The Logic of Playing Bach
During the 2020 pandemic I was one of the fortunate who had extra time when things shut down. Witnessing the world succumbing to the pandemic, I wondered if I could take all that I’ve learned, studied, and practiced over the past forty years of playing and thinking about music to create a performance that might allow listeners the possibility of a transformative musical experience. To do this, I decided to create a completely new, re-examined performance of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) book 1.
Listen:
Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1
This recording offers a glimpse of a new approach to performing music that tries to go beyond emphasizing personal preference, uniqueness, mannerisms and habits (in short, my “voice”), and instead tries to align with, support, and clarify a great composer’s vision for what we all could experience. In this way, by de-emphasizing my own voice, people who may not share my taste or my preferences for playing music a particular way, might be more likely to personally experience Bach’s vision.
Bach said he composed the WTC “for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.”
I was curious. Here is a collection of music that has inspired and taught composers and musicians for centuries. (It was completed in 1722). Why is that? I decided to delve into each one of these pieces to better understand Bach’s instructions — the harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and textural motion, and their relationships to each other.
The proof of any performance is in the listening, of course, so, I set out to create a musical performance of each piece that aligns Bach’s instructions (the facts given in the score) with those aspects of sound not explicitly indicated in the score. The reason I approached it this way is because we don’t hear sound as divided between aspects that happened to have been written down and those that weren’t. We hear sound as one thing, and we hear how it relates to other sounds (higher, louder, part of the background, etc.). My hypothesis was that, if I let the choices I have about how to play be guided as closely as possibly by the musical motion and relationships given in the score, a musical performance accessible to everyone could emerge.
The choices about how to play that we musicians typically reserve for ourselves include how loud things are, tone color, balance (which elements predominate), and timing. Most of the other aspects of the sounds I make are prescribed by Bach. For example, he indicated quite clearly what note should be played and when. And he did that for almost every single one of the tens of thousands of sounds in the WTC. Yet, the facts contained in Bach’s instructions go beyond indicating “this note, for this length, at this time.” His instructions also indicate what is foreground and what is background, which sounds participate in a harmonic entity, which sounds belong to which line, and what the quality of the musical motion is, or in other words, whether the musical energy is increasing or decreasing.
There is much more included in Bach’s instructions than meets the eye. And yet, elements essential to successful musical performance are, indeed, left unspecified. Bach’s instructions don’t say anything about how much louder this phrase should be than the next, or how fast we should play, or how much time is needed at the end of this section. His instructions do, however, tell us the relationships: that this phrase should be louder than the next … not by using an obvious and explicit directive like “make this louder,” but instead by indicating the ebb and flow of musical energy and the relative relationships of the sounds. Those are facts in the score that provide clear guidance for shaping or structuring those aspects of sound that are under my control, such as the loudness of the sounds that make up those phrases.
We are certainly free to ignore those facts in the score, as many musicians do, but I wanted to see how far I could get by aligning my sounds as closely with them as possible. Even if I felt that a phrase ought to “go” a certain way, I resisted the easy path and structured my playing so it would match the shape of the musical energy explicitly given in Bach’s score. After all, I am just as likely as any musician to have a strong preference for what I feel is “my” voice, my passion, my mercurial whims of the moment. Yet, allowing those things to determine the nature of my performance virtually ensures that it would only resonate or connect with people who also share such biases or temperament. By aligning instead with Bach’s already worked-out plan for the flow of musical energy, any attentive listener ought to be able to have an experience closer to the one Bach himself imagined.
What I discovered by restraining my “free choice” to clarity, alignment and logic was astounding. Instead of the paralysis of infinite choices of how to play this or that note or phrase, I could focus instead on how well balanced the ebb and flow of energy was — on how clearly foreground and background were differentiated — and not whether this or that note was supposed to be foreground at all.
One thing that challenges musicians when playing the Well-Tempered Clavier is that Bach never indicated any dynamics (instructions for how loudly and intensely the sounds should be played)—not once among tens of thousands of notes. Bach never said how loud any of them should be, nor which notes should be more prominent than any others. And, by the way, he only mentioned anything about timing six times.
What can a musician do in the face of that ambiguity? One option is to assume that all of those aspects of sound left un-specified by Bach are fair game for the musician to play any way they like. Another option is to look to the musical energy explicitly indicated in the instructions Bach did write, and then to play in a way that conforms to and supports that musical energy, which is what I tried to do.
How do we know how fast to play these pieces?
Performers are all over the map on this question. Some play a piece at break-neck speed, while others play the same piece with the lethargy of a dirge. There is little consensus or “received wisdom” among musicians about the tempo of most of these pieces, partly because most musicians simply don’t read what’s actually in the score. It’s true that, on the surface, Bach says nothing about how fast to play. Remember, he mentions speed only six times, and even then, it’s to say “walking pace” or “as fast as possible.”
But, that does not mean we have no idea how fast Bach intended his music to be played. A deeper understanding of Bach’s instructions reveal a likely range of tempo for each of the preludes and fugues. As Robert Marshall explained in our Bach seminar at Brandeis, the time signatures and note values Bach used give us a good “ball park” sense of what type of note-length gets the pulse. Those facts indicate whether, for example, a half note or a quarter note should be felt as the pulse, or the beat.
We can also use what we know about the keyboard instruments of the time to understand how their sounds started, lingered, and then died away. For example, a clavichord sound comes into being and instantly begins dying away, like a piano. Unlike a piano, however, the clavichord sound dies away more quickly and has a smaller range of loudness. That means the quality of that instrument itself presents a “higher risk” of receding from the listener’s attention.
Why does that matter? Well, if you choose a very slow tempo, and the individual notes die away quickly, you risk creating a performance where the listener loses the thread of connection between the notes. That sustaining thread is the essence of music, because there is no musical experience without relationships between sounds. If such relationships are made harder to grasp by taking too much time between the sounds, the music can fall apart in our mind. As soon as our mind moves on to something outside the music, the music has failed. That’s the true measure of whether a performance is “too slow.” Likewise, if you go so fast that the sounds pile up all over each other before our brains have a chance to grasp the relationships, we are shut out of the music in that case, too. Too much information means our minds move on to something else.
Bach and others in his time had a notion of a basic pulse. This “tempo ordinario,” as it was called, was a pulse equivalent to the pace of footsteps while walking. Keep in mind that there were no machines at the time that could measure or produce a “beats per minute” calculation. So, a relative term pegged to normal walking speed was used as a point of reference.
Meanwhile, when we are listening to music, if a pulse is too slow, our brains sometimes simply flip to perceiving the next fastest rhythmic unit as the pulse. For example, if a quarter-note pulse takes three seconds to play, but there are also eighth notes actually occurring during those pulses, then we might perceive those eighth notes as “the” pulse instead. That means for us playing the music that if Bach writes 4/4 and we are hearing the 8th notes as the pulse, we are playing the piece too slowly. Similarly, when Bach writes a time signature of cut time, or “alla breve,” that means that the half note gets the pulse. But if we play it so slowly that we feel the quarter note getting the pulse instead, we’re playing too slowly.
In addition to the time signature telling us what rhythmic value should get the pulse, there is another method for determining the boundaries of a possible speed. That is to see what the shortest note values are in the entire piece. If the piece contains notes that are 1/64th of the quarter note, for example, then the quarter-note pulse cannot be so fast that those 64th notes cannot be physically, nor intelligibly played. In this way, shortest note lengths in a piece act as an upper limit of the maximum speed. The actual speed limit is determined by the acoustics of the room, the nature of the instrument’s sound, and the musical rate of change (for example, how quickly harmony moves, or how frequently a piece of the main melody is passed from one musical part to another).
Do these guidelines yield strict speed indications? No, but we also don’t need a metronomically exact speed indication. We simply need to know what range of tempos could possibly allow enough time for an attentive, listening mind to grasp the sounds and make sense of them without losing interest. The answer to that question is not a number. Not a “speed.” It’s a confluence of conditions that include speed, reverberance of the acoustic space, characteristics of the sound of the instrument, and the attentiveness of the listener.
In this recording I have tried to be as faithful as possible to the instructions embedded within Bach’s score. I have gone beyond the surface — beyond simply looking at the equivalent of what would be “letters” in a story — to understand the harmonic, linear, rhythmic and textural energy (or, in the story analogy, the sentences and paragraphs). I have tried to understand how the increasing and decreasing harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic energy is balanced within the music. And then I have used that understanding to shape the variable aspects of sound under my control.
I’ve brought to bear my decades-long study of harmony and counterpoint. For any moment in this recording I could explain to you what harmonic, contrapuntal and rhythmic facts led me to play the way I did, but that would take an enormous amount of time, and would be pretty tedious to read, too!
When you listen to this recording, listen without thinking about other things. Listen without looking at a musical score. Allow yourself to focus on the sounds that are unfolding. Allow their ebb and flow of energy to be reflected in your internal experience, without letting your internal dialog chatter along with its own commentary.
One final point: You do not need to know anything about harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, musical notation, keyboard instruments, time signatures, historical context, or even about classical music for these recordings to be accessible to you. Bach was able to marshal his immense skill and insight to produce musical works that can be fully and deeply experienced by anyone in the world who listens actively and openly. If I have been successful — a big “if” — you might just have a musical experience that goes beyond the day-to-day norm, and that transforms your sense of “being in the now.” That’s a tall order, but if that doesn’t happen, at the very least I hope you may hear in these performances some greater clarity, with a better sense of understanding what Bach envisioned.
Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, performed by Paul Henry Smith
