“Why Bach
Is So Important”
By Martha Stockton Russell |
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The following is excerpted from Martha Russell’s book, A Music Lens on History. It provides the detail of her thinking on the importance of Bach, and helps to explain why Margaret Allen, founder of the Windswept Music Workshop, included Bach Chorales in the workshop schedule. – John Morrison
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In 1685 Bach was born. He came to birth in Germany, as did Handel in the same year. Both are accorded a place in the sun. Handel, unable to function freely in Germany, removed to England. He became England's great musical exponent; but his genius was circumscribed within the boundaries of an espoused national culture.
Bach, on the other hand, lived out his life in Germany; often in some obscure position, never in a particularly prominent one. But the music that he made transcends all boundaries, both of nation and of self. Like the first sustained tone of consciousness it stand apart. Summing up the past and holding in itself the future, it bridges the gulf between the music of the past and the music of the future - polyphonic and monophonic music - in unquestioning recognition of the harmonic beat that underlies harmonic structure…
For the music of John Sebastian Bach stands at the crossroads of civilization: it fulfills the past; it gives earnest of the future; and this is literal, not figurative statement. It is polyphony, raised to its highest power; it is a tonal consummation of moving voice parts to which nothing can be added. The miracle is that nothing was added. It is only that out of the movement of those polyphonic voices, a new tonal world emerged. – “and suddenly-there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying: Glory to God in the Highest and on earth, peace...” For the lines of sound that take on the majesty of a Bach fugue, the wistfulness, the humor, the gayety of a Bach suite, the transcendent glory of a B Minor Mass, are lifted, each one to its own freedom of beauty, through their fusion in the beat which in inherent in a shared and common purpose: the feeling beat lying below the surface of accepted metrical rhythm; harmonic beat, the basis of harmonic structure, without which harmony could not exist. For harmonic beat is the record of group motion: and group motion is the essence of group freedom; and “freedom”, the children have said it, "is something that sings with joy!"
Shortly after the armistice which concluded the first world war, that friend whose piano playing had proven that the laws which govern motion are the same laws that govern true music expression, was asked to give a series of programs for the children of the Park School in Buffalo. During that winter, for an hour each week, those children lived with music that was the sound of motion; breathed with the lift and fall of its melody as a tree breathes with the motion of the wind that passes through it; came to know that inner beat from which it took its rise. She played them music of every age and every country, but mostly she played them Bach; the dance suites first, the preludes, and then the fugues. I shall never forget the way she made clear to those children the nature and structure of a Bach fugue.
“You see, there are all these voices going about their business, sometimes singing the same song, but in different places and different keys, sometimes singing a little song of their own while some other voice sings the ‘theme-song’. And with several voices singing their own little tunes all at the same time, you would think that music would get quite tangled up, - as it did in the days, not so long before Bach wrote his music, when composers were more interested in seeing how many voices they could put together and get an occasional harmony out of them, than they were in the music the voices sang. Fifteen, and even twenty voices they would put together - just imagine it. And then of course things did get so mixed that the man who was writing the music would have to bring all the voices together to sing in unison on one tone - as if that would help matters - before they could go on any further.”
“But the Bach music handles itself quite differently. Each voice sings its own song in its own place and its own way; but each voice sings, not just for itself alone, but first, last and all the time, for the glory of the music as a whole.”
“This of course makes for perfect team work in the fugue, just as it does in basketball or football or hockey. Of their own accord the voices come together, not to put over a make-believe unity by singing a tone in unison, but out of all their different tones to create a new sound; a living, breathing, unit of sound that we call harmony. And because each tone gives to that harmony everything it has at that moment the harmony they make is tuned to the need of each and every voice; and the lift of the beat that is the common property of them all lifts each voice up and out to do its own next bit of singing and brings it back again in perfect timing. I think it is because they have learned the secret of being together while being apart; for you will notice that as they go about their own affairs, each voice with some part of itself is listening to the whole. So when one of the voices has an important bit to do, a special something to put over, the other voices clear the way for it and give it all the support within their power.”
“Now make yourself comfortable, take your own inner spring - you know about that - and when I start to play, ‘rest’ yourself entirely on the music. You will hear the way the voices enter one after the other, and the little song each one sings as it goes along. You will feel the beat of their coming together and the sweep and color of the harmony their voices make; and from the harmonic beat you will lift with them to the next and the next song, until presently you won't be able to tell the music the piano is singing from the music as it sings in you.”
In the years that followed upon 1914 one heard the plaintive voicing. “But what of Germany's music! How is it possible a nation that gave us Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, to give us at the same time, world war?” In the first place it was not at the same time. Wagner and Strauss intervened. In the second place, and on the puzzle itself, perhaps the music lens can throw a little light. Turn it again upon the German folk-song, and the reason for the truth and beauty and unstinted flow of Germany's music is clear. The soul of Germany spoke the language of the new dispensation and gave it welcome in a music that was the evolutionary birthright of every nation. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, could have been born only in Germany, but their music belongs to every individual of every land, the world over.
Unfortunately the reality of music and the performance of music are not necessarily one and the same thing! Which brings us to the “second phase” of our questionnaire and a little oddity of the music art which may provide its answer.
For music has a curious characteristic that is all its own. Among the arts it is the only one which, though an entity in itself, depends upon a momentary re-creation by the performer for its fulfillment. Painting is put on canvas; sculpture is put in marble; poetry, perhaps still closer to the bound edge, is secure on the printed page; and no second person may tamper with their end result. But music has no concrete registration blank. Its medium is evanescent sound. Of course, its sound is written down for purposes of preservation, but not so many of us can take up a symphonic score and hear the music printed there; for the great majority music, to he heard, must be recreated through the medium of performance. It is this idiosyncrasy which gives the music art its value as a lens. Music, like every art form shows us an inner reality. Unlike the other art forms it leaves it with us to choose the manner of its fulfillment - whether we shall sing the reality that is music, or the music the way we wish to hear it sung.
The music of John Sebastian Bach came to birth in Germany. This, as we have said, would be inevitable since it was Germany's necessity to place before the world the message carried by that music. The idiosyncrasy of music just noted left the choice as to the manner of giving over the Bach music in Germany's hands. Was it to be played as melodic lines of sound, intellectually devised with the consummate skill of the polyphonic era? Or should it be handled as harmonic beat opening the door to a new awareness and a further freedom? Germany's evolutionary tuning put her en rapport with the harmonic beat reading. Was it an unresolved frustration of purposive ambition lying below the level of conscious thought, that over-bore her timing trend and fixed her choice?
The tradition for the handling of Bach's music which Germany gave to the world was polyphonic. And the nations of the world accepted the tradition and practiced it.
Bach died in 1750. It was in America, a century and a half later, that the Bach Choir in Bethlehem -under the direction of Dr. J. Fred Wolle, broke with the traditional German handling and liberated the harmonic beat in the Bach music. One doubts that Dr. Wolle was aware of the stupendous thing he did, for genius does not analyze its impulses. But it is significant that he, a music seer, wished to be remembered as a teacher, rather than as musician. Perhaps it is also significant that Dr. Wolle was a Moravian; that his forebears were of that little band who came to America to build a new Bethlehem in a new and a free land. |
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