Lecture 16. Baroque Music: The Vocal Music of Johann Sebastian Bach
Prof: Today we’re going
to start talking about the music of the Baroque period,
1600 to 1750, exemplified by J.S. Bach.
Today will be the first of two
presentations about the music of Bach: one,
today, dealing with Bach’s vocal music,
the other coming in sections–yes,
we have sections on Thursday, Friday, and Monday–have to do
with the instrumental music of J.S. Bach.
So we’re going to start now
with Baroque music and Bach, and a word, first,
about Bach’s biography.
Bach came from a very long line
of musicians. Indeed, ten generations of
Bachs were musicians. It goes back to old Veit Bach
in the sixteenth century and continues generation after
the generation into the nineteenth century.
In the area in which Bach was
born, this small town of
Eisenach–you can see the town’s name up there and the date in
which he was born, in 1685–in this area of
Thuringia, the region in which Eisenach sits,
the word “Bach” was eponymous.
In other words,
Bach simply meant a musician just like we have the word
“Kleenex,” for example,
or we have the word “Xerox,”
that begin to take on the connotations of an entire class.
So to be a Bach in that area
was to be a musician. Johann Sebastian Bach was
simply the most talented of this long-lived clan of musicians.
From the age of nine,
J.S. Bach was orphaned. Both his parents had died by
that time, so he was raised for the most
part by his older brother, Johann Christoph Bach,
who was a student of our Johann Pachelbel?
So there is this connection
between the Bachs and Pachelbel, and for the most part,
J.S.
Bach was self-taught. How did he teach himself music?
Well, he copied music.
He copied music for two
reasons: One, to learn the musical style, and
two, to get music
because you simply couldn’t go to a photocopying machine and
copy this– the music of Corelli or the
music of Vivaldi. You had to copy it down
yourself by hand. You couldn’t go to a music
store and buy edited editions because, for the most part,
that didn’t exist. So much more of it was simply
music copied by one musician after the next.
So Bach learned his craft by
copying, literally, Corelli.
And we have run into Corelli,
of course. Does anybody remember a piece by
Corelli that we performed? Frederick.
Student: “La
Folia.” Prof: “La
Folia,” excellent, and he copied Vivaldi.
What’s Vivaldi’s most famous
composition? Frederick again.
Student: The Four
Seasons. Prof: The Four
Seasons. So he copied that and he also
copied some other concerti, Grossi of Vivaldi–,
oftentimes surreptitiously by moonlight when he was supposed
to be in bed. Bach’s devotion to his
profession was legendary. When he was a young man he sort
of went AWOL from his first job and walked from the town of
Arnstadt– which you see up there–walked
from Arnstadt in the center part of Germany up to the
Hanseatic city of Lubeck on the North Sea up there,
a distance of about two hundred fifty miles,
to be able to sit at the feet of a very famous
organist and composer there in Lubeck,
and then he walked back.
It would be like one of us
wanting to learn something from a congressman or something and
walking from New Haven to Washington, D.C.,
and back. In his day Bach was legendary
not so much as a composer oddly enough, but as what?
What was Bach known for in his
day? We touched on this before.
Angela.
Student:
> Prof: He was an organist.
Okay.
So he was an organist.
He was the great virtuoso
organist of central northern Germany in this period.
Now, we have met an organ piece
by Bach before. What was that?
The name–Michael?
Student: Mitch.
Prof: Mitch. Okay. Yes.
What was that, please?
Student: G Minor Fugue.
Prof: G Minor Fugue.
Can you sing any of it?
Could anybody sing any of it?
Hey, we got some takers down
here, Chris and A.J., together, a duet.
Gentlemen, please.
Students:
> Prof: Excellent.
Oh, wow.
Bravo.
Okay.
>
I think that’s sort of the key
that they sang it in. We’ll come back to that idea in
just a minute because I have found myself tripping over that
fugue subject and another one that I want to talk about this
morning as I was trying to think through these.
There’s another famous
piece–organ piece by Bach–that we might have heard recently.
It should be track one.
Let’s listen to a toccata by
Bach wrote in Arnstadt early in his career.
>
Okay.
We don’t have that queued.
I’m sorry, but you probably
heard it at the concert the other day.
>
It’s a big organ piece in D
minor, the kind of spooky music that begins every Halloween show.
Well, that’s more organ music
by J.S. Bach. We may be able to resurrect
that after a while. We’ll find out.
And again, a piece that he
composed as a young man here in the town of Arnstadt,
roughly 1705 or so. So there he is,
the first job, and we won’t say “fresh out of college”
because Bach did not go to college,
but he went to a very high-standing prep school in the
northern part of Germany, just graduated,
and has his first job at Arnstadt. Let’s take a look
at–Raoul–here is the picture of our great man,
but let’s go on to our first real slide there,
and I think– That’s the organ in the church
at Arnstadt where Bach worked. The organ is still there.
The essential parts of the
pipes and all are still there. That’s the very organ that Bach
played, but they’ve sort of modernized
it over the centuries and they took out the original console–
so Raoul, if we could have the next slide,
please–and there is the console.
This is kind of the central
the processing unit, if you will,
for Bach’s organ.
So you can see–does that look
like a big organ or a small organ to you by our standards?
Yeah, kind of on the smaller
side. There were bigger ones,
actually, up to the north, but you can see here–some of
you did that extra-credit project on the organ–
two keyboards and a pedal board down here to be played,
obviously, with the feet. And what do you suppose these
things are lurking all around it?
What would we call those?
We’re going to pull one of
those. Student: A stop.
Prof: A stop, okay.
And it brings into play an
the extra rank of pipes, pipes of a particular sound,
and we have this expression, “Oh, I’m going to pull out
all the stops.” Well, of course, that has to do
with organ technology.
So this is Bach’s–the console,
in effect, of Bach’s original organ.
Bach eventually left Arnstadt
and moved on to the larger city of Weimar where he stayed,
as you can see there, from 1708 to 1717,
and he functioned as an organist and a court musician
there. In 1717, he decided to leave
that position in Weimar and move on to another town,
Coethen, and the Duke of Weimar, Duke Wilhelm,
summarily had Bach thrown in jail.
Bach was thrown in jail for a
month, sat in jail, languished in jail.
We think he started the
“Well-Tempered Clavier”
while in jail.
Why did the duke have Bach
thrown in jail? Any ideas?
Well, he hadn’t obtained a
release from the duke, and this tells us something
about the status of musicians in the eighteenth century.
They were little better than
indentured servants. No such thing as the free agency
here, not like baseball players or whatever today.
If you wanted to take another
position, you had to get your present employer to say,
“Okay. It’s all right if you go.”
Imagine that today.
You want to quit your job and
move on to a better job. Well, you can’t leave until the
present boss says you can go. But that was the case and Bach
had violated that modus operandi and there he
languished in jail for a month.
Finally, the Duke of Weimar
relented, and off Bach and his family went to the town of
Content. Let’s take a look at the next
slide, please, the town of Cohen,
again, is sort of central Germany. This is an engraving of the
mid-seventeenth century, and we can see here the
court–the building of complexes where Bach worked there in the
center. Now we’re going to go to the
front of that next slide as it stands today.
It’s rather heavily damaged
after communist occupation after World War II,
rather–not in the best state of repair.
You go inside the courtyard
there. Next slide, please.
Going in you can see it’s
something of a mess because they are fixing up that room and
indeed have fixed that room up above.
Let’s have the next slide,
please, and here is that room up above,
the so-called now Crystal Room of the palace at Cohen,
and this was where Bach performed.
And when you go to sections
this week you will watch a wonderful video of a performance
of the Bach “Brandenburg Concerto”
No.
5 performed right in this hall,
and you’ll see those same windows there.
This is Bach’s music performed
in the environment for which Bach had created it.
In 1723, Bach moved again.
He was an aggressive,
ambitious person, J.S. Bach.
He moved this time to the city
of Leipzig, a little bit to the south of Cohen,
and he spent the rest of his career in Leipzig.
He moved to Leipzig in 1723 for
two reasons, and we’ll come back to those two reasons.
But while I have this slide up
here let’s just put this in context.
You can see where Berlin is
there. You can see where Lubeck is
when he walked, all the way to the top.
This is central Germany here
and these towns aren’t too far apart.
Here’s Cohen.
Here’s Leipzig.
So in 1723, he goes to Leipzig
and he goes there for two reasons: One–next slide.
One, because his family will be
given, by the standards of the time, rather large quarters
here.
Actually, by our standards, they
were very small–nine hundred square feet.
Bach ultimately had twenty
children and they were living in nine hundred square feet.
Ask yourself–do you know how
many square feet are in your parents’ apartment or home?
A lot more than nine hundred,
but that– this was thought to be big digs
back in the eighteenth century, in these cities that were
encased by military fortresses. In any event,
we can see Bach’s working area and the living area right here in
this building. And I was hoping you could count the
number of stories because it will become important later on.
One, two, three, and then the
roof begins.
And I also want you to–it’s
hard to see on this slide but there’s a group of choirboys
walking out here. How do I know they’re choirboys?
‘Cause, they’re arranged by
height. Ever look at choirboys?
That’s how they arrange them
when they walk in procession, the young kids first,
the older ones toward the back. We’ll come back to that point
in just a minute. Another reason Bach moved to
Leipzig was it was a university town, so he’d get a free
university education for his numerous sons.
What about his numerous
daughters? Did they get a free education
at the university? No, because women did not go to
the university in this period. The first woman to receive a
degree, a college degree,
in a Western university was a woman enrolled in philosophy at
the University of Padua in 1676, so it would be unprecedented. I mean, there was one precedent
in Bach’s day for women to go to university.
It was assumed that just the
men would go to university. In any event,
let’s talk about Bach’s standing here in the town of
Leipzig.
Bach had to petition for this
job. He wanted this job because it
had these advantages, as mentioned,
and he was not the first choice of the town council of Leipzig.
There was another composer who
was their first choice, Georg Philipp Telemann.
He declined the position.
They offered it to somebody
else named Graupner. He couldn’t get a release from
his employer so he couldn’t take it.
And so, as the town minutes of
the town council– the minutes of the town
council–say, since good musicians can’t be
had we’ll– mediocre ones will have to
suffice. And they turned at that point
to Bach, which I guess calls us to ask how many misjudgments are
we making in our lives? Maybe A.J.
doesn’t realize that sitting
right next to him, Chris there,
is a genius and we should pay more attention.
How many geniuses are sort of
sneaking around in our midst unrecognized today?
Anyway, Bach was anything other
than the grande artiste when he arrived in Leipzig.
Here I’ve made some Xeroxes out
of my book called The Bach Reader.
When Bach got there,
he had to take an oath of office.
He had to swear to do the
following: “One, I shall set the boys a shining
example of the honest and retiring manner of life,
serve the school industriously and instruct the boys
conscientiously.
Two, bring the music in all the
principal churches of the town into the good estate to the best of
my ability. Three, show the honorable and
most wise counsel all proper respect and obedience.”
And so on it goes.
Here are a few more things:
“Faithfully instruct the boys not only in vocal music but
also in instrumental music,” and he had to teach
the Latin as well, “–arrange the music that
it shall not last too long,”
> “–and shall be of such a
nature as not to make an operatic impression but rather
incite the listeners to devotion.”
So they didn’t want Bach’s
music to go on too long, which is very important,
and they didn’t want it to be very operatic.
They wanted a sort of
conservative music there. Here’s number twelve:
Not to go out of town without the permission of the honorable
Burgermeister. Number thirteen:
Always walk as far as possible with the boys at funerals.
So Bach here in Leipzig is sort
of a glorified scoutmaster. He’s not this kind of
nineteenth-century image of the genius or the–of the grande
artiste as mentioned.
Okay, the point is,
once again, Bach in his day was recognized and valued
not so much as a composer but as a performer.
Well, what was the matter with
Bach’s music? Why were they already at the
outset here, sort of clipping his wings, telling him what
style not to write in? Well, Bach had this proclivity
for writing music that’s very sort of rigid,
very chromatic, very contrapuntal, and very
long, and it is long and
contrapuntal, as we will be seeing in
particular in sections this coming week.
If we compare,
for example, two concerti Grossi:
the first movement of Vivaldi’s Spring Concerto,
it lasts three minutes and ten seconds;
Bach writes the first movement of a concerto grosso.
You’re going to watch a video
of it.
It runs for nine minutes and
ten seconds. So it’s three times as long,
three times as dense, in a way.
Okay.
Let’s go on to talk about the
kinds of things that Bach composed here,
and for that, we’ll take a look at the board.
Bach’s works:
Some of these we’ve talked about already.
Preludes and fugues for
harpsichord or keyboard; “The Well-Tempered
Clavier.” We’ve talked about the G Minor
organ fugue. We can talk about “The Art
of the Fugue.” Let’s– Raoul,
let’s have the next slide. I think I’ve got a slide of
that here. No, wrong piece.
Okay. Sorry.
This is the Bach
“Brandenburg.” I’ve brought in the wrong slide.
I’m sorry.
But “The Art of
Fugue” is an interesting composition that Bach wrote very
much toward the end of his life; sonatas for flutes and violin;
dance suites for orchestra.
You may know the “Air on a
G String”–beautiful, beautiful solo violin writing
there, with basso continuo underneath;
solo concertos for violin and harpsichord;
the concerti Grossi that we’ll be talking about;
the “Brandenburg Concertos.”
We’ll be working with No. 5.
Then he wrote a lot of
religious vocal music: the B Minor Mass.
I was playing parts of the
Sanctus of the B Minor Mass when we came in.
Let’s just listen to a little
bit of– we listen to this on the fly
this morning, but let’s just listen to a bit
of the Sanctus of the B Minor Mass to give you a sense of the
monumental quality that Bach can create.
>
So pretty impressive stuff.
But it goes on for a long time
and it’s filled with imitation and fugal subjects that
recombine and different kinds of permutations.
It can be inverted and go
backward and forwards and upside down, and this is what
Bach would do.
If somebody would write a set
of variations that had ten variations in it,
he would write a set of variations with twenty
variations in it. If somebody would write one
canon, he would write ten canons–as he does,
for example, in “The Goldberg
Variations.” Whatever he did,
he prosecuted maniacally, and what he ended up with was
stuff that’s very dense, very compact,
that’s the best sort of craftsmanship but it’s not
necessarily the most popular sort of music in that regard.
But, as you heard,
it can be very grand and quite spectacular, as we heard from
the Sanctus of the B Minor Mass there.
When Bach arrived in Leipzig,
it was a town of thirty-five thousand and was one of the
biggest in Germany.
Does that sound like a big town
to you, thirty-five thousand? No.
I mean, Hamden probably has
thirty-five thousand people living in it.
But this was a big city in
Bach’s day, and he was called there to run music really for
all of the Lutheran churches in that town.
Now we’re talking here Leipzig,
which is not far from Wittenberg where Martin Luther
was active, so we’re talking about the kind of
the home ground of Lutheranism here.
And Leipzig enjoyed complete
freedom of religion.
You could attend any church–of
course, this was all Christianity.
You could attend any church
that you wished. There were a dozen or so of
them in this city. The only kicker was that they
were all Lutheran churches. You could go to this Lutheran
church or that Lutheran church, whatever one you want,
but they were all Lutheran churches.
So Bach’s job was to organize
the music for these churches, particularly the principal
Church, which was this Saint Thomas Church,
and what he wrote for this Saint Thomas Church was this
a thing called the cantata.
What’s a cantata?
Well, it’s a
“sung thing” as opposed to a sonata,
“sounded thing.” So this is a sung thing.
What can we say about the
cantatas that Bach wrote? How would we summarize them?
Well, they are
multi-movements–recitative, aria, chorus–multi-movements.
They go on for about
twenty-five to thirty minutes. They are religious in subject
matter and of course, they are written in the German language,
and Bach wrote about three hundred of these cantatas.
He wrote them in cycles of
fifty. When he arrived there in
seventeen twenty-three, he starts writing one cantata
for each Sunday. At the end of the year,
he’s got about fifty of these things;
next year he starts all over again.
So he ended up with about three
hundred cantatas. Then he got exhausted from the
process and stopped about 1729,1730 or so.
Now on the board up here, you
see the layout of a typical cantata.
It is “Wachet auf,
ruft uns die Stimme,” “Arise,
a Voice is Calling,” and here’s–
I hope you can see this okay.
Here’s how it shakes down.
We have seven movements in this
cantata, seven movements. And they are arranged chorus,
then recitative. What’s a recitative?
Somebody tell us what a
recitative is. We haven’t talked about it but
maybe you know from another context.
Jacob.
Student: It’s a short,
conversational piece. Prof: Yeah.
Okay.
It’s not much music,
more sort of spoken dialogue accompanied a little bit by a
basso continuo. Did anybody tell me from the
reading what a basso continuo is?
Well, I think if you look on
your text on about page one hundred fourteen,
you’ll find a discussion of it, but a basso continuo is an
an ensemble that plays a bass line, and because several
instruments are involved in it– it’d be the left hand of the
harpsichord, maybe a cello,
maybe also a bassoon, two, or three instruments playing
a bass line.
It makes for a very heavy,
very powerful bass line, and this is
typical of Baroque music. So a recitative will be–and
indeed all the arias–will be accompanied by basso continuo.
The choral stuff will be
accompanied by basso continuo. Continuum–it’s just always
going, so it’s a strong bass that’s always going.
It’s different from the
basso ostinato because what happens in a basso
ostinato? Yong.
Student: It keeps
repeating. Prof: It keeps repeating
over and over and over again so a basso ostinato would be
a particular kind of basso continuo,
a kind of species of basso continuo.
But basso continuo,
a bass that’s always going on and is very strong.
So we have sort of spoken
dialogue with a strong bass, then an area,
and I’m going to say something about this–these arias in this
period. They are Da Capo arias in the
Baroque period.
What does a Da Capo aria mean?
Anybody peeked ahead at
that–in the discussions in– around pages one hundred fifty,
one hundred sixty or so in the text–
or know that from other contexts?
What would a Da Capo aria be?
Well, literally “Da
Capo” sounds like a film score, the capo or something.
It means the head guy or in
this case the beginning of the music, the head of the music.
It means you take it from the
beginning of the music. So you do one section,
an A section, and then you have a contrasting
section and then you get this sign that says DC,
“Da Capo,” and then you go back and do the
A section all over again. So what form do we end up with
when we have a Da Capo aria then obviously?
Ternary form. Okay?
So the arias in here are
usually structured in the Baroque period in Da Capo form,
and then we have the choruses: chorus one,
chorus four, chorus seven.
And in each of these choruses,
we are making use of this thing called a chorale tune.
What’s a chorale?
What’s a chorale tune?
Well, a chorale tune is just
what other Christian denominations would call a hymn
or what we hear at Yale– whether we’re Muslim,
whether we’re Jewish or whether we’re Christian,
we’re going to have to sing >
and so on it goes.
I think it’s called “Duke
Street,” “Oh,
God, beneath the–oh, God, above the rising stars thy
exiled fathers cross the sea.”
It was written herein
New Haven, so it’s kind of the Yale hymn if you will,
or maybe the Yale chorale.
So these chorales were sort of
old melodies, old religious melodies.
Some of them were remakes of
Gregorian chants. The Lutherans just took old
Catholic chants and turned them into chorale tunes.
Others were newly composed,
going back to the sixteenth century.
Martin Luther himself composed
chorale tunes. Can anybody name a chorale tune
or a hymn tune by Martin Luther? I bet you–
> Does Anybody knows the name of that?
Yes. Kristin, is it?
Okay.
Nice and loud,
please, Kristin. Student: A Mighty
The fortress is Our God.” Prof: Okay.
“A Mighty Fortress is Our
God.” It’s a Reformation–so the
Reformation chorale and musicians have used that
frequently over the centuries. So we’re going–not going to be
working with “A Mighty Fortress.”
We’re going to be working with
a different chorale tune, “Wachet Auf,
Ruft uns die Stimme,” which was a couple hundred
years old by the time Bach got his hands on it,
and you have it here.
So on your sheet– Everybody
got the sheet for today? So here is a chorale tune and
it’s in lots of phrases. Right?
What about this?
>
Do you think that’s a tonal
melody? Does that sound pretty secure
to you or does that sound sort of weird?
Roger, what do you think?
Student: I think it
sounds secure– Prof: Sounds secure.
It is tonal,
and why would you imagine it sounds secure?
If you look at the downbeat of
each measure, almost every measure,
what notes do we have there? They note that form
> a triad, a major triad,
> so we mustn’t forget all that
stuff we studied early on. So here’s Bach borrowing a
chorale tune; he is foregrounding a major
triad in a big way, and who has to sing this?
Well, ultimately the full
congregation.
Everybody has to sing these
chorale tunes to show that you are a–
in this case, a good Lutheran,
I suppose, so everybody was expected to
sing them, and because of that,
they tended to be rather step-wise.
So we should all sing this.
Right?
Today we’re all going to be
good Lutherans, no matter what our real
religion is, assuming we have a real
religion, so let’s <<plays piano>>
start here.
We’re just going to sing
“la.” Here we go.
>
Okay. Great.
Now, this is not working so
well, and why is it not working so well?
Student: It’s too high.
Prof: It’s too high.
So what would Bach have done in
those days? The only person here that can
sing this is Lynda– Lynda and Santana ’cause
they’re sopranos and I could hear them,
but that was about all I could hear.
It’s too high so what would
they have done in Bach’s day? Stopped singing it?
I don’t know.
Lightning bolts would come down
on the church or something.
I’m not quite sure.
No, they couldn’t stop singing
it. They had to transpose it,
just take it down. Well, make it lower.
>
We’ll go to a different key.
Here we go.
Ready, sing.
>
>
Rest.
>
>
Louder.
>
>
Okay. We’ll stop there.
So Bach’s got this chorale and
then he’s going to do something with it.
And what he does is write the
first movement, so that takes us back over here
to move one of our chorale cantatas.
We’re going to talk now about
the text about this particular chorale.
What’s the text calling about?
Well, here’s what–here’s the
translation of it: “Awake,
a voice is calling, from the watchman from high in
the tower.
Awake Jerusalem;
midnight is the hour. They call us with a clarion
voice. Where are the wise virgins?
Get up. The bridegroom cometh.
Stand up and take your lamps.
Alleluia.
Provide yourself for the
wedding. Go–you must go out–go forth
to meet him.” Now in Bach’s day,
this chorale would have been sung.
It’s the major musical portion
of the cantata, which is the major musical
portion of the whole service, and it was sung right after the
reading of the gospel.
So they’d come in and there’d
be some introductory chorales and prayers and that kind of
thing. Then they would have a reading
of the gospel, the thesis of the day.
Now, this particular cantata is
written for Advent. So what’s Advent?
Who can tell me what Advent is?
Don’t necessarily–Muslim,
Jew, Christian, whatever, you may–probably
know what Advent is. Thaddeus.
Student: It’s the days
before Christmas. Prof: It’s the days
before Christmas. So we have the English word
“adventitious,” something coming,
something about to arrive. It’s the birth of Christ in
this particular case. So it’s, I think roughly the
four weeks before Christmas.
Think maybe late November,
or early December, up to Christmas.
So that’s when this cantata
would have been appropriate. It would have been sung say,
on the–on Sunday, the first of December,
something like that, and as I say it’s preceded by
the gospel of the day. So to get our heads in this we
have to understand what Bach’s message is here.
We have to know what the gospel
is. So I’ve asked Chris–I gave
Chris the textbook here. I put it in the textbook and
asked Chris to read the gospel for today.
So stand up and–or–yeah.
Are you going to stand up?
Student: Then shall the
kingdom of heaven–” Prof: Oh,
good. I like that,
nice and loud, the voice of God.
Student: –be likened
unto ten virgins, which took their lamps and went
forth to meet the bridegroom. And five of them were wise and
five were foolish.
They that were foolish took
their lamps but took no oil with them, and at midnight there was
a cry made. Behold, the bridegroom cometh.
Go ye out to meet him.
Then all those virgins arose
and trimmed their lamps, and the foolish said unto the
wise, ‘Give us of your oil for our
lamps are gone out,’ but the wise answered,
saying, ‘Not so; lest there be not enough for us
and you, but go ye rather to them that sell and buy for
yourselves.’ And while they went to buy the
the bridegroom came and they that were ready went in with him to
the marriage and the door were shut.
Watch therefore,
for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the son of man
cometh.” Prof: Okay.
Excellent, and that’s the King
Jame’s version of that so the syntax is sometimes difficult
and the verbiage is a little bit unexpected there.
But what does all this mean?
What is this? Roger?
Student: It’s the second
coming of Christ. Prof: The second coming
of Christ. Okay.
And what are we supposed to do?
We, good citizens of Leipzig,
what are we supposed to do? Student: Be ready.
Prof: Be ready,
get our spiritual house in order because Christ is coming,
so Bach has this idea of this powerful figure coming into the
midst of Leipzig.
And he creates the following
kind of music. We start here with
> and then it begins to move a
little bit in pitch. It’s a good example of
something that we’ll talk about in a moment,
but if we want to have the sense of the inexorable march of
something, what better way than a
repeating bass line? Then we have a melody begin
> and then we didn’t have
time–we have a C motive that we wanted to put up here–
>. So when you read your textbook
there, I interpreted this as follows.
You will hear someone saying,
i.e., me saying, that this is the inevitable
march of the Lord coming to the citizens of Leipzig.
They get very excited and they
begin to run in his direction, and this is the–Bach didn’t
write all this down; I’m kind of interpreting it
this way, but I can’t help but think back
In the early session, we talked about the musical
Chicago and that number in Chicago,
“get the gun, the gun,”
>, and it gets faster and faster
and the texture gets denser and denser.
Well, that’s exactly what Bach
is doing here.
Whether it’s Broadway or Bach,
the modus operandi is going to be the same.
So let’s listen to just a
little bit here. This is the opening movement of
Bach’s cantata “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme.”
>
Okay.
We’re going to stop it there.
That’s just the opening phrase.
The crowd’s coming in there
with little fugal expositions underneath that,
“who?”, “Where?”,
coming where? sort of this busy counterpoint
underneath. I used to use this as a
Listening Exercise but it didn’t work.
It was too–I couldn’t get–the
students couldn’t–I don’t know. It just was too complex and in
a way, it told me something. Bach’s music is very complex.
So I went on to a more
straightforward movement and that’s what we’re going to do
now, the fourth movement that incorporates the chorale.
So we have the chorale,
sort of like the voice of God, up here on top.
Let’s go on to the fourth
movement that you may well recognize.
It’s one of Bach’s most famous
compositions, and I have four questions for
you here.
What’s the bass doing?
How many voices are there?
How many lines,
and strands, do you hear in the texture?
And where is the chorale tune?
Who’s singing the chorale tune?
So this is movement four of
the cantata “Wachet Auf.” >
And then the ritornello starts
again; this refrain theme starts all
over again. >
All right. Let’s pause it there.
So what kind of bass do we have
here? It’s called walking bass.
Right.
We’ve talked about that before,
and, once again, it gives a very sort of secure
foundation. So we have a basso continuo
playing a walking bass, >
>
something like that,
just going on and on the sort of with the same note values,
tends to be step-wise, the same note values.
What else did we need to know
there? What happened to the chorale?
Well, first of all,
what about the texture? How many strands did you hear
in that texture? Brian and Nicole,
you want to huddle up there and figure out what the answer to
this one is? What do you think?
Nicole, how many strands?
How many lines did you hear
there? Okay.
Well, we’ve got the bass in
there and we had that lovely, lovely melody,
> which you have on your sheet
there, so that’s two, and what was the third one?
Well, the chorale tune
> but what was different about
the chorale tune this time? It was easier to hear.
Why?
‘Cause all of the male voices
were singing it together in unison.
It wasn’t distributed in all
this counterpoint in all of the voices.
All of the lines–all of the
voices were singing it together.
And if you have this sheet
here, I think the miracle of this particular sheet is that
this guy had this one melody >
and he said,
“Gee whiz, if I went >
I could have that go against
this melody.” He thought–he had one nice
melody and he thought up an even more beautiful melody that could
interweave with his given melody.
So that’s the gift here,
to be able to hear one thing and size up its implications,
to know what it could become. I guess that’s what a great
creative artist is all about, to know what something can
become. All right.
So we have that particular
movement and I think that’s the basis of your Listening Exercise
twenty-two for next time. Now we’re getting toward the
end of our hour and I want to ask you–well,
we’re going to do two more things.
One, we’re going to come back
at the end– to the end of the cantata,
but I want to ask you a question about–
just try to put yourself in Bach’s shoes here for the
moment.
You got this job as a composer
and you got to generate all this music.
Right?
You got to generate twenty-five
to thirty minutes of new music every week.
Well, that would be like–all
right. So presumably you get Sunday
afternoon off, watch football,
or whatever you want to do. Then Monday morning you start
all over again, and by next Sunday morning, you
got to have twenty-five to thirty minutes of music ready to
perform. Why is that hard?
What’s the hard part of this?
What’s the time-consuming part
of all of this? I see Roger and Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, go with it.
Student: Writing it out.
Prof: Writing it out,
yeah, probably not composing it.
I think these composers just
have this stuff spewing out of their ears nonstop.
I don’t think it was thinking
it up and maybe not rehearsing it, though that would take some
time.
But before the days of
photocopying machines, it would be very laborious to
copy the full score and all of these parts,
maybe fourteen different lines simultaneously,
and multiple copies of the violin parts and the cello parts
and this kind of thing– so it’d be very time-consuming.
How did he do this?
Well, let’s see if we can go
back to the next slide here and we’re going to talk about this
just for a bit.
How did Bach execute this and
the next–Raoul, I think there was the–yeah.
So we’re going to go back into
our church here and we’re going to see Bach’s church where his–
the floor plan here and then we’re going to–
next slide, please–take a look at the inside of it where the
the sermon was preached and take note of the high altar up there.
Next slide.
We’re going to go through these
quickly now. There we have the west end up
there where the organ is. That’s where the cantata would
be performed. Next slide. The organ up there.
Here’s a question for you.
Is this an organ from Bach’s
day? Next slide.
Does that look like Bach’s
organ? No, too many mechanical–kind
of mechanical contrivances there so that’s an organ from the
beginning of the twentieth century,
and Bach’s organ would have looked far more like this and
we’re going to talk about this in a section a little bit later
on.
Moving on, let’s go back to
this, because this is the building that we saw before,
the place where Bach lived. If we look at it now and start
counting up, we see that now there are five stories before we
reach the roof line. In 1731, Bach petitioned the
town council because of his large family taking the roof
off of this building and provide him with more space,
more space because he had all of these children,
he had relatives and he had students living in these
quarters, and what they do to earn
their keep? Well, they copied music for him.
So this is sort of,
if you will, the corporate headquarters of
Bach, Inc. This is where all this great
music is generated from. His wife, Anna Magdalena Bach,
was his principal copyist. All right.
So that’s what–where they
lived. Now Bach, of course,
as mentioned, died in 1750.
Historians are profoundly
grateful to him for that because it gives us a nice,
clean cut-off by which to end the Baroque era–
end of Bach, end of Baroque. Died in 1750 of a stroke at age
sixty-five. At the time he wasn’t thought
to be particularly important, so they relegated Bach’s
remains to an outlying parish church.
As Mozart played Bach,
Beethoven played Bach, Felix Mendelssohn played Bach,
people began to realize that, lo and behold,
they’d had a genius in their midst.
So they exhume Bach to see if
he was a genius.
Let’s take a look at this.
This is what they did in 1895.
They dug him up and they
photographed him because this was the period in which there
was a theory of genius– interestingly enough,
that the genius had a smaller brain than the normal human
being– not a larger brain but a
smaller brain. In any event,
Bach’s brain turned out to be just completely normal and this
was presumably a lot of nonsense,
but when they dug him up then they repositioned him.
And they repositioned him at
the high altar and this marker here is now where the remains of
Bach is situated. And they tore out the
south-side bank of glass in the church and constructed based on
the portrait that you saw at the beginning of our hour–
that portrait–they constructed stained glass windows with
titles of some of Bach’s works there,
so that musical tourist such as myself–
or I hope you, someday–will go to Leipzig to
enjoy the wonderful music of this city and the wonderful
music of Bach.
Now the last thing we’re going
to do on our way out– the way the cantata would end
is that the entire congregation would stand up and everybody
together would sing the chorale tune.
We’re not going to do that
’cause you already did that, but we’ll just play this music
as you go out to give you a sense of how the service would
end. >
.
