(Video) J.S. Bach - Contrapunctus XIV from Art of Fugue
🔩 Nuts and Bolts
Composer: J.S. Bach (1685-1750)
Work: Art of Fugue (BWV 1080), Contrapunctus XIV
Audio engineer: Michael Caporizzo (from Ithaca College!)
Video: Four/Ten Media
Performance clothing: NOT by Jenny Lai
What’s in an ending?
Bach, knowing he’s a bad dude
What is there left to say about the GOAT? I’ve gone back and forth about my feelings on Bach in the past. I was indoctrinated into the mindset of my teachers: Bach is amazing and we should play more Bach. Then I had a few years when I thought he was a mere mortal and didn’t want to touch much of his music because it wasn’t written with the sound of the marimba in mind. My myopic view eventually dissolved and now I have settled on a more informed realization that many other folks have found: he was amazing.
Percussionists will play something of Bach at some point in their lives. Everyone knows the A-minor violin concerto from the Goldenberg book, and most collegiate percussionists will play through the violin Sonatas and Partitas and the Cello Suites in their four-year academic tenure as well.
yikes.
Adolescent players will take pride in the rebellious musical theft from our more endowed string colleagues, but soon that feeling wears off and we’re left with the guilt that we don’t know what to do with it. The music is not ours, and like Inception, our subconscious probably rejects this foreign music and struggles to identify with the lines, the counterpoint, and maybe even the requirement of accuracy (gasp!).
But what about music that wasn’t written for…anything? Nobody can claim it. It belongs to, well, Music, I guess, and it could feel like the purest realization of composition. One example of this is Bach’s Art of Fugue. It doesn’t rely on a certain configuration of people or the sound of a specific instrument and is the realization of a style, perhaps even the culmination and ultimate milestone of a compositional form. The ultimate goal of the piece might not have even been to have it played, but read, like a musical thesis. If we never heard the piece, though we would be left with disappointed ears…
Beethoven’s Grosse Fuga from the Juilliard Manuscript Collection. Click the image to go to the info page!
A variety of instruments and groups have realized this thesis, from soloists to string quartets and large ensembles. So why not me? Why not marimba? There really is no reason that the admission ticket for marimba is any more or less pricy than any of the instruments that were around when Bach was writing this piece. In fact, perhaps the instrument is even better equipped in some ways. It is contrapuntal, like the keyboard or lute, and has a warm resonance that enhances the swooping lines, with a percussive attack that drives the rhythmic impulse. Only a few measures throughout the entire work are impossible for a marimbist because of reach, but a regular listener would never hear the omissions that would be necessary.
The Art of Fugue is a culmination of decades of development in the fugue style. As Bach saw his colleagues around him moving in newer harmonic and melodic directions, the art form that he essentially perfected might not have a piece that shows a comprehensive approach to the techniques that are possible within this form. I would also argue that this could be one of the seminal pieces in his output that define his organized mind and understanding of structure. I would also argue that this mind of his didn’t really have a match in our Western classical canon. How can all of this music be generated from just one simple, four-bar idea? 🤯
This Met Museum exhibition feels like the way a 20th century person would interact with the fugue. It feels alive and modern, but we will never know what it feels like to wear the gown.
Click the picture to go to the website!
Other wonderful fugues were completed after Bach’s death, like Beethoven’s Grosse Fuga, the fugue in Liszt’s B-minor sonata, and 20th-century composers Bartok, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Ligeti and others. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but all of these composers’ fugues were completed with a nod to Herr Bach in the process. These composers fill their fugues with processes and languages that Bach would not have encountered, but I don’t feel these as developing the fugue, it’s more like taking a piece off of a shelf in a museum and looking at it through our modern eyes. But regardless if you feel that the fugue is still being developed or not, I believe Bach’s intention was to wrap up the fugue while he was still alive, show what is possible with it, and use his singular craft to present the fugue in a kind of comprehensive punctuation to the style.
In the hands of these fabulous post-Bach composers, the form comes to life again, but everything is placed back in time. It’s like a Jurassic Park of music. Art of Fugue preserves the fugue in amber, and modern-day geniuses carefully extract its DNA and bring this form to life with contemporary language. But no matter what, the form is timestamped in the past. The velociraptors don’t have cell phones - they still think it’s 75 million years ago, and will always be tied to that period.
That being said, the irony is not lost on me that Bach seemingly set out to put punctuation on the historical sentence of the fugue, and did it, except for this final Contrapunctus XIV, which lies unfinished. There are theories that he completed more of the Contrapunctus than we have available to us today, but I haven’t heard of anyone who believes he finished the piece before dying in 1750. Many people have attempted to finish the piece, and many of them are valiant efforts, but the way an art restorer attempts to color-match paint from Rembrandt, the attempts are futile at best. I am comfortable with the piece remaining unfinished, perhaps a poetic invitation to continue engaging with the past, or perhaps a reminder that the immortal man was, in fact, human after all. Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes” and Bach wasn’t able to escape either.
Resources
Editions I used:
Bach, J.S., ed. Davitt Maroney. Art of Fugue. MĂĽnchen: G. Henle Verlag, 1989.
I found it easy to play from this version off imslp.org, but did not play Mr. Tovey’s completion: https://imslp.eu/files/imglnks/euimg/e/ed/IMSLP509563-PMLP05843-Bach_Contrapumctus_XIX_completed_Tovey_GF.pdf
Other resources:
Wolff, Christoph. Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.
Wolff, Christoph. Bach’s Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.
Podcast and other info from Evan Shinners (W.T.F. Bach)
Gould, Glenn, Tim Page. The Glenn Gould Reader. New York: Knopf, 1984.