January 25, 2012
Why is Bach boss?
Suddenly I had to stop—I had screwed up a turn in the harmony and wasn’t moving toward the goal of G minor anymore. I had embarked upon a Neapolitan odyssey which was now gone quite awry.
“Why do you suppose,” my teacher asked, breaking the extremely uncomfortable silence, “that Bach can be so difficult to memorize?” We were working on the C minor keyboard partita, BWV 826.
“It’s because nothing can be moved out of place,” he continued. “Not one thing—not one note in a sequence, not one chord in a progression may be disturbed without shattering the whole, nor can one element in any vertical texture be shifted by the slightest degree. Everything is exactly where it should be, and you will never find a way to improve upon it while continually discovering new means such as this by which to destroy it.”
A short time later I would play that particular work for the great Rubinstein pupil Dubravka Tomsic, who spent the first fifteen minutes of our very public time together fussing over voicing and timing in the opening French flourish and the other fifteen minutes repeatedly demanding that I play the first phrase of the ensuing andante with absolutely perfect evenness in front of God and everybody. It was delightful.
Read this. Leading Tone is not only a musician, but writes quite nicely about music.
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floete reblogged this from leadingtone and added:
gets old. It’s endlessly fascinating.
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mojitochica said:
Telemann is better!
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thebrokenlyre reblogged this from leadingtone and added:
An excellent article!
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“ Musician readers MUST read this, because...beautiful essay.
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Fantastic, thank
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