What if the Bach Chaconne was modal jazz?

As I struggle my way through the Bach Chaconne on guitar, I’m having to work around the fact that I am great at music theory but terrible at note reading. So before I could play the piece, I had to completely understand it and be able to feel it by ear. The only way I could make the score useful to me was to go through the entire thing and write in jazz-style chord symbols. I know that this approach is “wrong,” because Bach didn’t think about chords as independently existing entities in this way, but it has still helped me get the piece under my fingers. Another “incorrect” but practically useful way for me to think about the piece is as a collection of scales and modes.

The scales approach can not explain everything that happens in the Chaconne. There are a few places (marked pink in the video) where the harmony emerges out of chromatic voice-leading that can’t be meaningfully described in terms of scales. Still, those moments are infrequent, and otherwise the scales approach has been very helpful.

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Deep dive into the Bach Chaconne

You can now read this post in Spanish on Deviolines

I have been spending much of my free time during the pandemic learning how to play the Bach Chaconne on guitar, drawing heavily on Rodolfo Betancourt’s transcription. Here’s Christopher Parkening doing my favorite interpretation by a guitarist (I do not sound remotely like this):

This journey has been one long reward for the obsessive-compulsive side of my personality. As of this writing, I can stumble through the whole piece, and can get through the first half in a way that sounds almost musical. If you want to try too, here’s a violin score. Also, here are measures 81 through 117 of the Chaconne from Bach’s manuscript:

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Green Onions

Is this the coolest music that has ever been recorded? I don’t mean cool in the sense of fashionable (though it is) or appealing (though it is), I mean it in the sense of laconic confidence in its bad self.

Booker T and the MGs recorded the tune without a title, and then when the record started to blow up, they had to name it in a hurry. They were considering calling it “Onions” or “Funky Onions” to honor its intense stank, but they were worried that might be off-putting, so they opted for a milder vegetable. Guitarist Steve Cropper tells the story of the recording here; he’s so Southern it hurts!

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Music is not a universal language and this klezmer song proves it

My man Adam has a word:

I can prove this with an example from my own life. When I was younger I got interested in my Jewish heritage and spent a couple of years playing klezmer music (shout out to F Train Klezmer!) There’s a beautiful tune called “Der Gassen Nigun”, in a minor key, with a moderate lurching waltz tempo and a dirgelike wailing melody. Here’s a lovely recording of it, by Harry Kandel and his Orchestra.

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Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus XI

Here it is, the most stupendous entry in The Art of Fugue. Its three themes are inversions of the ones in Contrapunctus VIII, meaning that they have the same rhythms and intervals but are upside down. Bach also added lots of subthemes and counterthemes. I used Ableton Live to visualize Angela Hewitt’s recording, drawing extensively on Dennis Collins’ analysis in Music Theory Online. I didn’t color-code every little thing that happens, just enough to show the major events in the piece.

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Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus VIII

In this post, I’m digging deeper into Bach’s The Art of Fugue with Contrapunctus VIII. It’s way more complex and intense than Contrapunctus I. I used Ableton Live to line up a MIDI file of the piece with Angela Hewitt’s recording, and then color-coded and annotated it to show the structure, the harmony, the subjects and so on.

Angela Hewitt says that she had to overcome some reluctance before learning The Art of Fugue.

I had heard extracts over the years, performed by various soloists and ensembles, but the work itself never seemed to grab me in the same way as the rest of Bach’s music does, on first hearing. Could it be that, at the end of his life, Bach had finally written something boring? It was hard to believe. I was determined to apply everything I had learned about Bach to see how I could make the work come alive.

It’s true that this music doesn’t grab you on first listen the way Bach’s catchier material does. Like, for example, the E major violin partita jumps right out at you. My kids were walking around singing it for months after I started practicing it. The Art of Fugue is not like that. But it pays back your effort and then some.

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I am making my students write raps and I wrote one too

The hardest songwriting assignment I’m giving to the NYU Pop Music Practicum is to write and record a short original rap verse. The students come from classical, jazz and musical theater backgrounds, and while many of them enjoy listening to rap, almost none have tried making it. So we are all outside of our comfort zones.

Students have the option to write their verses from scratch, or to use existing verses as a template–Toni Blackman recommends this one and this one. They can rhyme over an existing instrumental or create their own beats, but they are not allowed to rap unaccompanied, because I don’t want them doing slam poetry. There is nothing wrong with slam poetry, but the purpose of this assignment is to experience the joy and terror of trying to ride a beat.

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The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I

JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death. It was not a big hit. Dense counterpoint was deeply unfashionable at that time, as Western European aristocratic tastes shifted toward singable melodies over block chords. The first published edition of The Art of Fugue only sold about thirty copies, and it wasn’t performed in its entirety until 1922.

Eventually the classical music audience did come to admire Bach’s final fugue collection, but it took almost 100 years after it was written. The fugues still aren’t the easiest listening experience. They were meant to be didactic, to be played and studied rather than to be listened to–though of course you are free to listen to and enjoy them. I’m finding that my own enjoyment is much enhanced by opening up the structure through visualization, so that’s what I’ve done with Angela Hewitt’s recording of Contrapunctus I using Ableton Live.

The main thing to listen (and watch) for here is the subject, the little melody that each voice plays as it enters. After the subject, the voices wander off to play other intertwining parts, occasionally returning to the subject as they go. In the subsequent Art of Fugue pieces, Bach does all kinds of twisting and warping of the subject, writing it upside down, backwards, twice as fast, half as fast, overlaid on top of itself, and so on. In Contrapunctus I, however, he doesn’t do any of these formal games. It sounds more like he’s just riffing around the subject. It’s almost casual, at least by his standards.

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