Bach Anxiety

Someday I want to write something long about Bach. (Maybe I’ll call it Bach to the Future, ha ha.) I have been slowly building toward it by doing a lot of Bach analysis here on the blog. My pandemic project has been learning movements from the D minor, G minor and E major violin partitas and sonatas on guitar. I can play these pieces slowly and badly, but I’m having a great time doing it. And I have learned a ton from remixing them:

I want to write about why Bach is so much more appealing to me than the other composers of his time and place. This story is as much about Bach’s reception history as it is about the notes on the page. Michael Markham has a good summary of that reception history in his essay, “Bach Anxiety: A Meditation on the Future of the Past”, from the 2021 book Rethinking Bach. If you don’t have university library access, Markham explores the same themes in this Los Angeles Review of Books essay, and also in this one. Let’s dig in!

Markham says that Bach’s main role in the present-day culture is rooted in the idea that he seems to speak to us from a higher, utopian world of pure mathematical logic.

This Bach speaks to us from a region that defies our comprehension but also assures us of some controlling laws imposing structure, paying off the Enlightenment faith in an absolute truth toward which one is obligated to strive (p. 340).

What is that absolute truth, though? Bach was an ultra-conservative Lutheran, so he would have understood himself to be pursuing a different set of truths than people are mostly seeking now. The music academy understands Bach to have been pursuing the truth of the Western tonal system, which he himself helped to codify as it evolved from the church modes. Bach did not write any music theory treatises, but he certainly understood theory, and his student Johann Kirnberger based Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik on Bach’s teaching.

The Western tonal system is not a universal law, even within Western European music, much less anywhere else, but many people have found it comforting to imagine that it is. On a practical level, if you are building a music curriculum, it is helpful to be able to draw a box around a particular set of conventions and say, this is what we expect people to learn. The problem is that a few too many people have pushed the ideological claim that Western tonality is universal, and that there is no other system of music worth studying (looking at you, Heinrich Schenker.) Anyway, this is not Bach’s fault. He wrote in the style that he wrote in; it’s up to us whether we want to treat his body of work as a set of rules that we have to follow.

If you do find the idea of music as a logical system appealing, then there is no music that is more logical or systematic than Bach’s. His Spock-like orderliness is the core of his appeal to Enlightenment-era Europeans and 20th century high modernists alike, and it continues to shape popular perception of him. Bach lovers have a certain persona: hyper-intelligent but maybe lacking in other human qualities. Michael Markham illustrates this by listing Bach’s main present-day (pop-) cultural signifiers: Glenn Gould’s germaphobic weirdness, Douglas Hofstadter’s abstruse mathematical games, Hannibal Lecter’s cold-blooded methodical plotting, the underground robot compound in Ex Machina, and Sherlock Holmes calming his nerves.

In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, my favorite Douglas Adams book, there’s a plot point that Bach’s “Ach bleib bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ” from the cantata “Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden”, BWV 6 is a remnant of a superior alien race’s computer operations as it synthesized music from the motion of the universe itself. Few people would go so far as to say that Bach is inspired by extraterrestrials, but the idea that he represents an alien intellect is widespread.

No one knows much about Bach’s inner life, and that makes it easy to project whatever meaning you want onto his music. Even if Bach had left behind lots of detailed autobiography, it wouldn’t necessarily affect his reception history. In Bach’s time, composers thought that their job was to express the glory of God, not to communicate their personal feelings. Bach’s music has an immediately recognizable style, but it’s more like the style of a mathematician than the style of a poet.

There has been a lot of purple prose about Bach’s universality. A quick Google search for “universal Bach” or “transcendent Bach” returns uncountably many books, articles and recordings. Bach is represented by three different pieces on the Voyager golden record. (The only other musician or composer who appears more than once is Beethoven.) A concert series a few years ago paired Bach cantatas with lectures on cosmology and physics. Paul Henry Lang calls him a “paragon of musical virtue acceptable to all factions.” Pablo Casals goes further:

To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make divine things human and human things divine; such is Bach, the greatest and purest moment in music of all time.

This may be over the top, but Johann Wolfgang von Goethe goes even further in his description of the Well-Tempered Clavier in his letters to Carl Friedrich Zelter:

I expressed it to myself as if the eternal harmony were communing with itself, as might have happened in God’s bosom shortly before the creation of the world.

This kind of Romantic hyperbole has not aged well, but it is true that when I’m playing the music, I get the feeling of being in touch with something larger than myself. Bach would have said, of course you do! My music is telling you about the glory of God, and so you’re experiencing exactly what you’re supposed to be experiencing. I’m a Jewish atheist, though, so I want to look for explanations of what I’m feeling here in the physical/social world. I relate to Bach’s music in spite of its Lutheran-ness rather than because of it. The question is, what am I hearing in there?

Bach’s music is complicated, but it’s easier to learn than you would think. His note choices feel inevitable and self-explanatory. While it might take a while to get those movements from the violin partitas under my fingers, it doesn’t take me long at all to memorize them aurally. Bach partisans in the music academy would argue that this is because he had unique insight into the Platonic rules of musical logic. One of the tropes of Bach fandom is that he didn’t so much create music as he discovered its fundamental principles, the way that physicists discovered quantum mechanics. Religious listeners see Bach’s insight into pure contrapuntal logic and his connection to God as one and the same thing. For a representative sample, here’s Michael de Sapio writing in The Imaginative Conservative:

Instead of the drama of opposing forces, we experience in Bach a steady state in which musical bounty unfolds, presided over by a rational order that could be likened to divine providence…  The loss and recovery of Bach illustrates the truth that time proves the merits of great art, and it is surely not the only instance of something traditional and unfashionable becoming novel and radical.

You can see how Bach’s reception history would flatter the conservative mindset: he was respected by other musicians in his own time but he was deeply uncool, and it took a hundred years or so before he caught on with the wider listening public. Plenty of people like to imagine that they are simply ahead of their time and that history will vindicate them. De Sapio attributes Bach’s slow rise to fame as evidence that people just have to accept universal truths eventually, no matter how unfashionable they are.

As a Lutheran, Bach’s sympathies seem to have been with what was known as Orthodox Lutheranism, the High Church faction that cultivated saints’ days and a rich liturgy (the Pietists were the more “evangelical” branch). This Lutheran inheritance in turn connected Bach with the broader Catholic Christian tradition of sacred music, and ultimately with the ethical foundations of music in the classical philosophical tradition, where music was conceived as the “harmony of the spheres” and a moral force in society. This inheritance surely goes a long way to account for the sense of wholeness and universality in his work.

The problem here is that you can only claim Bach is universal if the universe consists of European Christians. Bach was cosmopolitan by the standards of eighteenth century Thuringia, but his horizons were narrow compared to yours and mine. Robinson McClellan points out just how different his world view was from a modern person’s:

Although Bach’s music is universally loved now, the stern Lutheran beliefs that infused its creation are counter-cultural today, and have often been ignored or derided since his lifetime. These days, the idea that theology can find direct expression in music theory can seem at best a heady curiosity, and at worst a regression to a way of conceiving the world whose very nature challenges some of our most cherished cultural, social, and political achievements.

I am perfectly happy to accept that Bach is in touch with something big and deep without having to get all colonialist and say that he is universal. I align more with Mozart’s attitude: “Now there is music from which a man can learn something.” Rather than thinking of Bach’s style as a universal truth, it’s more accurate to see it as a game with arbitrary rules. Bach played this game better than just about anyone, but this is partially because of the fact that its rules were codified to describe his music. I am less interested in the rules of this game, and more interested in the way that Bach used methodical organization to have the music explain itself to you. There’s a good reason to believe that he wrote his secular music for pedagogical purposes. He might have been surprised to learn that there would someday be concert performances of the Cello Suites or the Art of Fugue; he probably meant for you to sit there and puzzle them out on your instrument.

Whatever Bach meant by his system of musical logic, it has been easy for people to read their own meanings into it. Bach’s pedagogy may have been meant for a particular group of students, but teaching has a way of escaping its context. Michael Markham:

Ironically, while Bach scholars have spent much of the late twentieth century trying to pinpoint the localness of Bach—not just a German but a Thuringian, not just a Lutheran but part of a specific contextualized moment drawn from various theological traditions, not just a composer but a member of a hereditary family-clan, not an Enlightenment artist but an overworked and alternately obsequious and litigious crank mired in the petty squabbles of provincial town life—Bach’s public mythic profile has mostly gone in the other direction. It seems only to expand, diffusing even the already vague sense of Bach as a “spiritualist” into a misty cloud of themes that can absorb anything from religious conservatism to New Age mysticism, to objective constructivism, to nonreligious secularism. In other words, Bach’s power as a spiritual force has not been bound to the fortunes of the specific institutions or spiritualities that he might have recognized (p. 346).

Playing the music has the effect on me that prayer has on religious people. It has the flavor of devotional practice without my having to believe the actual words of the Bible. It’s easier to maintain this selective understanding of Bach’s intended meaning with the instrumental music than with all those sacred cantatas. Markham thinks that it’s only because it’s so easy to remove Bach from his context that his music has any hope of continuing to be popular.

Given Bach’s history of adaptation and the endlessly mutating ideals that can stretch out from “spirituality” and “complexity,” Bach may well be the best bet for a survivor among the canonic composers struggling for attention after the bursting of the “classical” music bubble (p. 349).

It is funny that Bach got so popular (by classical music standards) with music that was notorious in his own time for being overly complicated and abstract. With all those contrapuntal lines moving around at once, it’s hard to comprehend everything from casual listening. You really have to dig into the score, and think in terms of patterns and systems. No wonder the twentieth century modernists loved Bach: they aspired to write music that required listeners to have specialized and esoteric knowledge, that didn’t care if you listened.

The irony is that Bach has aged so much better than his modernist admirers have. Michael Markham cites Philip Glass’s famous description of modernism as “a wasteland dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy creepy music.” The absolute music of the twentieth century avant-garde still has outsize influence over university composition departments, but musicologists have been moving away from it and toward the study of music’s social and cultural contexts. Most of Bach’s music had to communicate with the churchgoing public, and to live in the political and emotional world generally. Transcendent logic is one thing, but there is starting to be a counter-image of Bach as a human being. Michael Markham describes this human being:

He is orphaned, death obsessed, outlaw, nonconformist, a sullen misfit. He is scarred from physical and mental abuse, disputes with both civic and court authorities, the memory of imprisonment and the threat of destitution. He is set upon by smaller musical minds who question his lack of a university education. He stands alone as a complex psychological figure among a collection of shallow and imperious straw men: despots, bureaucrats, venal patrons, abusive pedagogues, jealous academics, frivolous popular composers (Telemann serves as the main foil here), and audiences craving easy delights. In other words, the personal flaws of this “imperfect man” selected for our inspection are consistently of the Beethovenian (anti-)hero variety.

Alex Ross chuckles over the fact that most of the writing that Bach left behind consists of “a stack of notoriously dull, grouchy business correspondence.” Peter Schickele’s “Bach Portrait” combines grandiose orchestral music with excerpts of this correspondence. It’s funny stuff.

Michael Markham points to the smash hit “Bach remix” Morimur as an exemplar of “Emo Bach.” It has become received wisdom that the Chaconne is about grieving the death of Bach’s first wife. This is probably not true, but the story has taken on a life of its own anyway. Morimur might be based on weak scholarship, but it still sounds beautiful. Markham calls it “an incantation, and a haunting composition in its own right” (p. 353). You don’t have to subscribe to Helga Thoene’s specific Da-Vinci-Code-like theories to appreciate how good  the Chaconne sounds when you combine it with a bunch of funereal Lutheran chorales. I loved this album, but I have a harder time with Bach’s own overt expressions of faith, especially the Passions, where Bach’s ultra-conservative, anti-modernist religious faith is the whole point. Markham worries that the Passions might come to feel like rites from some ancient and exotic culture, but for me that has already happened.

However orthodox Bach might have been in his personal faith, his music had a complicated relationship with the church. Superintendent Olearius of the Arnstadt Consistory famously reproved Bach for

having hitherto made many curious variations in the chorale, and mingled many strange tones in it, and for the fact that the Congregation had been confused by it. In the future, if he wished to introduce a tonus peregrinus [note against the melody], he was to hold it out, and not to turn too quickly to something else or, as had hitherto been his habit, even play a tonus contrarius [note conflicting with the melody].

When Bach didn’t have to worry about the limits of human singers, he could push hard against the limits of what people of his time found harmonically acceptable. Alex Ross points to a spot in The Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor where a D clashes with both a C-sharp and an E-flat, which he calls “a full-throated acoustical scream.” It doesn’t sound too far out if you listen to Thelonious Monk, but if you’re immersed in the European canon, it’s startling.

Here we are back in comfortable territory for me: “pure” musical concepts unburdened by theology. People love to use the word “pure” to describe Bach: just logically sequenced notes on the page, no frou-frou. However, being too worked up about purity takes humans into nasty fascist places, so we should be applying plenty of close scrutiny. This is what Jeremy Denk struggles with in The New Republic:

Rather than using our words to measure [Bach’s] goodness, we can use his music as a standard to measure our ideas of the good, to assess our prejudices about virtue.

This is wise. Trying to rank the composers in order of greatness is tedious at best and colonialist at worst. However, it is useful to see what we’re elevating when we elevate these guys.

On the strength of this tremendous logic, Nicolas Slonimsky labeled Bach the “supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music,” which seems like hyperbole but isn’t. Bach is much more than a logician—he is Moses, minus Charlton Heston, handing down commandments.

I get nervous when we start thinking of religious authorities from the past as “supreme arbiters and lawgivers.”

Bach’s choices come to feel permanent, and immune from passing style and taste; they give the illusion of being facts. All other composers seem to be writing novels, but Bach writes non-fiction.

Wouldn’t that be nice? One thing that’s so hard about writing original music is not knowing what you’re supposed to be trying to write. If you have a set of constraints to work in, you still have to solve musical problems, but at least you don’t have to solve the meta-problem of what problems to try to solve in the first place. If you can take Bach’s counterpoint rules as “non-fiction” then everything becomes nice and clear. Those rules are complicated, but at least they are intelligible.

The sort of musical truths that Bach sketches out—unrepeatable, as no other composer ever came close to replicating these foundational experiments—are the opposite of the inspirational pronouncement. Unfolded over time, in an uncanny mix of narrative and repose, they are not intended to dazzle. They are intended to be lived in; they are well-made like a blade or a bell that rings true.

The idea that Bach is No Fun, that he takes Hard Work, is definitely a part of the appeal. There’s a competitive aspect to my desire to play these difficult solo violin pieces, a kind of “look at me, I can play all these notes” thing that I know is childish. Fortunately, I am too old and too undisciplined to ever get good enough at Bach to really get competitive about it. I do enjoy the badassery of being able to play these pieces even at my limited ability level, but that is not the main pleasure. The main pleasure is getting to live inside the music and see it up close in a way that isn’t possible from passive listening. Denk knows that too, and he takes a dim view of recordings as a way to experience Bach.

A score has nothing to do with paper, or e-ink; it can appear on an iPad or on parchment. A score is at once a book and a book waiting to be written. Perhaps a golden age of music was born with the score and died with the recording. If you are listening to a recording, you are hearing someone’s truth about Bach’s truth, their idea of Bach’s truth. The wonderment is that you may hear truths you never suspected, possibilities you never dreamed—but still you are buying another person’s truth. So I say, in all seriousness, if you don’t play an instrument, take one up; take lessons; make the time.

Denk is right, to an extent. Playing the music is as different from listening to recordings as playing basketball is from watching it on TV. However, Denk is missing one essential point about recordings: you can remix them. I have learned a lot from struggling through scores, but not nearly as much as I have learned from annotating and remixing recordings in Ableton Live. I have to learn the music aurally because I don’t read well enough to do it entirely off the page. I’m just glad to live in a world where this is possible.