I’m teaching melody in music theory class this month, and nobody wrote better melodies than Bach. If you want to learn how to use single note lines to imply chord changes and counterpoint, the prelude to his first cello suite is a whole textbook worth of wisdom for you. My favorite interpretation is by Mstislav Rostropovich.
Music supervisors in movies and television have run this prelude into the ground, as evidenced by Bach’s colossal IMDB page. Noteworthy usages include The Pianist, The West Wing, Netflix’s Daredevil, If I Stay, The Hangover Part II, and, uh, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. My personal favorite is in Master and Commander, when they arrive in the Galapagos Islands.
To get the piece ready for presentation in class, first I downloaded the MIDI from Dave’s JS Bach MIDI Page. I then carefully aligned it to with the audio from Rostropovich’s recording. I duplicated the MIDI a few times so I could slice and color-code it according to various levels of structure: phrase boundaries as I hear them intuitively (the top track in the image below); then key centers (the second track); and, finally, chord changes (the third track). The fourth track is the audio waveform of Rostropovich.
Here’s a Noteflight transcription (not created by me.) The fake cello sound in Noteflight is pretty terrible, so I changed it to electric piano.
Let’s examine a few sections in detail. The very first measure is this lovely soaring arpeggio on a G major chord. It’s voiced root-fifth-tenth, which is a film score cliche for Westerns because it suggests wide-open spaces:
Already, there seem to be three voices present: a “bassline” playing G, a “top-line melody” playing B and A, and a “countermelody” playing D. Now compare that to the second measure:
The melody has exactly the same contour and the same bass note here as in the first measure, but the middle “voice” is playing E and the top “voice” is playing C and B. This implies a C chord. The third measure is similar too:
This chord is harder to understand. From harmonic context, you’d expect it to be a straightforward D7 chord. As expected, there’s an F-sharp in the middle voice and a C on top. But the bass note continues to be G, not D or A. You are not supposed to use G under a D7 chord! I guess Bach knew that the continuity of the droning open G string would be enough to make sense out of the chord clash.
In measure 22 there’s a long sustained D that acts as a kind of exclamation point in the midpoint of the piece. The phrase leading up to it is a really weird one.
First, some context. In measure 20, there’s an arpeggiated A7 chord with C-sharp in the bass. It’s a bit unusual to have the third in the bass of this chord, especially because Bach puts it in such a low octave – that’s the second lowest note a cello can play. In measure 21, you’d expect the A7 to resolve to a D chord. It does, kind of, but it’s a D7 chord, with C in the bass. In other words, that low leading tone all the way at the bottom of the cello doesn’t resolve up to the tonic like you’d expect; it resolves down to the flat seventh, played on the open C string. That is a very unstable chord voicing! The D7 makes us expect a resolution back to G, but that never comes. Instead, in measure 22, Bach continues to arpeggiate D7/C. But in the second to last note in the phrase, he precedes the climactic D with a C-sharp. You are absolutely not supposed to put a C-sharp two octaves above a C in a chord. If you play the two notes in isolation, the combination is so dissonant that it’ll peel paint. I guess you could think of this as being a quick jump to the key of D major via a momentary A7 chord. Strange though this all is, it still manages to sound beautiful and inevitable.
The second section of the piece begins with this lovely series of scale runs, going from the end of measure 22 through measures 23 and 24 and into the first half of measure 25. I hear all of this as one long D7 chord resolving to G at the end of measure 25.
This passage is all pleasantly diatonic except for the beginning of measure 24, when Bach uses the notes E-flat, D, C-sharp, D. Neither E-flat nor C-sharp belong to the key of G; they are both seriously dissonant. Bach is doing what jazz musicians call a chromatic enclosure, when you surround a target note (in this case D) with the notes a half-step above and below it. This kind of thing is common in Charlie Parker solos, but it’s not common at all in Baroque music.
Towards the end, there are a couple of striking bariolage passages. First, there’s this one in measures 31-37, where the melody alternates between the open A string and various other notes.
The tension here is pretty dramatic, almost heavy-metal-like. But that’s nothing compared to the bonkers bariolage passage in measures 37 and 38, where notes climb chromatically up above the open D string to climax in the glorious finale.
I was so obsessed with this prelude in my early 20s that I learned how to play it on the mandola (which is tuned the same as a cello, so it sits well.) It took me months to get it all down because of my limited chops, but memorizing the notes was easy. All of Bach is easy to memorize, in spite of its complexity; everything is so logical and inevitable-sounding, and all the little components are so catchy, it’s just a matter of patiently stringing them all together.
While I was lining up the Rostropovich audio with the MIDI, I looped individual measures, some of them many times. The piece is already so repetitive that it makes perfect sense to add more loops. So I made a remix where everything gets repeated four times. Sometimes I’m copying and pasting entire measures, sometimes halves or quarters of measures. I added some delay for additional hypnotic effect. Enjoy.
Here’s a more adventurous remix that I created for the Disquiet Junto: