which seeks to undermine it," he emphasizes (Ibid.: 112f). "It is this critique which preoccupies the first three sections of this chapter: "'Those Masterful Images:' Bach and the New Musicology" [113-16], "'Sympathy in White Major': Deconstructing Bach" [116-25], and "Monuments of Unageing Intellect': Restoring Bach" [125-34]. Then White continuues with Bach's music in the final two sections: "Bach and the Musical Subject: Autonomy and Adherence" (133-45) and "Virtues of the Late Bach" (145-48).

"Those Masterful Images:" Bach and the New Musicology

In White's first section, "'Those Masterful Images:' Bach and the New Musicology," he observes (Ibid.: 113): "In the domain of Anglo-American musicology, since the Bach Year of 1985," there has been a musicological deconstruction of "western musical culture as this is now arraigned, interrogated, and re-contextualized." The various charges White summarizes as follows: "Bach has been enlisted both to define and dismantle the western canon; to exemplify and to indict the hegemony of German musical culture [white, Anglo-Saxon, male]; to reify and to condemn the immanent relationship between musical art and Christian Theism [Bach as the "Fifth Evangelist"]; to affirm and to undermine the privileged relationship between word and tone in European art music; to validate and to interrogate the apolitical condition of art music; to consolidate and to dissolve the concept of composition as a stable entity in western music; to extend and impugn the claims of German musical idealism; and to re-instate the autonomy of musical discourse as sovereign engagement with modernity in the aftermath of a notably stringent postmodernism." Thus, "Bach has been used to promote a general reaction against those principles of music history which in other quarters continue to obtain, untroubled by the radical realignments proposed by postmodernism." The three "Evangelists of the Postmodern," to cite White's 2017 article (Bach Network UK), Susan McClary, Lydia Goehr, Richard Taruskin (non-Bach specialists), as well as "New Bach" specialist John Butt configure the "New Bach Testament," says White, as they "collectively reflect the more general trajectory of Anglo-American musicology of the past generation."⁴ White cites (Ibid.; 114f) "McClary's insistence that we appropriate Bach as an agent of radical discontent with the [musical] canon" and "the deconstruction of Bach's musical discourse in favor of 'our own political ends'," 'Goehr's strategic deconstruction of Bach as a composer of musical works" and "his radically altered status as a composer," and "Taruskin's criticism of his aesthetic, religious and expressive orthodoxies" and "his embodiment of an anti-enlightenment aesthetic and his role in the creation of a (subsequently undermined) hegemony of German musical idealism," as well as in "Butt's no less strategic recovery of the imaginative autonomy of individual works by Bach." Besides Butt, White cites various other Bach specialists "whose work would suggest that they are receptive to the kind of productive intellectual disturbance which the new musicology affords" (Footnote 6: 114).⁵

"Sympathy in White Major:" Deconstructing Bach

White's next section, "'Sympathy in White Major': Deconstructing Bach," like the first section (113-116), is based on his 2017 Bach Network (UK) article, "Evangelists of the Postmodern: Reconfigurations of Bach Since 1985,"⁶ and begins with this Adorno perspective on Bach (Ibid.: 116): "Bach’s music is separated from the general level of his age by an astronomical distance." Says White; "It is a principle of reception — either as an article of good faith or as an obstacle to historical perspective — during "overlapping phases of the Bach revival" beginning in the early 19th century." Adorno's seminal work anticipates the later conflicts involving Urtext principals and "historically-informed performance practice," says White (Ibid.: 116), citing Laurence Dreyfus.⁷ Adorno's dialectic study is conflicted, says White, "as in his remarkable distinction between 'universality' of the music's ahistorical condition and the false consciousness of its quasi-theological power" (ref. Adorno: 135). Adorno suggests in his closing (Ibid.: 146) that the orchestrations of the Viennese "moderns" Schoenberg and Webern (whom he championed), in the six-part Ricerata No. 2 (Musical Offering, BWV 1079, YouTube) and E-Flat Major (Musical Offering, BWV 1079) "St. Anne" Fugue, BWV 552b (YouTube), are "models of an attitude to Bach which corresponds to the stage of his truth." (Adorno cited in White, Ibid.; 117). The "link between the decomposition of the given thematic material through subjective reflection on the motivic work contained therein, and the change in the work-process that took place during the same epoch through the emergence of manufacturing,' says Adorno (Ibid.: 139, White 117), shows "Bach was the first to crystallize the idea of the rationally constituted work."

Three "Evangelists of Postmodern"Turning to the three "Evangelists of the Postmodern" — McClary, Goehr, and Taruskin, White deconstructs their Bachian arguments. McClary's deconstructions of Bach's fifth Brandenburg Concerto first movement (YouTube) and the Sleepers Awake chorale Cantata 140 (YouTube) entail "a critique directed against the cultural hegemony of European art music as an oppressive and socially-constructed canon," says White (Ibid.: 118).⁸ McClary's "storming of the citadel was a primary agent in the development of the new musicology," says White (Ibid.; Footnote 19: 118). Her Bach criticism "entails a denial of the intentional agency of his compositions as musical works." Goehr follows with "lapidary grace" that "Bach did not intend to compose musical works," says White (Ibid.: 119). Her "grander objective was to separate the idea of musical autonomy from its universal status in western history and to relocate it in the nineteenth century." Goehr's "influential deconstruction of universal principles," such as "fidelity to the work" as text, "as a pervasive and sometimes pernicious ideology which both distorts history and privileges a fetishistic commodification of the canon promote a new orthodoxy in place of an old one." In particular. Goehr criticizes the "general sense of borrowing" with "no uniqueness or ownership of any given expression," (Goehr: 182-3, in White: 120).⁹ Her argument about "musical production without the work concept" "loses ground in the face of Bach's systematic and exhaustive approach to composition." The "late works of Bach not only affirmed beyond any reasonable doubt his own awareness of the musical work as a coherent unity which virtually confers autonomy on compositions such as the Mass in B Minor, the Musical Offering, and the St. Matthew Passion,"¹⁰ says White (Ibid.: 4), where "inherent autonomy abides, irrespective of the 'invention' of this autonomy in the nineteenth century (Ibid.; Footnote 24: 120). "Goehr’s engagement with and representation of Bach self-evidently serves a larger purpose: the historicisation and dismantling of the work-concept as a universal regulator in the reception and practice of music," says White (Ibid.: 121). "Self-evidently, too, her work emancipates the idea of musical practice from the hegemony of the work- concept and, by association, from the authority of western music as a mode of cultural imperialism." Her "reading of Bach appears closely to inform Richard Taruskin's explicit identification of historicism as a nefarious agent in the historical narrative which he provides in The Oxford History of Western Music, against the grain and prestige of German idealism," says White (Ibid.; 121). White is concerned with Taruskin's "representation of Bach, in which the obstinate Kapellmeister and the genius of German idealism belong respectively to the historical narrative as empirical truth, and to a myth of German musical supremacy in which Bach is foremost as protagonist." He calls Taruskin's perspective "a whirlwind of indictment" (Ibid.: 124). In contrast to Handel's music, "which privileges and approved 'entertainment' as the fundamental meaning of the English oratorios in particular" (Burney's echo chamber), says White (Ibid.: 123f), Bach's church music has an "anti-Enlightened" temper with a Luther "bitter" truth, "extremism of musical diction," with "striking words" that "reveal to us" a "world of filth and horror, that humans are helpless, that life is pain, and that reason is a snare. . . ." From the "progenitor of 'sheer, deliberate ugliness'," "as the contemptible father-figure of absolute music," "Bach's music endures as a permanent imitation of elitism, religious obscurity, and social collapse." "We attend instead upon the history of a discredited and moribund tradition, a [politically correct] 'sympathy [symphony] in white [WASP] major,' to borrow Philipp Larkin's musically inflicted trope for self-pity," says White (Ibid.: 125).

"Monuments of Unageing Intellect:" Restoring Bach

In the next section, "Monuments of Unageing Intellect': Restoring Bach" (125-34), White turns to John Butt's Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Footnote 4), which is a "strategic recovery of the imaginative autonomy of individual works by Bach in the wake of such [Anglo-American new musicology] readings." Butt's book "re-inscribes Bach in history through the agency of musical works which are 'firmly grounded in experience of the past' and yet 'somehow oriented towards the future'," says White (Ibid.: 126; citing Butt Ibid.: 17). "Bach's musical intellect" "becomes an interlocutor between the past of Lutheran culture in North Germany and the enabling response of the present day," says White (Ibid.: 127). "The existential authority of the Passions is non-negotiable," he stresses (Ibid.: 128). Because Bach's musical work is "inherently vulnerable to (and dependent upon) its reception," says White (Ibid.; 128), "Butt impersonates the tone of 'faithful' and 'suspicious' readings of the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion (YouTube) and the music assigned to the Jews in the St. John Passion¹¹ [SJP] respectively," the latter involving turbae (crowd) choruses that have antagonists singing fugues. There "is something beautiful about these profoundly violent choruses," says Butt (cited in White, Ibid.; 128), despite Taruskin's criticism of Bach's vocal works (see above, Three "Evangelists of Postmodern"). "Bach engineers them so that they are essentially autonomous musical structures, despite their very violent effects. . . ." and "this sort of aestheticized violence is analogous to the extremes of violence against the Jews within the modern world" and a persuasive simulation of post-modernist discourse," says White (Ibid.: 129). The setting of the SJP chorus, "Wir haben ein Gesetz" (We have a law, Jn. 19:7; YouTube), represents the "conflict between adherence to the law and a remorseless insistence upon its fateful consequences," says White (Ibid.: 129).

Here are two Bach Passion comparisons from the first chapter of Butt's book, “Bach’s Passions and the construction of early modern subjectives.” Butt suggests that the difference between the SJP and SMP (BWV 244), given their respective historical receptions, is that the “forms of subjectivity” in Matthew are “more modern” (Ibid.: 40f), while John “relates to different forms of subjectivity” involving its “increased prestige during the course of the twentieth century.” Looking at a significant difference between the two Passions, Butt says that the SJP “is very much tethered to the continuous and richly disputatious texture of the Gospel text. The free, meditative elements, particularly the arias, tend to be centrifugally scattered to the outer reaches of the piece, so as not to disturb the relentless events and arguments of the narrative.” The SMP (BWV 244), with its “ordered sequence of meditative recitatives and arias” resembles “a Lutheran analogue of the Stations of the Cross.” Bach's music represents "monuments of an unageing intellect,"¹² "which many of his works continue to represent now enjoy a global presence, even if the cultural agencies and beliefs which brought thew into existence have largely fallen away," he observes (Ibid.: 130). Works such as the Matthew Passion and the B-Minor Mass emerge from a new musicology 'imaginary museum of privileged art" to become "the source of a magisterial body of critical commentary, source study, analysis, and exegesis that is proverbially Biblical in its address," he finds (Ibid.; 131). "An increasing conflict between autonomy, cultural meaning, and historical significance lies at the very nerve-center of Bach reception since 1985." The conflict "between Bach's deconstruction as an icon of German idealism and the reanimation of his authorial legitimacy and intentionality, is representative of a cultural war that continues to rage," he suggests (Ibid.: Footnote 55: 131). "Given Bach's 'fusion of international styles'¹³ in the service of an explicitly religious aesthetic, the greater claim of culturaservitude in European music, especially as an expression of Roman Catholic absolutism, emerges as a vital (if hitherto neglected) context in which to understand Bach's allegiance to formal jurisdictions not his own," White says (Ibid.: 132). "Although Bach's imaginative autonomy has been affirmed, interrogated, suppressed, condemned, or rehabilitated (as in the sequence of writings examined here), it remains to be contextualized."

ENDNOTES

¹ Harry White, The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the Work-Concept in Fux, Bach, and Handel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020: 60ff); Amazon.com: "Look inside"; discussion, BCW.
² Charles Burney, A General History of Music, citation beginning of Harry White, "Evangelists of the Postmodern: Reconfigurations of Bach Since 1985," in Understanding Bach, 12, 85–107 (Bach Network UK 2017), Bach Network UK.
³ See Theodor Adorno, "Bach Defended Against His Devotees" ["Bach gegen seine Liebhaber verteidigt'] (1951), republished in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967): 133-46; text, Bach defended against his devotees (La Musicologia) [PDF].; discussion, Deconstruction in Music.
⁴ Much of White's article is focused on the Bach criticism with "post modern attenuations," he says (Ibid: 87), involving McClary's Bach "as an agent of radical discontent with the canon ("The Basphemy of Talking Politics During the Bach Year," in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Cambridge University Press); Goehr's "strategic deconstruction of Bach as a composer of musical works" (The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works – An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, Oxford Scholarship Online), and Taruskin's repudiation of the hegemony of German musical idealism through Bach's "aesthetic, religious, and expressive orthodoxies" (The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol I: The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, Amazon.com). With their "innovative and pioneering" "influential reconfigurations of narrative in western musical culture," says White (Ibid.: 87), these polemical critiques "collectively reflect the more general trajectory of Anglo-American musicology of the past generations." Butt's Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Amazon.com: "Look inside") is a "strategic recovery of the imaginative autonomy of individual works by Bach in the wake of such [Anglo-American new musicology] readings," says White (Ibid.: 114).
⁵ White lists contemporary Bach scholars with a theological perspective that involves "reception history as a meaningful construct" (Ibid.: 103): Michael Marissen's Lutheranism, Anti-Judiasm and Bach's St. John Passion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Tanya Kevorkian's Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650-1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), and Karol Berger's Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). White cites emerging scholars who "are receptive to the kind of intellectual disturbance" the "New" Bach represents, including Marissen, Kevorkian, and Berger as well as Laurence Dreyfus (Patterns of Invention, University of Oxford: Professor Laurence Dreyfus), Eric Chafe (tonal allegory, Johannine theology, Brandeis Faculty Guide), Daniel Melamed (Hearing Bach's Passions, Mass in B Minor, Christmas Oratorio; Daniel R. Melamed (Jacobs Scool of Music)), and David Yearsley (counterpoint meanings, David Yearsley (Cornell University)). White also enlists Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower, Prof. Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower) (The Hebrew University of Jerusalm)), who has three articles in the Bach Network (UK) Understanding Bach: "Exploring the Limits: the Tonal, the Gestural, and the Allegorical in Bach’s Musical Offering" (Bach Network), "An experiment in reception and conception: re-texting Bach’s St John Passion for Good Friday 2005" (Bach Network), and "The Dramaturgy of Religious Emotions in Bach’s Cantatas: Aristotelian Process in Neoplatonic Frames" (Bach Network). White also cites (Ibid.: 115) the theological work of Robin A. Leaver who has just published Bach Studies: Liturgy, Hymnology, and Theology (Abingdon: Routledge 2021), Amazon.com: Look inside, preface, xi.
⁶ Harry White, "Evangelists of the Postmodern: Reconfigurations of Bach Since 1985," in Understanding Bach, 12, 85–107 (Bach Network UK 2017: 88-98), Bach Network UK; discussed at BCW: "New Bach Studies: Evangelists of the Modern."
⁷ See Laurence Dreyfus' critique of Adorno's "Early Music Defended Against its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the 20th Century," Music Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Summer, 1983: 297-322, Oxford University Press; Oxfor Journals); also Academia.edu.
⁸ For a "constructive" perspective on Bach's two compositions, see Michael Marissen's article, "There’s More Religion Than You Think in Bach’s ‘Brandenburgs'," New York Times; Dec. 20, 2018, NY Times, and Gerhard Herz's monograph, Bach Cantata No. 140 (Norton Critical Scores), Annotated Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), Cantata No. 140 (W.W. Norton Company).
⁹ Bach borrowings (appropriations) continue to be denigrated in some new musicology quarters, particularly as "parody"; see "Parody": Obsession or Transformation, BCW; and the Bach cantata Website discussion, "Beyond Analytical Musicology: Bach's Self-Modeling," BCW.
¹⁰ These Bach major works are dfrom a contemporary perspective in Christoph Wolff's Bach's Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), Amazon.com; contents, Google Books: "Mass in B Minor: Importance, Genesis, Legacy" (Ibid.; 317-32);"The Canons of the Musical Offering" (Ibid.: 305-309), and the St Matthew Passion (Ibiid.: 214-228); see also, Bach's Major Vocal Works: Music, Drama, Liturgy (New Haven CT : Yale University Press, 2016); Amazon.com: "Look inside", BCW.
¹¹ John Butt 2012 Bach St. John Passion recording sung within a reconstruction of Bach’s Passion liturgy, BCW, YouTube; Peter Smaill commentary, BCW: "Peter Smaill wrote (March 25, 2016)"; Alex Ross's "Bach's Holy Dread," The New Yorker (2017) commentary, last six paragraphs, beginning "That paradox animates John Butt’s book on the Passions," New Yorker Magazine.
¹² "Monuments of an unageing intellect," is found in Yeats' poem, "Sailing to Byzantium"; commentary, Spark Notes.
¹³ See Manfred F. Bukofzer, Chapter 8 heading, in Music in the Baroque Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 1947), Amazon.com; "Look inside."

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To Come: Harry White's "Bach and the Musical Subject: Autonomy and Adherence" and "Virtues of the Late Bach."

Harry White's "Bach and the Musical Subject: Autonomy and Adherence"

William L. Hoffman wrote (April 14, 2021):
In his Chapter 3 penultimate section, "Bach and the Musical Subject: Autonomy and Adherence," Harry White¹ suggests that "a theory of the late Baroque musical imagination answerable to the relationship between Bach's expressive autonomy and the general discourse of compositional servitude from which it arose," now "returns us to [Theodore] Adorno's Bach," whose "emancipation of the musical subject" entails a rebellion against the office of church composer" as one "which privileges the imperium of Bach's own musical imagination" "as against the demands of the church service," he says (Ibid.: 133). In a narrow sense, this reveals Bach's "fundamentally instrumental conception of the musical subject," apart from its applied context. "The governance of Bach's aria ritornellos exerts more influence on his vocal writings than any other consideration." In particular this governance is found in his "domains of the liturgical and sacred dramatic music — when the abstract claims of an instrumentally-conceived subject take precedence over" the textual meaning expressed in rhetorical devices. The Bach musical subject's symbolic authority is "an idea which accumulates significance through the discourse of counterpoint" where "the musical idea draws attention to itself by means of its combinative permutations." White establishes his theme with an extended view of the Cantata 54 final fugal aria and makes an analogy to the opening fugal chorus Kyrie of the B-Minor Mass, before commencing with a discussion of Bach's development of the opening chorale fantasia choruses of his unique chorale cantata cycle (1724-25) as well as Bach's liturgical organ chorale preludes and other hymn settings and the compositional implications of the 1740s fugally-driven collections.

Bach's Cantata 54: "Imaginative Assembly"

The musical subject's integrity increases when it "surfaces from the web of its own contrapuntal deliberations" to eclipse its verbal text, "subordinated to the hieratic demands of the musical subject." The second and closing aria of Bach's 1714 Lenten Oculi (or Trinity +7) alto solo Cantata 54,² "Widerstehe doch der Sünde" (Stand firm against sin), entitled "Wer Sünde tut, der ist vom Teufel" (Who commits sins is of the devil), "affords a comparatively early manifestation of this imaginative assembly," says White (Ibid.: 133). Cantata 54 is one of Bach's earliest "modern" cantatas (musical sermons), dating to 1714 in Weimar to a text of Darmstadt court poet Georg Christian Lehms (BCW), printed in 1711. In all, Bach set 10 Lehms texts, beginning with solo soprano cantata 199 (BCW) for Trinity +11 (?1713), followed by eight cantatas composed at Christmas 1725 (BWV 110, 57, 151) and in 1726 (BWV 16, 31, 13, 35, 170), all for his third and final church-year cycle (Wikipedia). Of the some two dozen modern sacred cantatas composed or begun in Weimar, Bach reperformed all but one, BWV 54 (Wikipedia) in Leipzig in various versions (Wikipedia). The first movement of Cantata 54 was parodied by Bach in 1731 in his St. Mark Passion, BWV 247, as the aria, “Falsche Welt, dein schmeichelnt Kussen” (False world, thy poisonous kisses), at the point (No. 19), where Judas betrays Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane with a kiss (text Emmanuel Music: No. 19; recording, YouTube).³ Thus, Bach in 1731 parodied another work with the same text Affect, reaching back as he would two years later in 1733 during the Missa: Kyrie-Gloria, BWV 232a, contrafactum, to the 1714 Jubilate Cantata 12 opening chorus, "Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen" (YouTube), for the Crucifixus movement (YouTube). Cantata 54 has only three movements in opera seria form: da capo aria-recitative-aria and lacks a closing four-part chorale (a cantus version of BWV 360 is found at YouTube; 11:32).

"Imbuing a Verbal Text with Musical Meaning"

In his analysis of the third and final movement of Cantata 54, White describes the following initial facets (Ibid.; 134): the ritornello "exercising a governance unprecedented in motivic concentration and forward planning," and the "unnerving exactitude [of] the first vocal statement" which "absorbs the trajectory of the whole text (from dire warning to the redeeming effects of withstanding temptation) in the relationship between subject and countersubject" ("the devil himself"). Above all, White cites "the pervasively instrumental nature of Bach's compositional reliances" in Cantata 54 "in the transcendent enterprise of imbuing a verbal text with musical meaning.⁴ Pace Charles Burney, this is 'all unmeaning art and contrivance' translated into the supreme logic and clarity of fugal discourse." There is "a vocal-instrumental symbiosis which will continue to preoccupy Bach's musical imagination for decades, and into old age," White observes (Ibid.: 135). "Its compositional strategies are essentially those which Bach employs (if on a grander scale) in the first from the Mass in B Minor," he says (Ibid.; 135f). This fugal movement of 1733 shows "the animating impulse of an instrumentally-conceived compositional technique" in contrast to "his north Italian (and, more generally, Roman Catholic) contemporaries," he says (Ibid.: 136). The four-measure Mass Introduction is original Bach (YouTube)), before copying out his extended "Kyrie" setting beginning with its 24-measure instrumental introduction ritornello, modeled after the Johann Hugo von Wilderer (1670-1724) Mass in G Minor (YouTube), in contrast to Bachian contrafactum self-borrowing (for an analysis of Bach's borrowings and modelings, see BCW).

Bach's Instrumentally-Conceived Chorale Fantasia Settings

White then turns to an extended discussion of Bach's monumental, instrumentally-conceived chorale settings of opening chorale fantasia choruses in "vivid contrast" to the concluding plain four-part chorales with simple instrumental doublings found in his unique chorale cantata cycle,⁵ with its initial and varied settings at the beginning of Trinity Time 1724. The opportunity to compose a set of chorale cantatas enabled Bach to begin with four distinct and representative works observing the first Sundays in Trinity Time, the omnes tempore (ordinary time) second half of the church year emphasizing doctrinal thematic teachings based on specific chorales. Each of the works is introduced with a chorus using a striking hymn tune in different voice and musical style: BWV 20, O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort I (Trinity +1), soprano voice, French Overture (YouTube; BWV 2, Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein (Trinity +2), alto voice, motet (YouTube); BWV 7, Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam (John the Baptist), tenor voice Italianate concertante (YouTube); and BWV 135, Ach Herr, mich armen Sünde (Trinity +3), bass voice, chorale fantasia (YouTube). The cycle is a study of "the relationship between the scriptural authority of the given hymn and Bach's response to it," says White (Ibid.: 136), yielding "an intimacy between the autonomous musical imagination and its liturgical reliances." The cantatas provide "a dramatically new perspective on the hymn which is its abiding inspiration," promoting "to an astonishing degree the independent signatures of his ritornello counterpoint so as to increase the tension between his own originality of discourse and the four-square hymn which it transcends," he says (Ibid.: 136f). "He resolves that tension through the fundamentally simple agency of cantus firmus [Wikipedia] counterpoint, "so that the hymn appears and sounds as the inevitable outgrowth or destination of the vigorous inventions that precede and surround it," he shows (Ibid.: 137).

Bach Chorale Cantata 178

White returns to Bach's chorale Cantata 178,⁶ "Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält" Psalm 124:1 (If the Lord God does not stay with us, Psalm 124:1; trans. Francis Browne) for the 8th Sunday after Trinity 1724, showing that the opening fantasia (French overture) illustrating "the Bachian relationship between musical autonomy and liturgical authority" with its "notably bleak and implacable subject-mater text," says White (Ibid.: 137). Previously in Chapter 2, White had compared two nautical simile da Capo arias (Ibid.: 89-94), Fux's King Herod's alto aria, "Fra due nembi e fra due venti" (Between two clouds and two winds; trans. Harry White) in the 1714 John the Baptist oratorio (K291), with Bach's bass aria "Gleichwie die wilden Meereswellen" (Just as the wild waves of the sea [Psalm 124: 4-5]) in cantata 178/3. In the nautical arias described in White (Ibid.: 89-94), Herod compares his moral dilemma to a stormy sea (Oxford University Press; recording, Discogs.com: track 1-11-2; YouTube), while the Bach chorale Cantata 178/3 aria compares Christ's ship threatened by waves with the soul imperiled by evil (music, TouTube) in a paraphrase of Psalm 124:4-5 (King James Bible Online). The opening fantasia uses the technique of Choraleinbau (choral insertion) in "which the vocal writing is 'built in' to literal or partial reprises of the ritornello itself" in "the instrumentally conceived texture which predominates," White observes (Ibid.: 139). Textually, Bach uses "his structural reliance on literal repetition as an affirmation of his own compositional style and technique" that "constantly affirms the syntax and grammar from which it originates." Similar chorale fantasias which begin BWV 62 (1724, YouTube), BWV 192 (1730, YouTube), and BWV 140 (1731, YouTube) share "a common technique in terms of ritornello construction" and "a radical degree of thematic invention."

Organ Chorale Prelude Collections

Thus Bach had produced old wine in new bottles, particularly his singular compositions of BWV 192 and 140, written beyond the original chorale cantata cycle, through thematic invention, most notably in his chorale prelude settings "which promote a symbolic and meditative intimacy between the original melodies and Bach's instrumental compositional technique," says White (Ibid.: 140).⁷ White singles out the early (Weimar) and incomplete chorale prelude collection, Orgelbüchlein, BWV 599-644 (YouTube, Wikipedia), with its "immediacy and intimacy of engagement." The BWV 62/1 fantasia and the chorale prelude BWV 599 setting of "Nun komm der Heiden Heiland" (Now comes the Saviour of the Nations) "are entirely characteristic of a pervasive contrast in compositional technique which obtains throughout Bach's working life, says White (Ibid.: 141) Moreover, the introspective and deeply nuanced signatures of Bach's late cycles of chorale preludes not only enlarge our apprehension of the early eighteenth century musical imagination beyond the passion settings, they also reconfigure our understanding of keyboard music before 1750 as an end in itself." The "significance of Bach's liturgical and liturgically motivated organ music lies in its imaginative and singular determinism." Beyond his obedience to "orthodox Lutheranism throughout his career," the "more fulsome his appeal to political and social authority" led to "the more extreme his ingathering of late work became." These fugally-driven late works (see BCW: "1740s Compositional Shift to Polyphony," etc.) "struggle even now for a reception history adequate to their exhaustive (not to say unnerving) extremism of technique," despite a proliferation of recordings and the "surge of scholarship devoted to Bach's organ music in the past thirty years," says White (Ibid.: Footnote 64: 141), most notably Peter Williams and Russell Stinson. ⁸

Bach's Musical Offering

White fittingly concludes his Chapter 3 section, "Bach and the Musical Subject: Autonomy and Adherence," with an examination of the Musical Offering, BWV 1079.⁹ "The coherence of BWV 1079 depends on an explicit relationship between the given authority of the theme and the extreme autonomy of Bach's contrapuntal engagement," he observes (Ibid.: 143). "The transformations of the theme . . . exhaustively exploit its fugal and canonic permutations, which in their unremitting insistence, complexity, and flair become the vary signatures of Bach's authorship, even as the authority of the theme itself is enhanced in the process." As "a self-standing work," it involves "the exhaustive extremism of Bach's treatment of the royal theme (which summons the same validating interdependence of authority and autonomy that underwrites Bach's lifelong compositional response to the Lutheran hymn), but also by its generic singularity." Further, the trio sonata is unique in several respects, as White points out (Ibid.: 144f). Its second movement is "the centerpiece of the whole work"; the trio sonata "is the only piece in the entire work that does not engage directly with the royal theme from the outset"; it is the only portion with "explicitly designated instrumentation"; and "is the only movement in the Musical Offering that is neither a canon or a fugue." In conclusion, he finds (Ibid.: 145), that the "royal theme is the validating authority that underwrites Bach's sheer prowess of invention, just as the Lutheran hymn underwrites the independence of his ritornello counterpoint."

"Virtues of the Late Bach"

"Virtues of the Late Bach," White last and briefest section of Chapter 3, shows "Bach's astonishing traversal and mastery of those genres which interested (or simply obliged) him throughout his working life," which "depended on modes of authority," including the musical subject. The Lutheran hymn's authority was three-fold, doctrinal, religious, and symbolic, involving "the routine, if immense, obligations of the working court and church musician to the prolific (but not exceptional) condition of Bach's musical estate." The "systematic ingathering of his late cycles" suggests "the waning influence" of the authority concept "as a condition of Bach's instrumental collections," says White (Ibid.: 146). These "exhausted the generic models to which they subscribe" and "also tested to the breaking pint the relationship between Bach's imaginative autonomy and the cultural, religious, and political authority which licensed his professional career." The textual authority of the Lutheran hymn in its "context becomes the musical subject, in both senses of the verb" and "comes to depend on the imaginative authority and extremism of Bach's commentary." His The Art of Fugue "represents the vanishing point of this [musical] utterance" in "its extreme condition of convergence," White says. "The musical work no longer depends on the validating license of a subject external to itself" and "serves no other purpose than its own existential rigor. As a musical work it is its own justification" in its "exhaustive engagement with counterpoint." The sole authority is "Bach's own imaginative prowess," "the sovereignty of musical discourse becomes an absolute," and "the exhausted genres it leaves in its wake confirm the autonomy of the work-concept."

ENDNOTES

¹ Harry White, Chapter 3, "The Stewardship of Unmeaning Art: Bach and the Musical Subject," in The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the Work-Concept in Fux, Bach, and Handel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020: 132); Amazon.com: "Look inside"; discussion, BCW; the last two sections of Chapter 3 are new, while the previous ones originally were found in White's Bach Network (UK) essay, "Evangelists of the postmodern: Reconfigurations of Bach since 1985," in online Understanding Bach 12, 2017: 85–107, Bach Network UK [PDF].
² Cantata 54: details, BCW; text (Francis Browne trans.), BCW; commentary, BCW; recording, YouTube; Arnold Schering's insightful comments on the text of Cantata 54 is found at BCW: "Background & Recordings."
³ The first movement of Cantata 54 is discussed in White's Chapter 2 (Ibid.; 99, 100, 104-7) in comparison with a Johann Joseph Fux da Capo aria and also is found in a transcription for guitar and orchestra by Christopher Parkening (BCW).
⁴ The three movements of Cantata 54 are transcribed as an instrumental concerto for solo English oboe (YouTube, Music Download Nos. 9-10, Amazon.com.
⁵ Chorale cantata cycle literature: discussion, BCW: "Chorale Cantata Cycle"; Wikipedia, Wikipedia); Christoph Wolff, "The Most Ambitious of All Projects: Chorale Cantatas throughout the Year," text Google Books, in Bach's Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), Amazon.com.
⁶ Bach Cantata 178: details, BCW); text, BCW; discussion, BCW; recording, YouTube.
⁷ Bach's transformation of iconic Lutheran chorales is particularly noticeable in the following: the early (revised in the 1740s) "Great 18" chorale preludes with his word-painting (see Anne Leahy J. S. Bach's "Leipzig" Chorale Preludes: Music, Text, Theology, ed. Robin A. Leaver, Contextual Bach Studies No. 3 [Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011; Amazon.com); Bach's settings of c.1731 free-standing liturgical plain chorales, BWV 253-438 (see Wikipedia: "186 four-part chorales in BGA Vol. 39," BCW); and the later, monumental, old- and new-style Clavierübung III, German Organ Mass/Catechism Chorales, BWV 669-689 BCW).
⁸ Bach organ music authors: Peter Williams (Wikipedia), Russell Russell Stinson (Bach-Bibliographie).
⁹ Bach Musical Offering, BWV 1079: details, BCW; discussions, Wikipedia; music, YouTube; articles, David Yearsley, Chapter 4, 'The autocratic regimes of A Musical Offering," in Bach and the Meanings of Coun(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002: 128ff; Amazon.com), Michael Marissen, Chapter 7, "The Theological Character of Bach's Musical Offering," in Bach and God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016: 191ff; Amazon.com; historical fiction account, James R. Gaines. Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (New York: HarperCollins, 2005; Amazon.com).

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To Come: White's Chapter 4, "A Darkness Which Might be felt: Handel, Fux, and the Oratorio" summarizes the importance of Handel's Samson and the influence of Fux's John the Baptist Oratorio, as well as a discussion of Bach-Handel synchronicity.

Continue on Part 4