Book Notes: Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie

 

6  "the notion of music as invention applies to Bach's vast body of music: as one of those scholar-performers, Laurence Dreyfus, argued in a book a few years ago, invention is the essential pattern of Bach's creative life. For Bach an invention was an idea -- a melody, a pattern, a contrapuntal motif -- worth developing.  Invention was also a term for the act of discovery, and for the mechanism - the application of rules, the habits of art -- that made discovery come about.  An invention was "a strong foretaste of composition<" a "workable idea" developed just to the point where it could be most fruitful and suggestive and delightful to others.  

Elie uses this metaphor throughout the book... " it allows us to see Bach not only as a technological adept but as an inventor in his own right, a Leonardo of sound." 

7 This book, then, is a story of invention -- a series of variations about inventions in different media, if you like.  Teh musicians who figure into the story, all of them steeped in the music of Bach, deliberately or intuitively worked out patterns of invention through their encounter with the music of Bach by way of new technology.

74. Like L'estro armonico, with its hints of passion and ardor, inventio was a term that served Bach as a figure for the creative process. The scholar and gambist Laurence Dreyfus sees the invention as the secret of Bach's music. The invention is "the essential thematic idea underlying a composition." It is not complete in itself: it is "the idea behind a piece, a musical subject whose discovery precedes full-scale composition." And it is the discipline that gives rise to the idea. It is not static but dynamic, not an object but "a mechanism that triggers further elaborative thought from which a whole piece of music is shaped."

Bach himself referred to the invention primarily as a teaching tool. By 1712 his two eldest children, ages three and five, were ready to learn to play music. He would teach them himself, using music he had written for the purpose, such as the book of keyboard exercises, assembled later, that included a set of inventions— pieces meant to give the student "a strong foretaste of composition.*

Invention would come to characterize his music, both as a habit of art and as a pattern of the art itself. His music develops ideas in ways that dramatize the act of invention. His use of "structured repetition" highlights the process.

And while scholars stress his thoroughness in working out his ideas, his music doesn't sound exhaustive; it sounds inventive-it doesn't finish the musical thought so much as keep it aloft.

Bach was a "discoverer and tinkerer standing behind his inventions," Dreyfus writes. That is appealing but understates the point. Bach was more than a tinkerer, improving other people's creations. He was not quite a discoverer in the usual sense, a figure venturing into terra incognita. He was an in-ventor, making new things, at once ingenious and practical, which could be put to use by everybody.

216.  A major theme of the book is "invention," as in the modes of invention in rhetoric.  On this page, "the 'structured repetition' of its development -- as the 'mechanism that triggers further elaborative thought from which a whole piece of music is shaped.'" (this is a quotation by Glen Gould, I think.  ) Music reference to 8th 3-part invention

217. the previous section was about Gould's first recordings (of the Three-Part Inventions, rather than the expected Goldberg Variations).  Elie does this fabulous prose bit, to contextualize the historical importance of the recording.  

That was Wednesday, June 8, 1955. The night before, Dwight Eisenhower had appeared on color TV (the first U.S. president to do so) to explain the Supreme Court's recent ruling that the nation's public schools had to desegregate

"with all deliberate speed." The Seven Year Itch, with Marilyn Monroe, was in wide release. In a laboratory in Philadelphia, Dr. Thomas Stolz Harvey was sectioning the brain of Albert Einstein, which he had removed while performing an autopsy on the scientist after his death in Princeton in April. Saul Bel-low, on Riverside Drive in New York, was mourning his father: "Not that I was ever prompt at anything," he told Leslie Fiedler, "but life is particularly difficult in all departments just now." Flannery O'Connor had just returned to Georgia from New York, where she had seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway and appeared on television to watch a playhouse acting-out of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." Dorothy Day and several dozen Catholic Workers and other peace activists were preparing to demonstrate at City Hall during a civil-defense drill— to voice their opposition to war, physical and psy-chological, and "as an act of public penance for having been the first people in the world to drop the atomic bomb, to make the hydrogen bomb." After years of struggle, Alberto Giacometti saw his work presented in three retrospectives at once: in West Germany, in London, and at the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue. An editor at the Viking Press was considering a novel by Jack Kerouac: "So here are these characters-in search of their identity-and the way they must do it—is by driving all over the U.S.—and the way they are really doing it is by 'feeling' life down to its very roots." On Montgomery Street in San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg was writing a long poem in a room kitted out with a Cézanne print, a woven basket, "Bollingen series books shelved, letters and essays Ezra Pound under bed-table clock, black-painted bureau with victrola-case & Bach on top" -—a three-LP mono set of the Mass in B Minor recorded by Hermann Scherchen and the Vienna Philharmonic.

There Ginsberg wrote of "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heav-cly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night" — "who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music / who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts..."

218 Gould on Bach... "virtually every major musician was determined to follow his example, to work as it was deemed he had worked -- as an artisan, a sober, conscientious craftsman in whom diligence and inspiration were inextricably intertwined." This was Gould's ideal.

219 By recording the variations one at a time, in multiple takes, as he had at the cottage, he set them apart from one another, exaggerating their individuality. The aria is played swiftly in a kind of triple time, so that it is over before it is through. The seventh variation is a country dance, with Gould's hands hee-hawing over the keys. The ninth, full of overtones, is akin to a minimalist anthem.  The twelfth is a holler: it sounds a little like a crazy person with his mouth up to your ear, giving you a piece of his mind. The thirteenth is a limpid modern chamber work, such as one of Milton Babbitt's graduate students might have played.

234 Rosalyn Tureck on Gould "He took a very great deal from me" in recording the Goldberg Variations.  Like his, her Goldbergs is gleaming, angular, architectural; but her is tidily proportioned where his is jagged, exaggerated.

249 Elie talks about the change from mono to stereo -- a gain in technical power (richness), and loss of emotion; higher and lower in mono, richer, smoother, more articulate, more various in stereo.  example of Stokowski's two recordings of "Komm, susser Tod"

269 Gould - "All aart is really variation upon some other art"... Gould reflecting on Strauss and Schoenberg -- too many new ideas, too few. Bach is the exception.

271 reference to Two and Three Part Inventions by Gould (not sure what the note is for)

279 (reference to Frank Kermode - A Sense of an Ending) and maybe Gould's description of some music performance as "an extraordianrily moving experience, but I am not sure that is appropriate to describe it as, in the ordinary sense, a musical experience." It was a mental exercise, a "proof invention, not of greatness."

304 Gould's favorite composer - Orlando Gibbons - Lord Salisbury's Pavan and Galliard is one piece.

308 - Stokowski - "For him, as for Casals, the music of Bach was a life force. The approach Casals took, abashedly and in private with the cello suites -- to play them, to plumb them, over and over again -- S took from the get-go and in public.  He wold play the music endlessly. Bach's music was an aural space where, moment to moment, he could create anew.

331 - on Jeremy Rifkin and Mass in B minor -- done with a singer in each role, rather than several (because the thinking is that Bach meant "this or that" singer when he listed several parts, with the assumption that he would never have a full batch).  

335/6 - Richard Taruskin, professor of music, "The pastness of the persent and the presence of the past"  talking about the "authentic performance" movement.  He examines 7 different recordings of the fifth Brandenburg.  He settles on Gustav Leonhardt's version from 1976.  Elie writes lovingly about it.

361 - Masaaki Suzuki records all of Bach's cantata's - how his Christianity brings him closer to Bach than his Japanese heritage brings him away

362 - Reference to WKCR-FM Bachfest at Christmastime. Christmas Eve morning to NY Day. ref to Keith Jarrett (Oct 10 is Thelonius Monk bday celebration on same station)

365 - TS Eliot says hearing Tristan und Isolde being one of the great experiences of his life; here Elie recounts the same while taking a train ride and listening to CD on discman and listening to St Matthew's Passion.  "I was overwhelmed by Bach on that train ride like Jonah being swallowed by the whale..."He feels that the Christian teleology pulls the music forward "that the Christian drive toward ultimate purpose gave Bach's music its astonishing drive, grasped in faith and patterned into art."

(viaticum 367) noun1.the Eucharist as given to a person near or in danger of death.2.ARCHAIC a supply of provisions or an official allowance of money for a journey.

402 Stephen Malinowski - animation - visualization (also works with Bjork on Biophilia ) (prelude from third partita; Lara St. John). Also Alexander Chen, Bach's first cello suite visualization.

403. CK Williams' poem "Time: 1976" (it reference Music offering)

406. Robin Holloway - Gilded Goldbergs - two pianos, reconfigurations of Goldberg

407. Bach manuscript. The clavier-buchlein vor Wilhelm Fredemann Bach - Yale - find the image of this

411. Keith Jarrett - Well-Tempered Clavier.  "I made a resolution: Come the new year, I would go throuhg a prelude each morning, Pablo Casals-style, letting Bach and the iPhone loop me over the Manhattan Bridge and into the workday."

412. poet Lawrence Joseph. "now evening comes fast from the sea"

413+ Bach Cantata Pilgrimage

Philip Larkin - poem - "Water"