BACH ILLUMINATED

friday, december 8, 2023 — church of the advent, boston
sunday, december 10, 2023 — all saints parish, brookline

= program notes =

by Michael Barrett

If you visit The Netherlands on Good Friday, the most somber day on the Christian liturgical calendar, you might manage to get a ticket to a certain annual performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the Passion according to St. Matthew. Joining you will be members of the Dutch government, including the Prime Minister. The tradition is unusual, but also telling: that an entire government may be expected to sit through a three-plus-hour often somber work by a composer long dead, and in a style that, even at its writing, was out of fashion.
 
The more we like something, it seems to me, the more likely we are to ascribe to it some quality of universality or transcendental quality. (“The Godfather is a timeless classic.” “Beethoven’s music speaks to every generation.”) To put it another way, we tend to decontextualize these beloved artistic endeavors from their time and place.
 
Yet I would argue that by learning about the occasionally mundane aspects of context, we will more often than not find deeper meaning in the art we admire. I would more strongly argue that the art itself could not possibly have come into being without that context. Even for artists who seem to break existing molds, that very breakage means that the molds are something to which we, and probably the artist, compared the new directions.
 
Such, in my view, is the case with Johann Sebastian Bach, our main dramatis persona for today’s performance. While I doubt that many disagree with the assertion that Bach’s life and times are useful in understanding his music, there is, I think, still the temptation to lift Bach above the fray of the everyday artisan’s life. I would argue for the use of the same tools of investigation that we might with other composers to find deeper understanding of his music through the context of his life and times.
 
Let us begin, therefore, with some pre-Bach context. In the 15th century, Johannes Tinctoris, one of Europe’s most renowned music theorists could claim that nothing written more than 40 years ago was worth hearing. Art music of any worth was new music, the one major exception being the venerated body of church monophony known as Gregorian chant. For Tinctoris, the art of composition was reaching a state of perfection, but of course tastes changed, and later generations of writers could claim the same thing for their own time.
 
The idea of a “canon” of polyphonic music, a set of pieces by dead composers that were still worth knowing and performing, took hold in a limited fashion during the period eventually known as the Baroque, as the new style of Monteverdi and his followers, focused on declamation and rhetoric, began to supplant the older international polyphonic style. That older, “Palestrina” style still had its place in conservative contexts like the church, and that style of writing, in which Baroque-era composers were thoroughly trained, could be employed in new works for symbolic effect.
 
The Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck is a prime example of a musician with one foot in the old style and the other in the new. His organ playing and teaching were highly influential, especially on north German musicians, and thus there is a direct connection to the organ music of Bach, through composers like Reincken and Buxtehude (see below). Sweelinck was also a fine composer of ensemble vocal music, both Latin motets and French polyphonic settings of Genevan Psalter tunes (works that, incidentally, could only be performed in homes, since the Calvinists of Sweelinck’s world forbade polyphony of any kind during the service.) Sweelinck draws on the old polyphonic style, but his music is energized with a keen rhetorical sense of pacing and expression, the marriage of word and music that was central to the emerging Baroque aesthetic. In his setting of Hodie Christus natus est, Sweelinck deftly toggles between triple and duple meter to vary the mood, while his motivic material is tailored to the word or phrase that is set. Each section of text begins with “hodie” (“today”), which Sweelinck sets as a tenor call with an ensemble response.
 
Thanks to musical innovations in Italy, Italian musicians and style came to dominate many European musical circles, with French dance music traditions as an important secondary influence. Since the early decades of Baroque practice, German musicians combined Italian musical models with long-established German contrapuntal practices, in order to modernize sacred and secular musical practices without abandoning older styles and pieces. So it is no surprise to see that Bach’s musical language is an amalgamation of these several threads of style and practice, albeit wielded with uncommonly powerful effect. (Perhaps this is one way to explain the impression of Bach’s “universal” appeal: the very nature of musical style in his orbit was one of adoption and adaptation across select national boundaries.)
 
In the early 18th century, artisanal crafts like music were family affairs. Male children were expected to follow in the family business, and JS Bach was no exception. Through close relatives he gained musical experience, directly and by example, and in his adulthood he expressed reverence for this family profession through his preservation of music from his Bach family tree, a collection known as the Altbachisches Archiv, or “old Bach archive.” It is from this fascinating collection of primarily 17th-century music that we perform Johann Christoph Bach’s Lieber Herr Gott and Johann Michael Bach’s Halt was du hast/Jesu meine Freude.
 
Both motets are settings for double choir, a practice more common in the 17th century and partly an adaptation of early Venetian Baroque practices. JC Bach deploys his forces more or less equally, with both choirs calling and responding to one another to heighten the rhetorical effect of each line of text, and sometimes engaging in full-fledged eight-part counterpoint. One of the more striking effects happens near the beginning of the work, where JC Bach abruptly changes meter from a slow duple to a fast triple, in order to heighten the setting of “wake us up.” We hope we wake you up as well! JM Bach’s setting is a chorale gloss: one choir (arranged here for the full Cecilia ensemble) sings a straightforward setting of the chorale “Jesu meine Freude” phrase by phrase (the same chorale that Bach uses in his motet setting), while the other choir (here sung by four soloists) enjoins the listener to hold on to what they have in order to gain eternal happiness.
 
JS Bach had many teachers and models, but perhaps the most consequential in his early professional life was Dietrich Buxtehude. Buxtehude was the preeminent church musician and organist in Lübeck, the north German Hanseatic free city, and an eminent figure of the “middle” Baroque period in Germany. Bach was so eager to learn from Buxtehude that he walked about 250 miles from his home in Arnstadt to Lübeck, and conveniently failed to return to his post until long after the requested leave of absence had expired.
 
Like nearly all his contemporaries, Buxtehude was primarily composing new music, in the latest hybridized German Baroque style. But like his colleagues, he was thoroughly trained in the Palestrina style, as his old-style setting of the Missa brevis makes plain. The Lutheran Missa brevis or German Mass was distinct from the full Mass Ordinary in that the only two movements are Kyrie and Gloria, the latter of which we perform today. (This was how the Kyrie and Gloria of JS Bach’s B minor Mass were first presented; only later did he add the remaining movements.) The Palestrina-like points of imitation are flavored at times by chromatic passagework, most poignantly when the speaker asks for God’s mercy.
 
We now turn to examples from JS Bach himself. My hope is that, by this point in the notes and in our program, you will have a sense of the multi-generational “baggage” of style and non-musical circumstances into which JS Bach was born and in which he continued to ply his trade. The first example of his work is a brief one, and not even a stand-alone piece: it is a movement from one version of a larger sacred work, Bach’s setting of the Magnificat, the Song of Mary. Vom Himmel hoch is not from the Magnificat proper, but rather served as one of several interpolations for a performance in 1723. Indeed the text (“From heaven on high I come down/ I bring you good tidings) is a gloss, or prelude, on the Magnificat text. In the style of an organ chorale prelude, Bach places the tune prominently in the top part and in relatively long note values, while the other voices sing the chorale phrases in shorter note values and proceed in polyphonic texture. Beyond all the traditions on which Bach is building, it is also worth noting that the long-note cantus firmus technique was a centuries-old practice by Bach’s time, one of the original techniques to, for example, give structure and coherence to the earliest polyphonic settings of the Mass Ordinary.
 
A much longer-winded essay on a chorale tune, and the most substantial work of our program, is Bach’s motet Jesu meine Freude (Jesus my joy). What we call the motets of Bach are a set of works that lack the independent instrumental parts of the cantatas or Passion settings, though there is evidence that in practice instruments may have doubled the vocal lines in performance. While written in Bach’s own late Baroque idiom, they recall in their vocal scoring (with or without instrumental doubling) the Venetian motets of the late Renaissance and early Baroque. Like so much of Bach’s and other Lutheran composers’ sacred music, Bach grounds his eleven-movement composition in a Lutheran chorale tune, the Protestant analogy to the Gregorian chant melody. Some movements are straightforward chorale harmonizations, though even some of these movements see Bach fitting in an unusual degree of text “painting” into the chorale form, as when the thunder cracks and lightning flashes in the third movement. (In these moments the chorale almost resembles the chorale prelude texture of Vom Himmel hoch.)
 
Elsewhere, Bach employs a range of musical textures, from delicate movements that suggest the trio sonata of two treble instruments and an active bass line, to those that emphatically dramatize the messages of the text in the most overt musical-rhetorical language of the day. This motet has much the effect of a Bach cantata -- a much more richly-scored affair -- or even a solo cantata or opera scene. The modest scoring for just five voice parts seems not to deter Bach the consummate musical dramatist.
 
By JS Bach’s death in the middle of the 18th century, his late Baroque style, heavily adorned with counterpoint, was largely out of fashion, having been supplanted by an easier-listening style known as galant, a set of aesthetic priorities that led in just a few decades to the style of Mozart and Haydn. Soon after, musical Romanticism emerged as an ever-changing dialect of the musical practices of the late 18th century, with the boundary-pushing figure of Beethoven as the almost universally acknowledged founding father.
 
While Beethoven’s shadow loomed over the period (and not always in healthy ways, if we consider the pressure of living up to this quasi-mythologized figure), Bach’s influence was less direct and grew in stages. As in his own lifetime, Bach’s achievements were at first known primarily through his organ music. But with the arrival of the second generation of Romantics, especially the precocious duo of Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, German musical society was (re)introduced to Bach the composer of grand sacred music. The key event was a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (see above), arranged (in two senses, i.e. musically and logistically) and conducted by Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn’s own choral music owes much to Bach and to the Lutheran sacred musical tradition more generally. We see many echoes of 17th-century practice in his set of six motets written for various days or periods of the Christian liturgical calendar. From these we have selected the two appropriate to the season, Im Advent and Weinachten.
 
Fanny Hensel lived in the shadow of her brother, and under the weight of societal misogyny more generally. Both her father and brother put obstacles in the way of Fanny realizing her full potential and celebrity as a professional musician, including arranging for Fanny’s music to be published under her brother’s name. Yet she found her artistic voice when she could, as in her setting of a Christmas prayer, Gebet in der Christnacht, here arranged for chorus (and further arranged by us for high, low, then tutti ensemble) by Olivia Sparkhall. The seemingly straightforward tunefulness of Fanny’s setting belies a sophisticated structure of pacing, repetition, and sequencing that builds each verse to its climax before receding.
 
A generation or so later, Johannes Brahms was adorned with the albatross-like label of “heir to Beethoven” by his mentor Robert Schumann. By this period, the idea of a musical canon had taken firm hold, informing the nature of (at least more conservative) notions of “classical music” to this day. Brahms himself loved old music, and not just the famous figures like Bach and Palestrina. He had a collection of music from more obscure figures from the 16th and 17th century, and the influence of these composers is evident throughout a great deal of his output, particularly the choral music. In his setting of Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, he takes a page directly out of the playbook of many Lutheran composers, Bach among them, in setting a chorale tune with a long-note cantus firmus technique, with the other voices singing quicker-note points of imitation using the chorale phrases. This is just what happens in Bach’s Vom Himmel hoch, except that in the case of Brahms, the cantus firmus is somewhat “hidden” in the baritone part.
 
Knut Nystedt’s Immortal Bach is not an original composition, but rather something that resembles an arrangement. The raw material is the first portion of a chorale setting by JS Bach, “Komm süsser Tod.” Nystedt instructs the performers to first sing the chorale excerpt in its unaltered version, a four-part harmonization of what to Lutherans of the day would have been a familiar tune. Then the arrangement begins: Nystedt asks the performers to sing each individual note for one of several durations, such that each part, and the entire chorale, becomes sonically “smeared” and considerably extended in time. Apart from a soprano anticipation in the second phrase, this scheme obtains for the remainder of Nystedt’s arrangement.
 
Cecilia recently performed Adolphus Hailstork’s settings of the Rubiyyat, and here we turn to the piece he calls A Christmas Canticle. Like Bach and like many late Renaissance composers, Hailstork balances unity and variety by laying out his musical motives as points of imitation that vary from nearly canonic to only loosely related. Also like many predecessors, Bach included, Hailstork carefully chooses his rhetorical moment to switch from polyphony to homophony, or one-versus-three call and response. This flexibility yields a sort of rhapsodic approach to counterpoint, which feels fitting as he sets the prophecy from Isaiah about the birth of Jesus.
 
According to the composer’s website, the compositional style of Zanaida Stewart Robles “can be described as energized, soulful, contrapuntal, harmonically colorful, rhythmically driven, heavily modal, occasionally with African elements and touches of progressive rock.” Every one of those elements, in fact, can be discerned in Robles’s hypnotic Ecstatic Expectancy. Melodic and textual cells overlaid in various patterns, with an irregular and often contravened meter of 7/4, together with percussion accompaniment, combine to create an atmosphere of mystical expectation.
 
We thus conclude our performance with these two examples of more modern musical voices that in various ways draw on, or at least echo, the musical world of JS Bach. This is not to say that Bach is a necessary influence on these composers or their works, but that there appears a commonality in practice, kindred spirits relying on similar building materials. Indeed, the story of JS Bach as being part of a community of broadly shared artistic practices, either by direct influence or shared materials, is much the point of today’s program: to place his music in a broader context that – we hope – only enriches the experience of hearing his remarkable music.