In this crazy time, learning and analyzing Bach is an obsessive-compulsive activity that feels like an anchor of mental stability. In that spirit, I’m finding it therapeutic to dig into the famous prelude from the E major violin partita. It’s an example of “perpetual motion,” uniform note values played without interruption. Aside from measures 1, 2, 134 and 135, Bach’s prelude is an unbroken string of sixteenth notes. This kind of composition became a genre unto itself for 19th century composers. However, when Paganini does it, I mostly just find it exhausting. Bach uses unpredictable phrasing and emphasis, so even when his note values are all uniform, his rhythms still feel syncopated and fresh.
My favorite recording of the prelude is by Viktoria Mullova. Her straightforward exactness suits this music better than the sloppy exuberance of more famous virtuosos like Itzhak Perlman.
I hear Bach’s complex rhythmic phrasing better when the tempo is steady and there are some beats underneath, so I made this remix.
My other favorite interpretation is by Hopkinson Smith on lute–I discovered that he’s relaxing when slowed down two thousand percent.)
As a mandolin player, I naturally have to shout out Chris Thile. I appreciate his crisp, clean sound.
The prelude sits nicely on the guitar too (this is the instrument I’m slowly and painfully trying to learn it on). Guitar versions are often labeled as being part of a “lute suite”, though it’s not clear that Bach himself actually wrote a version for lute.
Bach was evidently so proud of this prelude that he reused it in his 1729 cantata Herr Gott, Beherrscher aller Dinge, BWV 120a, and then again two years later in Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir, BWV 29. Who could blame him?
In the video below, I aligned a MIDI file of the prelude to Viktoria Mullova’s recording. Then I annotated the MIDI to show key centers, chord changes, and melodic motifs.
Here’s the score. As with the MIDI, I annotated it with chord symbols and color-coded the melodic motifs. Normally, classical music is horrible in MIDI format, but the Spock-like logic of this piece makes it sound surprisingly okay.
Let’s dig into some specific passages. Links point to the relevant spot in the Mullova recording.
Bach lays out all the basic melodic ideas of the piece right here, with a sequence of arpeggios, two bariolage passages, and some scale runs. A sequence is a musical idea that gets repeated higher or lower, sometimes multiple times in a row. Bariolage is a technique where the violinist alternates rapidly back and forth between an open string and other notes. Bach uses tons of bariolage in this piece. There isn’t much harmony yet, though; so far everything is on the tonic chord, E.
Bach continues to sit on the tonic. He does some long runs up the E major scale to “upside-down” versions of the earlier bariolage.
Still sitting on E! The bariolage settles down to hover around the open E string. It’s both tense and exuberant.
Finally, some chord changes. “Multi-bariolage” is a term I made up to describe the effect of quickly alternating between static notes. The rhythm gets peculiar here, because I start hearing the bottom note in each little cell as the “downbeat.” That makes it feel awkward when the rhythm “resets” in the next phrase. I guess it’s not Bach’s fault that I’m emphasizing the wrong beats in my head. That’s why I made the remix, so I could hear the rhythm as Bach intended (except for the fact that he didn’t intend there to be breakbeats under it, whatever, you know what I mean).
Sequences! Key changes! The rising sequence on E major gets repeated but transposed down to C# major. This is a surprise, since the E7 was setting you up for an A. Meanwhile, the C# major turns out to be a C#7, setting up a key change to F# minor.
Except the F# minor is a fakeout, we’re really on our way to a long passage in C# minor. More sequences! Bach loves sequences.
More multi-bariolage, alternating between C# minor and G#7, with two very tense bars of C# diminished with G# in the bass. That creates a gnarly major seventh between the bass and the G natural in the chord, which is not “correct,” but sounds excellent in context.
First appearance of the key of B major. More multi-bariolage.
The same bariolage passage as in measures 13-17, but transposed down a fifth so it centers around the open A string.
Same jaw-dropping passage as in measures 17-28, but transposed down to A.
Something I appreciate about this piece is how the pattern of melodic motifs and the chord/key changes don’t necessarily align with each other. The arpeggio figure carries across from A to Edim, another carries across from Bm to F#dim, the larger meta-pattern spans three entire keys. This unpredictable relationship between harmonic boundaries and melodic motif boundaries is a big part of the pleasure of this music.
All through this passage, the sequences get repeated in asymmetrical groupings. The green falling arpeggio figure happens four times, the pale yellow rising one happens three times. If everything was symmetrical groups of four, it would make for an easier listening experience, but a less engaging one.
The harmonic rhythm changes all of a sudden, with multiple chord changes per bar instead of just one.
I will admit that my concentration starts to wander at this point. It’s just so much information! I’m still struggling to process what happened earlier, and Bach is laying yet more permutations on me. No one knows exactly why Bach wrote the violin partitas and sonatas, but the likeliest theory is that they were meant as teaching pieces for violinists or composers or both. That would explain the relentless onslaught of complexity–if Bach was writing for a regular audience, he might have introduced some repetition, a few breaks or pauses. But if this piece was meant to be studied rather than listened to for “fun,” it makes sense that he would jam every idea he could think of into it.
The pattern of arpeggios and sequences almost gets predictable for a second there, but then Bach fakes you out again. If the music wasn’t so consistently beautiful it might start getting on your nerves at this point. At measure 107 there’s a harmonic surprise, a G7 chord where you’re expecting C#7. In classical, you call this an augmented sixth chord; in jazz it’s called a tritone substitution.
Some appealing visual symmetry as the bariolage falls and rises, then the whole pattern shifts up a fifth. It’s also cool how the chord changes at the midpoint of the bariolage figure.
The coolest sequence passage in the whole piece, alternating scale runs with descending bariolage. The symmetry is obvious just from looking at the MIDI. I wonder how much Bach was just drawing patterns on the page at this point.
More visually appealing symmetry, a sequence of rising and falling arpeggios.
And yet more attractive symmetry. A less imaginative composer would have done four iterations of this sequence, but Bach does five.
The climax of the piece. A more conventional piece of music would have ended on a big E chord after the B7 in measure 135. But Bach keeps going, throwing in two quick bariolage scale runs down two octaves of E major, and then a jump up two octaves worth of E major arpeggios. It’s like he just can’t contain himself.
Why do I like this music so much, when most music of this time and place leaves me cold? Normally I resist Baroque music for its excessive formality. But Bach is the most formal of them all. Maybe I like this piece because Bach is wearing his pedantry on his sleeve. He sounds like he’s systematically working out every permutation of a set of ideas, not trying to entertain you. And yet, there’s something exciting about the flood of symmetries and asymmetries and meta-symmetries and meta-asymmetries tumbling out of this music. To the extent that I can keep up with it all, it feels like having my brain rewired. I don’t believe that “classical music makes you smarter” across the board. But Bach can certainly be an excellent music teacher.
Update: I just found out that David Bruce made a great video about this piece too: