Bach and Emotion

Today there is no question that Johann Sebastian Bach has become a part of our classical canon: his works are regularly performed, most people can probably recognize the vocal lines of his most famous chorales, and probably everyone who collects classical music recordings has a CD of Bach laying around, or at least a few MP3s that they play from time to time.

Despite the fact that nearly everyone can recognize Bach’s name, I still think that his reputation hasn’t completely emerged from the onslaught of Romanticism. Romantic music, by which I mean the classical music that appeared from roughly the time of Beethoven to the early twentieth century, has forever changed the landscape of the way that we listen to music, and what we expect from it. In a previous blog post, I remembered being in a master class for the piano in which no one except me even liked playing Bach on the piano. Everyone wanted to express the passion of Beethoven, or impress everyone else with the fast piano techniques required to play Chopin, Rachmaninoff, or Scriabin, and thought of Bach’s music as a boring collection of technical exercises. Although I think everyone in that class was wrong – they were expressing a far too limited conception of what Bach is about – it underscored for me the fact that Bach is often misunderstood, and often for quite specific reasons. The truth is that while there are plenty of opportunities for expressing emotion in Bach’s music, the way that you express it is very different from the way emotion is expressed in Romantic music.

Specifying these differences is actually not an easy exercise, but I want to take a few minutes today to explore this. I think the most fruitful place to begin talking about Bach is through the thing that he was most famous for in his day: his organ skills. Although he was modest in his conception of his own abilities – he famously once said that anyone could be as good an organist as he was with enough hard work¹ – the truth is that there were very few people who could match his skills in a time when playing the organ was taken very seriously. Legend has it that the one time when he had scheduled a competitive organ recital, at the behest of others, he so terrified his competitor, that the poor man ran away rather than face a musical dual with Bach.²

Now, it takes a unique skill set to play an organ at Bach’s level. In some ways organs can be forgiving when compared to other instruments. Unlike a piano, you can strike a key in a variety of different ways in order to get the same tonal effect, you can hold notes indefinitely if you’re feeling lazy, and you don’t have to worry about using the tips of your fingers to control dynamics. But on a number of parameters an organ can be absolutely unforgiving. If your rhythms are not perfect, the sound you will produce will become a dreadful mess, and if you hold a wrong note, it will produce a screeching sound that even a cat in heat couldn’t match. Compare this to the vocal music of Palestrina or Monteverdi: in this music you actually could sing a wrong note or mess up a rhythm and still sound reasonably OK; all you would have to do is wobble your pitch slightly or change the dynamics. But you have far less opportunity to do this with an organ fugue. Hence, a composer for an organ has to put extra care into the construction of chords, and pay particular attention to the way the different rhythms interact.

Bach’s polyphonic music seems to me to be a natural outgrowth of an organ’s demands. Two of the key characteristics of his works are the interestingly complex rhythmic structures, and the way all the harmonies often fit together perfectly. Compare this to Romantic music: although it is true that a performance of a symphony has to have nearly perfect synchronization, and most people can recognize when a wrong note is played, nevertheless, by varying the tonal qualities, it seems to me that Romantic music is far less demanding harmonically. And when we turn to later music with 13th chords and 15th chords, it seems clear that we are more willing to accept dissonances for their own sake. To be sure, there are lots of dissonances in Bach, and he has chords that can rival some of the most complex chords in Stravinsky, but in general they occur less frequently, in part, I imagine, because they would not sound as good on Bach’s main instrument. I think that Berg wrote some of the most beautiful music out there, but just try playing it on an organ with all the stops out, and you have a mess.

Discussing the organ leads me to one of the most crucial questions in Bach interpretation: the independence of his voice lines. Instructors frequently observe that it is important to keep Bach’s voices separate in a way that is very different from the music of subsequent eras. As it is normally described, this requires pianists to think “horizontally” rather than “vertically”: to pay more attention to how each voice develops independently rather than to emphasize the chordal structures. The best interpreters such as Rosalyn Tureck have inventive techniques to achieve this end. Forcing a pianist who is used to playing Chopin and Beethoven to do this will be a painful enterprise, and it is not at all obvious initially where the emotion is going to come in. Unlike music from other eras Bach doesn’t let you express emotion by simply playing louder and faster.

While there is a lot of truth to saying that one should play Bach horizontally rather than vertically, this independence can often be taken too far. It is worth remembering, that perhaps more than any other composer, Bach could keep two opposing forces in perfect balance: although he writes individual parts that are independent, and have profound vocal qualities of their own, he is always acutely aware of the collective effect he is producing with all the voices. I take this to be one of the most fruitful products of his time on the organ, and it appears throughout the music he wrote for other instruments. Anyone who has played even a smattering of Bach’s keyboard works can recognize this, because in almost all of his works there are moments when the voices come together and produce a collective sound that is very different from what one would expected from the individual melodic lines alone. Consider the effect of the entrance of the second voice in the second Invention, or the wonderful counterpoint that occur in bars 10-12 of the First Invention. My favorite moments of these effects are in bar 17 in the first Fugue of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (Something Rosalyn Tureck brings out to great effect in her recording), and the haunting melody in the 17th bar and following of the last Fugue of that work (a moment Barenboim plays exceptionally well). This last work provides particular testimony to Bach’s ability to think in two directions at once: he almost miraculously pulls out a lyrical melody from what is ostensibly a 12-tone theme worthy of Schoenberg. If we turn to his choral works these moments are even more dramatic and obvious: consider the magnificent rhythms from the middle Coro of Aus der Teifen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir (BWV 131).

All this is to say that the best interpreters of Bach can keep the voices independent while acknowledging these moments of sublime beauty. Of course, there is a range of possible interpretations in any given work. For piano works, I tend to like the balance that Rosalyn Tureck achieves in the piano works rather than the remarkable independence that Gould can achieve. In vocal works, I’ve come to like the emphasis on the individual voices found in Rifkin and some of Fisher-Diskau’s recordings, if only because most recordings sound too monotonic.

I think this contrast between independent and collective action lies at the heart of what I find most powerful about Bach’s work. There are many composers who can manage to carry you through a broad range of emotional responses in the half hour that you give them. Some of our most beloved composers fall in this category: Beethoven was a masters of this in his piano and orchestral works, Schumann in his piano works, and composers such as Verdi and Puccini in their vocal works can write music that can put a tear in the eyes of the most stoic of listeners (especially if they are played well). But although it is a fool-hearted task to try to rank composers of this caliber, I would venture to say that except for the sphere of string quartets, and especially the late quartets of Beethoven, few of these composers can match Bach at his most powerful. Although I’m sure reasonable people will disagree with me on this, one of the reasons I think this is that at those climactic moments in Bach you can feel that intensity not only in the collective effect, but simultaneously in a different way in the conversational interactions between each individual voice. And in fact, the emotional quality comes less from the individual dynamics of the individual musicians, and more from the abstract relations between the members and their relations to the overall monophonic effects. The clarity of the architectonics of the work emphasizes the emotional power.

It is worth making a side note on string quartets, since it does seem peculiar that they form an exception to the generalizations above. Actually, I think that there is a lot of similarity between some of Bach’s music such as works in the Art of the Fugue, and the best string quartets, such as the late quartets of Beethoven. To be sure, there are important differences between these two composers, but in the music of both, there are moments when each respective master does a fantastic job of both producing complicated collective musical effects while still giving each voice independence. I suggest that the uniform quality of the sound of a string quartet, in which all the sound is produced by prolonged contact with strings, finds a parallel in the uniformity of sound of a Baroque organ, in which all the sound is produced by prolonged sound from pipes. The effect in both of these cases is to force a composer to devote more attention to counterpoint and collective harmonies. This also underscores the persuasiveness of Albert Schweitzer’s observation that Bach learned a lot about the melody of vocal lines from the Italian masters of the violin.³

The twin impulses of Bach to let each line sing with its own voice, while producing large-scale effects may ultimately explain why those students in my piano master class did not like Bach. Bach does express intense emotion, but you can’t produce it without first mastering the architectonic structure that forms the basis of the pieces, for that very structure serves as a tool for emotional expression. Consequently, it takes a lot of work in order to get to the point of being able to express emotion in Bach: a performer can’t simply rely on the easy way of expressing emotional intensity, by simply playing faster and louder. The emotion comes from within the structure of the music itself.

Footnotes

1. ^ Forkel Johann Nikolaus, Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work, translated by Charles Sanford Terry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. pp. 45ff.

2. ^ Schweitzer, Albert, J.S. Bach, translated by Ernest Newman in 2 Volumes. New York: Dover Publications, 1966.v. I. p. 153)

3. ^ Schweitzer, Albert, J.S. Bach, translated by Ernest Newman in 2 Volumes. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. v. I pp. 196-198. Schweitzer infers this, but it seems reasonable.

Improvisation on April 21st, 2006

I've decided to add another improvisation to my blog tonight. I've been meaning to post more improvisations, but despite my initial enthusiasm for my Apple GarageBand software, I've subsequently decided that unless you use a lot of peddle the grand piano sound there is rather unfortunate. Anyway, although I'm most comfortable with a piano, I'm learning to appreciate the other sounds GarageBand has to offer. Actually, using other sounds both in the software, as well as just on my keyboard, is teaching me a lot about Bach's fugues. His fugues are so much easier to play with an organ sound. This shouldn't be surprising given that Bach was both one of the best organists of his day, and the composer of arguably the best organ music ever written, but I never adequately appreciated how much more freedom one has on an organ. It's much easier to change fingers in the middle of a chord, or to get out of a fingering puzzle (which can happen quite frequently with Bach), when you don't have to worry so much about getting the initial attack of your notes right.

Anyway, as usual, I don't claim this little improvisation at my keyboard is anything great, but I thought it sort of captured my mood tonight before going to sleep. I suppose a "mood" is not quite the right world. Occasionally, amid the tumult and insanity that happens every day, I sometimes get an intuition of some sort of constancy amid it all, and that intuition alone is somehow reassuring. This short improvisation sort of captured this feeling for me tonight, so well, in fact, that I've actually started transcribing a version of it into musical notation. Perhaps it will form the foundation for something interesting in the future. In the meantime, the link to the AAC file is here, the MP3 is here.

First Improvisation

I've decided to do something unusual for today's posting. As some of you know, I love to play the piano. I can't say that I'm very good at it, but there are few things I enjoy more. In particular, one of my favorite activities is just to sit at the piano for a few hours and improvise. It's just something I've done for years now, and I find it a very useful way for me to relax after a long day. It's rare that anyone actually gets to hear these improvisations, and most people probably don't even know I have this habit, since I usually end up improvising when I happen to find myself alone in a room with a piano.

But, recently a couple of new developments have occurred. For one thing, thanks to my friend Patrick, I now have an electric piano in my apartment. I've always wanted a keyboard in my apartment, and a while back I was seriously investigating buying a clavichord, since I figured that it would be small enough to fit in my apartment, and perhaps quiet enough for me to play without disturbing the neighbors too much. But an electric piano is even better. Now I can play at 3 AM with headphones on, and my neighbors don't hear a thing. This is a particular boon since I really do like playing late at night, and it has been very rare that I've been able to do so, since the baby grand piano in the apartment I grew up in was far too loud to play even after 8 PM. Further, though, now with a midi connector I can actually hook the electric piano up to my computer and record things using the Garageband software. And then it is really easy to convert the file into something that could be played in itunes. This has been a very interesting development, because my improvisations are usually one-off things, and no two improvisations are even remotely the same, so I never get to hear what I've done afterwards, and if there are good moments, they disappear almost instantly. I'm hoping now that I can hear the compositions multiple times, I'll be able to improve their quality. Right now, they are just sort of experiments with harmony, dissonance and rhythm, but I'd like to eventually be able to produce things that sound really good. I mean, the things I play now have moments of clarity, but it is still rare that I'll sit down and play an entire piece that sounds like something worth recording. Nonetheless, I think that my improvisations do express the moods I'm in rather accurately, and hence they are a good way of recording the way that I feel.

So, in an effort to enhance my blog, I've decided to occasionally post improvisations here in AAC format. They are reasonably sizeable files (5 MB or so for a five minute file), but since I have a limited amount of space on typepad.com, I probably won't post more than a few at a time. So this is what I'm going to do. Anyway, just to reiterate, I don't claim that these are particularly good. I'm still quite an amateur, and I realize I need to diversify my harmonies, and produce more interesting rhythmic features, and the developments can be greatly improved. They are really experiments, and nothing more. But if you happen to be interested in listening to an experiment every now and then, you'll find some here. Perhaps you'll even find a few moments that you like. The other night I was in a C minor sort of mood, so here is an Improvisation in C minor. (If for some reason you can't play the preceding link, as some have mentioned, here is an MP3 Version of the Improvisation in C minor. (I may stick to MP3 in the future.)

P.S. The little photo in the corner is a stylized version of a photo I took at one of my favorite lakes in Vermont when I was in a particularly C minor sort of mood a couple of years ago.

Bach Aria, and Some Recordings of the Well-Tempered Clavier

Let me preface this post with what I take to be a wonderful coincidence. As some of you know, a new Bach aria was recently discovered. If you click on this link, you can go to the NPR story on it, and even listen to it. The aria is the first discovery of a vocal composition of Bach in over 70 years, and it was performed by National Public Radio 292 years after the year of its first performance. The story of its discovery is interesting with some amusing twists. But what I think is the best thing about this discovery is the fact that the announcement was basically made on my birthday. It's a rather nice birthday present, and it gave me an added incentive to write these brief notes on recordings of the Well-Tempered Clavier

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Recently, I've been comparing recordings of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier in an effort to figure out who has the best recording of the work. Of course, in order to determine what's the best recording one has to develop some sort of criteria. This is actually rather difficult to do. A number of different factors influences one's reception of a recording. There is obviously the skill of the pianist, but there is also the quality of the recording, the quality of the mixing, whether the microphones have been placed properly, the hall, how well the recording was remastered, the question of whether or not a historically accurate recording is better than a modern variant. Also there are considerations about the stereo that you choose to play the recording. As I discovered listening to a number of different recordings, some sound far better on particular sorts of stereos. There are further complications with Bach. Unlike more contemporary composers, Bach gave very few instructions as to how his pieces should be played. Tempos are a matter of conjecture, and the same pieces can be played at vastly different speeds. Further, how should one play a piece that might have been written for a clavichord on a modern piano?

Before I say what recording I like best, let me take you through the recordings I listened to.

First, there was no doubt that I had to include what many people take to be the standard recording of the WTC: Glenn Gould's recording from the 1960s. I love these recordings, as do many other listeners. They are very well-engineered, and they sound very good on most stereos. Further, there is no doubt that Gould was one of the greatest performers of Bach the past century has given us. But, I think that Gould's recordings have become so popular, that many people now fail to recognize what's distinctive about Gould's recordings. Some people have just come to think of Gould's sound as Bach's sound; they assume that when they listen to Bach they are having transparent access to the way Bach wanted his pieces to sound, or if they are more agnostic when it comes to historical accuracy, they think that Gould somehow reveals to us the heart and core of baroque music in a way no one else can. But I think that it is important to realize that what made Gould's recording of the Goldberg Variations in 1955 such a revolution is the fact that Gould played Bach in a new way that is often quite idiosyncratic. I like to think of Gould's performances as a modernist reaction to his predecessors. I think that the best contrast is seen against a lesser-known player like Walter Rummel. Walter Rummel plays Bach much in the way that one would expect a Romantic pianist to play Bach: he uses lots of peddle to create dissonance or to smooth out lines, and incorporates dramatic changes in emotion and intensity. I don't know much about Gould's early education, but I could imagine that his style is a reaction to this sort of Romantic excess. By usually adopting a peculiar almost staccato style of playing - which apparently was produced by the unusual way Gould held his wrists below his fingers - and by eliminating peddles, and what's more, by eliminating much of the emotional contours to individual melodic lines, he presented a very pure style of playing that showed a tremendous amount of respect for counterpoint. His style of playing created a revolution.

Like most revolutionaries, I happen to think that Gould ended up producing a product that went a bit too far in the opposite extreme from his contemporaries and predecessors. For one thing, I don't think that Gould shows sufficient respect for the phrasing of the melodic lines in the pieces that he plays. Bach was obviously concerned with this, since Bach's own introduction to the Inventions says that one should most of all try to develop a cantabile style of playing ("am allermeisten aber eine cantable Art in Spielen zu erlangern"). Gould's particular style of playing is perhaps one of the reasons why Gould famously thought that the preludes in the WTC were not particularly interesting, and instead concentrated on the fugues. A fugue seems a very natural composition for Gould to play. His style of playing means that none of the lines in the fugue dominate the others, and that it is possible to clearly hear every note as it is played. But the preludes require a different sort of playing. Here we don't have the complex counterpoint of the fugues, and instead we often find a more unified phrasing structure, such as that required by a particular dance form. And I think Gould is at his weakest with this sort of phrasing structure. Sometimes he just races through a prelude in order to make them a little more challenging, at other times he omits repeats to get to the fugue a little faster. (Of course, I generalize a bit too broadly. For instance, Gould takes the prelude to the B-flat minor prelude of WTC slower than just about anyone else I've listened to, and he occasionally can bring out a melody in a wonderful way, I am obviously speaking here of general impressions.) And what's more, so far as Bach's compositions are an exploration of the particular qualities of each of the keys in the Well-Tempered scale of the 18th Century, I don't think Gould does a great job of bringing these qualities out. This probably has to do with the way his peculiar style of playing de-emphasizes the phrasing of the melodic line, and the harmonic connections between notes along the "horizontal" lines of the piece. But there is no question that Gould's recordings should be on the shelves of anyone who truly appreciates Bach's WTC. And sometimes his modernist interpretation of Bach can sound just as refreshing as it did with his monumental 1955 recording. After listening to twenty minutes of B minor fugue recordings, when Gould's begins it seems a gust of fresh air has entered the room, and one just is called to attention. Perhaps it was this quality that led NASA to include a recording of Gould playing the Well-Tempered Clavier on each of the Voyager Space missions. Since in general variety is something to be praised, one has to praise Gould inventiveness. Nonetheless, Gould is not my favorite recording of these pieces.

Another set of recordings that I've been listening to are those of Ralph Kirkpatrick in his recording of the first book of the WTC. The unique thing about Kirkpatrick is that he plays the piece on a clavichord. Since the clavichord was THE instrument for secular keyboard playing in 18th Century Germany (In contrast to the harpsichord, which was more popular in France and Italy), these recordings have special historical interest. Bach himself may have played these pieces on a clavichord.

It is worth making a few observations about clavichords. I have only had the opportunity to play one once (I hope to play one again at some point), so most of my knowledge of the instrument comes from hearing it on these recordings. Unlike the harpsichord, the mechanism by which a clavichord makes the sound allows for an added degree of expressiveness in terms of the sound quality of the note and the dynamic range. For instance, it is possible to produce a slight tremolo effect by wiggling the key a little when one hits a note, and it is also possible to produce louder tones by striking the keys harder. The sound of a clavichord is also closer to that of a guitar. But clavichords have a number of weaknesses. For one thing they cannot project sound very well, and thus need to be played in smaller spaces than the piano. (Harpsichords also are better adapted to smaller places: much of the beauty of a harpsichord's sound is lost in even a moderately-sized concert hall. In a larger space a harpsichord often sounds very percussive, and the beauty of the rich resonance of the instrument is lost. If you want to hear a recording of what a truly beautiful harpsichord sounds like, I would suggest Pierre Hantai's Opus111 recording (The cover to my copy is different, but I think the preceding link goes to the right album.) of Bach's Goldberg variations: a recording that I think may well be my favorite recording of the piece - I should note that unfortunately Hantai's Re-recording of the same piece is not nearly as good, get the Opus111 if you can.) To get back to the clavichord, it also has the misfortune that the mechanism itself can be distracting. This is something that one notes with Kirkpatrick's performance. The recording is full of clicking sounds and squeaks produced by the instrument itself.

But Kirkpatrick's recording is quite good. He plays difficult pieces with hardly a hitch - see the further notes on this below - and plus one gets to hear all the extra resonances that a clavichord can provide. Minor keys sound darker and richer, and major keys can have an unusual brightness at times. In listening to this recording, one really gets a sense of why Bach chose to explore the different keys in the way that he did. Although Kirkpatrick is not my favorite recording, I think that it could also arguably have a place on most listeners’ shelves, if only for the shear joy of hearing Bach performed on the clavichord.

I also had the opportunity to listen to Sviatoslav Richter's recording of the entirety of the WTC. Richter is without a doubt one of the greatest pianists of the 20th Century, and therefore any recording that he makes of a piece of music deserves a hearing. Richter's recording of the WTC is also very good in itself. Although Richter does play Bach in a more Romantic style than any of the other recordings I listened to, it is not an excessive Romanticism - more like a Prokofiev than a Rachmaninoff - and represents a nicely balanced midpoint between the recordings of Gould and those of Rummel. Unlike Gould, he can bring out melodic lines with remarkable effectiveness, and even in a complicated fugue he can manage to make each of the voices sing clearly and independently. And although he allows himself some freedom when it comes to tempos, and dynamics, his rhythms are often nearly perfect. So, although his version of the C# minor fugue from Book I shows some signs of his Romantic piano training, it still manages to be a masterpiece of clarity and precision. What's more, the engineering on his recording may well be the best of the recordings I've listened to - certainly on a par with the engineering on Gould's recording - on a good stereo the sound is truly divine. And Richter is also the only one of the recordings I've listened to that is performed on a Bösendorfer. I don't know how many people have had the opportunity to play this brand of piano, but it does have a very distinctive sound. It's hard to describe. The piano body is often more square than that of a Steinway - a little closer to the shape of a harpsichord - and because of the shape I've often described a Bösendorfer as having a sort of "square sound," although I've never been able to quite explain what I mean. I suppose it is a fantastic way of saying that the notes are quite sharply delimited and clear. This sound brings an interesting perspective to a performance of the WTC.

When it comes to tempo, Richter is closer to Tureck than Gould, and he seems to relish playing the repeats, and in what I'd like to call the "construction" of a sound canvas: the different voices in a fugue are like different colors in an abstract painting, and Richter seems to enjoy arranging them in the way an abstract painter might arrange color on a canvas. We hear one line being played smoothly with the notes connected, and another line of the fugue is played with a sharp and loud staccato, and when a third lines enter, the preceding lines change to accommodate their new arrival. I think this does obscure the voices in fugues a bit, but the effect can be quite appealing - particularly, late at night.

So Richter's is also a recording worth adding to a collection. In particular, people with very good stereos might want to own this recording if only so they can relish in the beautifully pure sound of the Bösendorfer and the level of professionalism that the engineers bring to bear on the recording. But I don't think Richter is my favorite recording of these pieces. For one thing, the rich canvases of sound he paints often dilute the strength of the rhythmic lines, and therefore detracts from the forward momentum of the pieces he plays. This is not always the case, but more often than not I think it is. Nevertheless, his recordings are masterpieces, and worth listening to.

Yes, I've been saving the recording I think is best for last. As far as I am concerned no one can bring out the beauty of the WTC better than Rosalyn Tureck. It is worth making a few comments about Tureck (See the Tureck Bach Institute website for additional info about her). On the one hand she is a skilled textual scholar who often consults original manuscripts of the pieces that she plays, and she has almost perfect control of the more technical aspects of Baroque keyboard works: she has a remarkably contolled pace and momentum, and can play perfect cantabile phrasing. Her trills are also very precise, and two simultaneous trills often interlock perfectly. Although Tureck is a scholar and remarkable technician when it comes to baroque keyboard music, she doesn't sound as if she is confined by these traditions, and one really feels that the music itself is what dictates her style of playing. Of all the recordings I discuss here discuss here, I find that Tureck's recording is the one that really reveals the quality of the key and the individuality of each of the pieces. Many times another performer will emphasize the same things that Tureck does, but they are just brought out more distinctly and clearly in Tureck's recording.

Perhaps her greatest masterpiece is her performance of the F minor prelude and fugue from the second book of the WTC. She takes these pieces incredibly slow. For a comparison, Glenn Gould plays the prelude in just over a minute and a half: 1 minute and 45 seconds. Tureck however takes over 7 minutes to play the same piece: 7 minutes and 18 seconds! And one doesn't feel like it is too slow - something I occasionally feel when Gould or Richter takes a piece very slowly. It is true there are places where I don't think her slow tempos sound appealing to a modern listener - her recording of the Goldberg Variations, for instance. But for the WTC and for the Partitas, no recording seems better.

If you want to hear more about Tureck's philosophy of playing, the best place to look is her educational piece: An Introduction to the Performance of Bach. Among the unusual things that she explains there is her use of the pedal. Tureck uses the pedal to bring out some aspects of the piece, but she uses it in a way that conforms with the musical structure of baroque music: not to blend notes together, or to emphasize dissonance, but to emphasize a cantabile style of playing, and to bring out a particular quality of a note. Unlike a Romantic pianist who might hit the pedal before or during the execution of a note, Tureck steps on the pedal AFTER she plays the note, in order to catch the trailing resonance of the note. In this way, the initial articulation of a note is sharp and precise, but one still appreciates the way it's sound can blend with other notes that are played concurrently. I really don't know how often Tureck does this, but sometimes you can hear it. I think far more usually her cantabile phrasing is sufficient on its own to achieve this effect. Anyway, this is an interesting technique that is faithful to baroque musical structure, but nonetheless makes use of the full sonority of the piano.

Almost every piece Rosalyn plays seems nearly perfect. Her performance of the C# minor fugue from book I was initially an exception to this for me, and perhaps brings out a weakness of her recording: the engineering on the album isn't very good. I first heard it on a very good stereo, and was surprised how jarring the sound quality was. If you have a $5,000 dollar stereo and you are just looking for a recording to show off what your stereo is capable of, you may want to skip the Tureck. Her recording really needs to be tweaked with an equalizer on really good components. And it occasionally can sound disastrous on some cheaper stereos. You should really try her album on a few different stereos before making a judgment. These facts are really surprising when one considers Tureck was recorded in the 70s - you think they could have done much much better. Anyway, the best sound I've got so far from this recording has been from my old Nakamichi RE-10 receiver with an MB-8 compact disc player and Acoustic Energy One speakers - a good sort of beginner's level high-fidelity system (although my CD player has serious problems - far too many skips for my taste). But, another thing that made me initially not like Tureck's recording of the C# minor fugue, is a note at the climax of the piece that can sould like a clear mistake. This occurs in the very difficult five-part fugue at measures 100-101 of the fugue. At this point all five voices of the fugue are in play, and there is a complicated combination of half notes, quarter notes, and eighth notes that seems to demand some accent since it is the most intricate part of the fugue. In a five-part fugue one wants to bring out each of the voices, but one only has so many fingers! Here Tureck's playing seems to stutter slightly. I've been trying to figure out what is going on there, and I'm guessing she plays the first chord in measure 101 with one note ahead of the others. Certainly, none of the other recordings I talk about do this. Gould plays the piece fast enough and staccato enough that he doesn't get caught in this thicket. Richter gets through it by playing a simple and solid chord, and thereby de-emphasizes the difficulty of the individual melodic lines. Surprisingly enough, the best recording of these bars seems to be Kirkpatrick. He shows no hesitation, and doesn't overly emphasize anything, but runs through the measures without a hitch. Although, there are elements of the recording to obscure this: unfortunately with five voices going at once there is a lot of squeaking and clicking coming from the clavichord keyboard - one can't play Kirkpatrick very loudly on a stereo here! Anyway, I am uncertain at the moment whether to say Tureck makes a clear mistake in these measures - perhaps someone who is more familiar with this piece can tell me whether she was merely trying to bring out a rhythmic feature that I am unaware of? Anyway, I do wish that she managed to come closer to the smoothness of Kirkpatrick, or Richter here. Her faithfulness to the melodic lines gets her into a bit of a thicket. But the rest of the piece is so good this detail really doesn't matter. It is perhaps a testimony to the quality of these recordings that I am forced to limit my complaints to single notes!

So, I think that no one performs these pieces as well as Tureck, and that she has been legitimately hailed as the "high priestess of Bach" (New York Times). But there is something to be said for not limiting oneself to her recordings. As Tureck herself says, she thinks of Bach's music as fundamentally abstract. What Bach does is give us a template of well-composed pieces, and leaves performers a great deal of freedom in how to bring these pieces to life. I think that there is a parallel with Shakespeare. I have been in a number of different productions of Shakespeare, but I always marvel at the freedom that is left to a director and to the actors of a production. This perhaps is an accidental feature of the way the texts have been transmitted to us: history has withheld many details about performance, thereby leaving many important decisions completely in the hands of the director and the actors. Bach's music gives us a similar freedom: there are no designated tempos, there are very few phrasing marks, and no phrasing remarks. Performers are called upon to make these pieces their own. And each of the recordings that I've listened to manage to convey a lot about the performers. It is very easy to distinguish each of these keyboard player's recordings - even disregarding things like Gould's occasional vocal accompaniments, or the fact that Kirkpatrick is on a clavichord. So, there is an advantage to listening to more than one recording of the WTC, because the pieces are as much defined by their differences as their similarities.

As an aside, I remember being in a piano master class in high school at Carnegie Mellon. I wasn't a particularly good pianist at the time, and was probably the worst pianist in the room, now that I think about it. I certainly wasn't playing anything difficult at the time, being mainly a composition student. Anyway, in one of our discussions in the master class the professor asked us what we thought about Bach's music. Much to my surprise, everyone thought that Bach was no fun to play. His music was described by a number of students as "mere technical exercises" or as not particularly interesting, unexpressive. Everyone was much more in favor of Rachmaninoff and Chopin. I think I well may have been the only exception to this other than the professor himself, who reprimanded the class for undervaluing some of the greatest keyboard music ever written. I don't know why students thought of Bach as mere technical exercises. I would guess that it was a combination of how they were introduced to Bach through piano lessons (almost everyone starts with Bach), and some prevailing prejudices about what baroque music should sound like. For me, however, no music is as expressive or emotionally powerful as Bach, mainly because it is so abstract: the abstractness leaves space for emotional expression of the widest variety. Often - perhaps under the influence of Gould and some comments he has made - people think of baroque keyboard music as unemotional and technical. It is true that a fugue doesn't leave the composer as much room for variation as other less demanding forms provide. But, it is important to recognize that Bach could attain great emotional depth in his compositions: his cantatas and choral works in particular emphasize this. There are the glorious dark tones of "Aus der Tiefe," which Brahms made so much of, or there are the bright happy tones in the setting of "Mache dich, mein Herze, rein" in St. Matthew's passion. Furthermore, Bach's instrument par excellence was an instrument capable of enormous depth and power: the organ. With an organ one can produce sounds so powerful that they can shake a cathedral. It is difficult to believe that Bach could do all this, but would revert to a confined, technical, and unemotional playing style when it came to the clavichord, harpsichord, and fortepiano. Hence, I personally would encourage performers to appreciate the expressive ability of Bach's music, although it is true that some restraint is actually necessary: one doesn't want a pianist to mangle the rhythmic or harmonic structure of a work. But then it is often true that tieing something down to a structure can be a vehicle for emotional expression. And, there is a wide range of possibilities in the performance of Bach, possibilities that enable performers to make their recordings deeply personal. And perhaps ultimately it is who we are ourselves, as subjective listeners, that determines what the "best" recording is, for just as performers bring themselves to the performances, so we bring ourselves as listeners.

Let me end this posting by mentioning a few games that can be played with the WTC. If you load your albums onto itunes, it is possible to make a playlist that enables you to listen to each of the prelude and fugue combinations by each performer in a series. So, for instance, you can play Kirkpatrick, Richter, Gould and Tureck all playing the C major prelude and fugue. You can then listen to the corresponding A minor prelude and fugue, then perhaps listen to the A major fugue. This seems like an excellent way to come to know the sound of each of the different keys. One has to remember that in addition to being a great pianist and composer, Bach was also a great teacher. How many young pianists start out playing a piece from the Anna Magdalena Büchlein or the Applicatio in C major from the Wilhelm Friedemann Clavierbüchlein? I think that Bach's foremost role may well have been that of an educator. This is perhaps the reason why Bach's music often seems so transparent: in addition to performing melodies Bach always seems to be trying to teach his audience something. For instance, when you hear something in F minor, it feels like it could never be written in any other key, and that Bach is trying to teach us something about the different keys as he composes for them. I suppose this has been one of my two main criteria in evaluating these performances. The other one is just the shear musicality of the performances. In both these categories I don't think anyone is as good as Rosalyn Tureck. But there are many more recordings out there for me to listen to. I suppose Landowska and Schiff are next, but I also would like to listen to Keith Jarrett and Hantai's versions more closely.