Bach Keyboard Music
Bach Keyboard Scholarship: Perspective, Context, Judgement

Bach Keyboard Scholarship: Perspective, Context, Judgement

William L. Hoffman wrote (May 27, 2019):
Bach's keyboard music is a roadmap of his mastery of composition, particularly the learned fugue. The history of his keyboard music reflects the conditions under which this music was composed and is often considered from the perspective of collections, both published and unpublished, that reveal his development as a composer and his triumph as an unparalleled interpreter at the keyboard. Most prominent is Bach's role as a pedagogue who groomed his students through his keyboard music in the art of composition and the craft of performance, the two pursuits being inseparable to him. Exacting studies, especially in recent years and sometimes called "New Musicology" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_musicology), of the actual music itself, often, like the "New Criticism" literary movement in the mid-20th century, emphasizes fundamental ingredients at the expense of historical-biographical conasiderations like motivation, context, and reception, instead emphasizing the music to stand on its own, rigorously dissected and autopsied.

Keyboard music was one of the hallmarks of the so-called "Baroque era," when common practice discipline became firmly established and most effectively presented through the keyboard, enabling the fundamentals — music theory and harmony — to be fully expressed and understood. Recently, the growth and ubiquity of electronic reproduction enables the performer (the musician) to pursue what is called the "historically informed" perspective of the conditions under which the music was created and presented, seeking authenticity. Meanwhile, from the Bach Tercentenary in 1985 to the quarter-millennium observance of Bach's death in 2000, 15 years later, "complete" editions of Bach's works were produced while Bach scholars produced cottage industries of specialized subjects. In some instances the pursuit of scholarship seems to border on academic, intellectual and philological gymnastics.

"Counterpoint, Canons, and the Late Works"

One of the most examined and debated repertory involves the major keyboard works of Bach's last decade, those seemingly enigmatic, academic works whose dating, ultimate structure, and performance media seem so illusive. The recent article, "Counterpoint, Canons, and the Late Works" by Paul Walker,¹ "is a discussion of significant research into the complexity, logic and ingenuity of Bach’s counterpoint published since around 1975." The study progresses from "Music Theory and Compositional Process" and Bach's fugues and canons to the music of the Goldberg Canons, Musical Offering, Canonic Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch," and Art of Fugue." Considerable background information is provided about important breakthroughs, specific insights, and special perspectives on music as found in major monographs such as David Yearsley's Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (2002, https://www.amazon.com/Meanings-Counterpoint-Perspectives-History-Criticism/dp/0521803462), Laurence Dreyfus' Bach and the Patterns of Invention (2004, https://www.amazon.com/Bach-Patterns-Invention-Laurence-Dreyfus/dp/0674013565), and Joseph Kerman's The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard (2015, https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fugue-Fugues-Keyboard-1715-1750/dp/0520243587). Another is David Ledbetter's Bach's Well-tempered Clavier (2002, https://www.amazon.com/Bachs-Well-tempered-Clavier-Preludes-Fugues/dp/0300178956).

As Walker's article progresses through the concepts to the music, a methodology of argument and counterargument ensues with conflicting dialectics that sometimes seems more important than the narrative as the footnotes take up more of the page than the actual writing. Blow-by-blow descriptions of every note and contentious, dualistic thinking (either-or) begin to dominate, particularly in the sections on the Musical Offering and Art of Fugue where, for example in the debate in the former over the reicercare form and the musical structure or the definitive version of the latter or the Canonc Variations.

In other publications, the Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) receives exhaustive commentary in Ledbetter's monograph (see Table of Contents, https://www.amazon.com/Bachs-Well-tempered-Clavier-Preludes-Fugues/dp/0300178956) as well as three essays on the WTC in Don O. Franklin's Bach Studies (1): ² Ulrich Siegele's "The four conceptual stages of the Fugue in C Minor WTC I," James A. Brokaw II's "The genesis of the Prelude in C Major BWV 870," and Franklin's Reconstructing the Urpartitur for WTC III: a study of the "London Autograph." The Ledbetter tome (414 pages) is an exacting study of concepts (clavier, well-tempered, preludes, fugues, all the tones and semitones, "Bach as Teacher") and commentaries on both WTC books. In the Bach Studies essays, Siegele examines the four stages of the WTC "Fugue [toccata] in C minor, BWV 847, the entries, the non-thematic sections, the final entry, and the source evidence. Brokaw's study of the Book 2 first prelude, BWV 870, is a detailed view of Bach's compositional process. Franklin's essay identifies a set of working procedures for reconstructing Bach's copying-out" process in the incomplete London autograph.

Invention Patterns, Counterpoint Meanings

Two major topical Bach keyboard monographs have been published in recent years and are expressions of the rigorous methodology of the New Musicology: Laurence Dreyfus' Bach and the Patterns of Invention³ and David Yearsley's Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint.⁴ Bach and the Patterns of Invention begins in Chapter 1, "What Is an Invention," with the composer's first keyboard collection, contrapuntal studies of the 15 three-part Inventions, BWV 772-786, and the 15 two-part Sinfonias, BWV 787-801, called Aufrichtige Anleitung (Upright Instruction), started in 1720 and finalized in early 1723 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventions_and_Sinfonias_). The music involves the three dimensions of the "motivic" developing ideas (inventions), contrapuntal in the two-voice (inventions) and three-voice (sinfonias), with cantabile style of playing, also emphasized in the WTC. The inventions are arranged in ascending key order and the sinfonias in descending order of the most accessible keys, as a forerunner to all the keys in the WTC.

Bach was aware of the rhetorical principles of music involved in inventio and Dreyfus describes the concept of the five-fold model first established by Cicero and modified by Johann Mattheson in 1739. "As one of Germany's greatest teachers in the eighteenth century (with a host of surviving reports about his teaching methods), Bach seems in fact to have stresses rigorous musical skills to the utter exclusion of any book learning," says Dreyfus (Ibid.: 9). There is a 1725 description of Bach introducing the Inventions to his pupil Heinrich Nicholas Gerber, then encouraging him to play the WTC and the Partitas.

Each Dreyfus chapter focuses on a mode of invention illustrated by a Bach work or genre: 2. "Composing against the Grain," "French Suite in G," BWV 816; 3. "The Ideal Ritrornello," Two-Harpsichord Concerto, BWV 1061; 4. "The Status of a Genre," Gamba Sonata in G minor, BWV 1029; 5. "Matters of Kind," fugue as genre, the WTC, BWV 846/2; 6. "Figments of the Organicist Imagination," theorist Heinrich Schenker and Fugue, BWV 847/2; 7. "On Bach's Style," Concertos BWV 1051 (6th Brandenburg) and BWV 1052 (Clavier No. 1); and 8. Bach as Critiof Enlightenment, BWV 831 (French Overture Echo) and Cantata 198.

Dreyfus' book is a "brilliant example of hermeneutic criticism," says Yearsley in his essay,"Keyboard Music."⁵ Usually applied to biblical interpretation, hermeneutics here becomes part of the musicologist's lexicon, with Dreyfus using a new critical methodology, "based in part on eighteenth century ways of thinking" says Yearsley (Ibid.). An effective use of theological hermenutics is found in the rhetorical device of the five elements of a sermon as it can be applied to Bach's oratorio Passions, says Robin A. Leaver,⁶ in Bach's most extensive original genre: exordium (introduction), proposito (key statement), tractatio (investigation of proposito), applicatio; and conclusio. This concept also can apply to Bach's sacred cantatas as musical sermons and by implication to complex Bach fugues like the one in E-Flat, BWV 552/2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMKl0VFKIFg), that closes the German Organ Mass and Catechism with its trinitarian allusions. At the same time, Bach's music explores in depth the three essential rhetorical devices of symmetry, contrast, and repetition.

Dreyfus examines the relationship between invention and elaboration in Bach's myriad permutations and combinations of fugues, "arguably the most important contribution to Bach studies in the past two decades," says Yearsley (Ibid.: 212). Besides pointing to "similar analytic studies [that] would doubtless pay dividend across the keyboard repertory, Dreyfus' methods also could "have profound implications for Bach's aesthetics as they illuminate the composer's often cantankerous attitudes toward contemporary aesthetics," Yearsley suggests. "Dreyfus unpacks the constituent features of various genres, from fugues to concertos, and demonstrates that generic considerations are crucial to the way Bach elaborates his musical inventions," says Yearsley. "Although source studies will continue to be relevant, the fleshing out of social, literary, and theological contexts will contribute substantially to hermeneutic endeavors that try to find larger and deeper meanings," Yearsley concludes (Ibid.: 314).

Yearsley makes only a modest reference to his own writing (Ibid.: 314), best found in Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint. Dominating musical interest in the first half of the 18th century, strict counterpoint "generated more polemical writing and more heated opinions" than any other musical endeavor (Ibid.: xiii), while it "was saturated with meaning — social, theological, and political." In his six chapters, he studies these meanings. Here is a synopsis from reviewer Peter Schubert (http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.06.12.1/mto.06.12.1.schubert.html): <<Each of Yearsley’s six chapters explores a different setting from which the metaphors are drawn. “Vor deinen Thron tret ich and the art of dying” shows how Bach’s last chorale setting can be understood, in the tradition of Lutheran deathbed rituals, as his last words. “The alchemy of Bach’s canons” likens the transformations of learned counterpoint to those undertaken by alchemists. “Bach’s taste for pork or canary” explores the eighteenth-century debate pitting contrapuntal artifice against natural galant cantabile. “The autocratic regimes of A Musical Offering” finds “the hermeneutic nexus between musical absolutism and political autocracy,” and makes Bach an active supporter of Frederick the Great. (166) “Bach the machine” sets counterpoint alongside eighteenth-century automata, including a defecating duck. Finally, “Physiognomies of Bach’s counterpoint” carries us into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the fascination surrounding Bach’s mortal remains.>>

Kenyon: Authenticity and Early Music

Two books published soon after the Bach Tricentenary in 1985 are a watershed of Bach studies: Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, edited by Nicholas Kenyon, essays on the historical performance movement,⁷ and pianist-scholar Paul Badura-Skoda's Interpreting Bach and the Keyboard, the challenges of musical ingredients (rhythm, tempo, articulation, dynamics, sonority, and playing technique), especially's Bach's ornamentation. The writers of the essays in Authenticity and Early Music are a broad spectrum of viewpoints and perspectives: Kenyon, Introduction, "Authenticity and Early Music - Some Issues and Questions"; Will Crutchfield, "Fashion, Conviction and Performance Style in an Age of Revivals"; Howard Mayer Brown, "Pedantry or Liberation? - A Sketch of the Historical Performance Movement"; Robert P. Morgan, "Tradition, Anxiety and the Current Musical Scene"; Philip Brett, "Context and the Early Music Editor"; Gary Tomlinson, "The Historian, the Performer, and Authentic Meaning in Music"; and Richard Tauskin, "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past. Kenyon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Kenyon) is a prolific writer on music, edited the journal Early Music, and was employed at the BBC. His most recent book is BACH 333: Bach, the Music (see below).

Kenyon traces the growth of early music through the growth of stereophonic recordings in the 1960s with the establishment of specialized ensembles and performers who then began touring, while the live focus now is on music festivals and institutions. The next 20 years experienced phenomenal growth and acceptance, primarily in England, western Europe and America. Little known repertory played on period instruments filled wide and deep niches to satisfy virtually every taste, making "music with a conviction and enthusiasm that won people over," says Kenyon (Ibid.: 3). He also observes the increasing "performance of familiar repertoires from the past in a radically different manner" while "how precarious were some of it's scholarly tenets." Purist rigidity and elitist myopia sometimes ensued. Two recorded performances involving Bach's Mass in B minor raised the hackles of traditionalists: Nikolaus Harnoncourt's 1968 insistence on anti-Romantic, authentic performers, especially boys voices replicating Bach's Thomaner choir, and Joshua Rifkin's 1981 — and still controversial — use of OVPP (one voice per part) with adult voices. After Kenyon's book, Harnoncourt in 1986 moderated his use of boys voices and used adults in his rerecording of this long and complex work, although he continued to record all the lesser cantatas with youths. Thus, "technically and interpretively, his (Harnoncourt's) performances were very strong ones, convincing on their own terms," says Kenyon (Ibid.: 5). "For some of us, there were many revelations to be had from timbres, textures and balances of these performances; we displayed an enthusiasm which perhaps helped to build up an unhealthy mystique surrounding the use of old instruments," says Kenyon (Ibid.: 7). For example, some insisted that Bach's keyboard music should never be played on the piano, only on the harpsichord, since Bach probably never composed for the former.

Authenticity saw the "burgeoning company of instrument makers" seeking to replicate lost instruments while recording companies labeled their re-creations as "authentic," so that the results were accepted, regardless of "whether the historical evidence used was either plausible, sufficient, or correctly interpreted," says Kenyon (Ibid.). The concept "historically informed" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historically_informed_performance) became the banner for all manner of commercial recordings on a band wagon with "period instruments" playing classical and romantic music which by now was beginning to age so that old music could be called "pre-owned" or "antique." This chronological advance or cultural creep or lag now required modification of definitions in reference books. "So the process of rediscovering a historical approach has now no time limits," says Kenyon (Ibid.: 12). Thus, "increasingly loud questionshave begun to be asked about the aims and the means of the 'authentic' approach from within its own ranks. It is those questions that form the thinking behind this book."

Kenyon's intent then was to explore "musical understanding, cultural and social context, acoustical conditions and concert-giving situations." The nature of authenticity and the meanings and uses of history also are important considerations. "The problem of historical context is one that has preoccupied musicologists over the last couple decades, and is a complex matter," says Kenyon (Ibid.: 14). "One problem here has been the moral imperativeness of the need to respect the composer's intention," he notes (Ibid.: 15) while "the relationship there between understanding and authenticity is a crucial one." Detached objectivity (with an occasional impulse of virtuoso improvisation?) is gradually replaced with "a strong personal taste"; "expressive instincts can now be unleashed without any danger of their being proved unhistorical," he says (Ibid.: 17). Finally, says Kenyon (Ibid.: 18), diverse "period specialists" "do wish to recapture insights of a past age in as uncompromising and as precise a manner as possible, to that the music can speak wth its own eloquence to today's audiences."

Kenyon Today: Bach 333

Thirty years later Kenyon takes a contemporary — and generous — view of "musical understanding, cultural and social context," in three new articles in BACH 333.⁸ As late as 1985, some musicologists still sounded the notion that Bach was "an isolated genius, remote from the world around him," says Kenyon ("Bach Interactive": 187) Now he relates that "Bach was totally a product of his time an environment, proud to belong both to a family tradition of active musicians and to a thriving musical culture of church, court and home. He learnt from those around him with rapid skill and dedication, absorbing their musical idioms and working to make them his own. So it is both revealing and important to trace back what we can know of his earliest musical influences and the part they played in developing his style. Here is 'Bach Interactive', engaging with his contemporaries, teachers and family." Kenyon introduces recordings that show the early influences, primarily involving formative keyboard music and Bach Family works of Johann Christoph and Johann Ludwig (CD 207-214 BACH INTERACTIVE Bach as arranger, performer, family member, librarian: composers Reincken, Böhm, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann, Pergolesi etc.).

Kenyon's "Bach after Bach" looks at reception history to the present (CD 215-222 BACH AFTER BACH Bach as inspiration: transcribed/arranged from W.F. Bach to Busoni, Stokowski to Birtwistle, Jacques Loussier to Vikingur Olafsson): "Bach Renewed: From Bach's Sons to Mahler," "Bach Reimagined: Chaconne and Passcaglia," "Bach Orchestrated: Reger to Stpkowski," Inspired by Bach: "Gounod to Pärt," "Bach and Virtuoso Piano: Liszt and Busoni," "Bach and the Virtuoso Piano: Th 20th Century." "Bach a la Jazz," and "New Colours of Bach."

Kenyon's "Performing Traditions" begins with a caveat (p.211): "We can never know exactly how his music sounded, either in his lifetime (with all the performer challenges of his day) or during earlier periods of revival (when it was reshaped by the practices of the times). We can only speculatively research and reimagine his music for our age and for our tastes." Vocal tradition shows most vividly changing tastes as well as improved sound reproduction, from the "solid if unfocused sound" of 1930s radio broadcasts or the interpretive tastes of "operatic fervency" replaced by "unforgettable impact" in the 1950s. Conductors took charge in the authentic Archiv Produktion founded in 1947, and the mantle was passed to Karl Richter (http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Performers/Richter.htm) in the modern instrument tradition: "his Bach had clarity, forcefulness and deep understanding," with the highest standards using massed voices, followed by the Bach Guild project and Telefunken's milestone "complete" Bach cantatas with Harnoncourt and Leonhardt, beginning in 1971 (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Performers/H&L-Rec3.htm). Later Ton Koopman (http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Performers/Koopman.htm) recorded all Bach's vocal music and Philippe Herreweghe continues to record selectively (https://www.discogs.com/artist/834088-Philippe-Herreweghe?page=1). Recently, John Eliot Gardiner (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Performers/Gardiner.htm) and Masaaki Suzuki (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Performers/Suzuki.htm) have recorded most of the vocal music. A wave of early music singers was lead by Emma Kirkby; countertenors Alfred Deller, Rene Jacobs and Andreas Scholl; tenors Higues Cuenod and Peter Schreier; and basses Klaus Mertens, and Thomas Quasthoff. "Keyboard Performing Traditions" and "Bach and Virtuoso Pianists" will be discussed in the coming essay on keyboard recordings.

Paul Badura-Skoda: Tercentenary Perspective

Besides the Kenyon essay book, Authenticity and Early Music, noted pianist and scholar Paul Badura-Skoda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Badura-Skoda) during the Bach Tercentenary compiled a thoughtful, lucid, highly informative study, Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard.⁹ He focuses on ornamentation, certain rhythmic maters, articulation, and the choice of treatment of the appropriate keyboard instruments. He cites various books on Bach interpretation "which outline a sensible compromise between historical insight and modern performance practice" (Ibid.: x). He emphasizes the influences on Bach and Bach's influences as a composer and teacher, which "was much greater than has hitherto been assumed." The "most important sources for the performance of Bach are the works themselves." Bach's way of thinking was more modern than his contemporaries, while continually revising and transcribing his works. His legacy shows an enduring vitality within an unequaled diversity of interpretation. Three main tendencies are found in Bach interpretation: historically minded musicians try to recreate the time of Bach, 19th-century massed sound and expressive elements, and 20th century compromise using available resources including adaptations which make a profound impression. The results can be pleasure and spiritual enrichment by "bridging the traditional divide between musicology and practical music-making," he says (Ibid.: viii) and applying knowledge, intuition and inspiration to play with empathy and conviction.

Badura-Skoda cites Harnoncourt with "the attitude of open-minded inquiry." Bach's music reflects much of the baroque traditions of rhythm that is quick and uniform with a few contrasts, often in long lines and great agogic freedom in the stylus phanticus of the toccata and fantasia, dance form that emphasizes appropriate beats, tempi that emphasize the contrasting movements in multi-movement works, terraced and echo dynamics, and the use of older as well as new instruments, depending on circumstances and availability. In expressive playing, regardless of the instruments, an expressive cantabile or singing style is important. While Bach's keyboard music explores melodic chorale melodies to the fullest and a wide range of dances, even in learned fugues there is a natural aesthetic beauty and sensibility. The second part of his study focuses on ornamentation where "the last decades have witnessed a certain stagnation in the assimilation of new insights and historical facts" in a "gross oversimplification" of ornamentation of "simplified rules without taking into account the context", he says (Ibid.: ix). (Above all, there are three ingredients that determinea musical work: motive, method and opportunity — the operative legal test of why, how, and when.)

FOOTNOTES

¹ Paul Walker, Chapter 15, "Counterpoint, Canons, and the Late Works" Part IV, Genres and Forms," in The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach, ed. Robin A. Leaver (London & New York: Routledge, 2017: 376ff, https://books.google.com/books?id=SCklDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA377&lpg=PA377&dq=Counterpoint,+Canons+Routledge&source=bl&ots=Qakh5kbYOw&sig=ACfU3U2o87MS2vVdPWai9xVJF0svdLDJlQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjKoc6-uqviAhVumK0KHbuoCe4Q6AEwBnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Counterpoint%2C%20Canons%20Routledge&f=false.
² Bach Studies (1), ed. Don O. Franklin (Cambridge University Press, 1989),(https://books.google.com/books/about/Bach_Studies.html?id=lT09AAAAIAAJ.
³ Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Cambridge MS: Harvard University Press, 1996); http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013568.
⁴ David Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint, New perspectives in music history and criticism (Cambridge University Press, 2002; https://www.bookdepository.com/New-Perspectives-Music-History-Criticism-Bach-Meanings-Counterpoint-Series-Number-10-David-Yearsley/9780521090995).
⁵ Yearsley, "Keyboard Music," Part IV, Genres and forms, in The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach (Ibid., Footnote 1: 311.
⁶ See Robin A. Leaver, J. S. Bach as Preacher: His Passions and Music in Worship (St. Louis MO: Concordia, 1978: 27ff).
⁷ Editor Nicholas Kenyon, Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium (Oxford University Press, 1988), https://www.questia.com/library/1341032/authenticity-and-early-music-a-symposium: "About."
⁸ Nicholas Kenyon, BACH 333: Bach, the Music, in J. S. Bach: The New Complete Edition (Berlin: Deutsche Grammophon, 2018; https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8469462--bach-333-the-new-complete-edition); 222 CDs of Kenyon musical commentary based on his The Faber Pocket Guide to Bach (London: Faber and Faber, 2011; https://www.amazon.com/Faber-Pocket-Guide-Bach-Music-ebook/dp/B004OVDVAW); and new articles (pp187ff), "Bach Interactive," "Bach after Bach," and Performing Traditions," in collaboration with Paul Mosely.
⁹ Paul Badura-Skoda, Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard, trans. Alfred Clayton (Oxford GB: Clarendon Press, 1993).

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To Come: Keyboard recordings: "Keyboard Performing Traditions" and "Bach and Virtuoso Pianists."