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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This spring I’m having the pleasure of co-teaching the NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum. This is an opportunity to enact my long-held belief that music teachers should know how to write songs. My method for teaching songwriting is to say, okay, go write some songs. But I don’t throw the students straight into the deep end; I start with a series of scaffolded songwriting challenges.
Sonny Rollins is a justifiably famous for his improvising, but he has also written several jazz standards that are as catchy as anything on top 40 radio: “St Thomas,” “Pent Up House,” “Doxy,” and the stickiest earworm for me personally, “Sonnymoon for Two.” Here’s an early studio recording:
Here’s the really famous version, from the Village Vanguard in 1957:
And here’s Horace Parlan quoting it in “Jelly Roll” by Charles Mingus:
Like harmony, melody works differently in grooves than it does in linear songs or Western classical compositions. In this post, I try to figure out what makes a good groove melody, and how to write one.
While this piece is hair-raisingly dissonant, it’s also remarkably popular (by classical music standards, anyway.) David explains this fact by showing how repetition makes the previously inexplicable seem more meaningful and less threatening. A crunchy chord might be weird and scary when you hear it once, but when you hear it repeatedly, it becomes more familiar and acceptable.
My kids have been watching The Sound of Music a lot lately. I have known many of the songs since elementary school, but I somehow never got around to watching the movie until now. Apparently it was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last musical, and boy did they leave it all on the stage. I was sitting there going, “Oh snap, that song is from this movie too?” It probably supplied half the repertoire for my elementary general music class. When I sang “My Favorite Things” all those times, I thought about the words, but not much about the tune itself.
John Coltrane, on the other hand, thought very hard about the tune, and radically remade it on his famous album of the same name. The album came out only a year after The Sound of Music debuted on Broadway. I struggle to imagine how it must have sounded back then. Like, imagine if in 2017, Kendrick Lamar had released an avant-garde thirteen-minute reworking of “You’re Welcome” from Moana, maybe that would be comparable?
