> BACH "senzja” BASSO 5 .| BachCOLOPHON BACH senza BASSO by Annet Bylsma Amsterdam 2012 ISBN 978-90-805674-0-5 Layout: Michael Feves Editing. Michael Feves, Ephraim Feves Printed by. Graficiént Printmedia B.V,, Almere, ‘The Netherlands Published and distributed by. Bylsma’s Fencing Mail, Utrecht, The Netherlands Information on how to order this book is listed on our website: www.bylsmafencing.com Copyright 2012, Annee Bylsa, Amscerdam All sights reserved. No part ofthis publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, of transmitted in any form of by any means, clectroni, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without ‘rine permission ofthe author or publisherAbout the book Bach senza Basso A good violinist, after some years with the Sei Solo a Violino senza Basso accompagnato, will have gathered enough material to write a book about them himself — and often does. ‘Add to this the army of musicologists shooting at each other from their gun-turrets of footnotes, and add this cellist (me) inquiring after the ‘senza basso’ in the ‘senza Basso’ ‘Who wants to read all that stuff?! Dear reader, if yon happen to glance at my pages and don't have any ‘AHA! Erlebnis’ (AHA! experience) at all, please, don’t buy the book. Bach hates eye-wash. With due respect, yours truly, rane Bqlome (Anner Bylsma)Henk and Ties Bijlsma - Van Roosendaal, Michael Feves, and Kenneth Slowik, thank you for your patience and fidelity and for a friendship the kind of which one only reads about in books! ‘Thank you! Anne*) The first line of the autograph of the Seé Solo, that great piece of writing ~ surely not meant to be played as written, but meant to register in the mind of the listener as written. ‘To matk it down as it should be played on a violin is quite impossible. It would come out totally unreadable and would be very unattractive and uninspiring too. On the piano, of course, it is the easiest thing ~ co do as written. The poor player-man probably wouldn't even notice how badly he misses the point. On the violin there are so many aspects to each and every note: ‘inhaling’ up-bows for instance, dissonances with one voice only ~ the other being in the mind of the listener, how to deal with chords, how to play syncopations without a proper beat, and how to envision those special colours which help change the harmony in the midst of a long note. A score like the Sei Solo a Violino senza Basso accompagnato can only be understood as a kind of code, a cypher, a secret message from one violinist (Bach) to another. And for this colleague, who might be a bit of a composer himself and somebody who knows about the idiosyncrasies of his instrument and the idiosyncrasies of his bow, and who shares with his listener a good sense of the ‘secret rules of communication’ — for him che autograph is exactly right, could not be better, and tells him precisely what o do and nor to do! ‘An attempt to write down, verbatim, the first two bars of this Adagio as it would sound on the violin, might look something like this: Bass notes in chords ~ apparently ~ should stand alone and be rhythmically precise, maybe as ae) before the beat, or a 4 (an eighth note would sound somewhat vain here). After this, the other accompanying notes should be slurred softly toward the top note of the chord, which always has to arrive on a first beat or other important place, even when a middle voice continues afterwards. If basses weren't in a rhychmically defined place, how could a listener estimate the length of a top note like the tied-over g” in the first chord? Is this one of those ‘secret rules of communication?” “The sequence of basses is always logical in itself, both in lengch and in diction: g-a-d’-g-sg’- fs d’~e'd’ (and so on). ‘The bar will be drawn out during chords to let them through, as it were, Strangely, nobody seems to take offense. Playing these solo works feels a bit like putting on a one-man show. In the imagination of the hearer these first two bars might very well come across as a gentleman striding to the fore, pasting by on his way four silk banners hanging from the ceiling.O Vaate = Viles del sete Cab eat ‘he writing in the manuscript is proud and clear — an epitaph hewn in stone! call looks straight-forward enough, but how many decisions had to be made to get the message on his one lonely staff? One can imagine Bach talking to his wife, who is willing to help him with all of his copy-work: Anna Magdalena, dear, thank you. I'll cut you a quill!” And then: “No, no! Not around and around with the pen, just a dab! And the notes with little lags, all in one jab. Also, if you wane the whole piece to fit on one page, don't let stems hang out at the bottom of the staff. You might need that space later. Avoid mistakes, my dear: corrections always make things worse. Better to leave it alone! And except when connecting beams and stems, of course, do not touch the paper where you were before. Rather than couch the notes, slurs should only point at them.” But,” his wife may have retorted, “why do you write all chose silly thirty-second, sixty-fourth, and hundred-and-rwenty-eighth notes? Can't you write them twice as long?” fe “Nothing doing,” might have been her husband’s answer, “this piece is in four!” Still, Bach-the-stickler will not have been entirely satisfied with this page. In bar 2 there is a slur on the wrong re side of the beam; unclear where it starts; should not happen again — and doesn’. Also there are three places where slurs cross each other: hardly happens after- - wards either, apart from the one spot in the Grave of the A minor Sonata where something outrageous must have occurred. > Bach's distaste for touching wet ink already shows in bar 3 and 5. The fact that he would rather write something incorrect is kind of amusing, Whatever... this also hardly happens again! And then, at the 5 very end: isn’t that anice example of ‘corrections only make matters worse’? ‘The ek in bar 3: imagine — with all those e's in the neighbor- hood! In the copy of Madame Bachen son Epouse (see page 74) itis also an e4, And in both scores itis the fattest note on the block! Personally, I don't like it very much, but ic is there and I might get used to it... For an example of Mrs. Bach's handwriting see the Allemande of the 6 Cello Suite on page 68. PS, ‘The title words at the top of the page ate quite sloppily written, Could they have been added afterwards while the ink was still wet, with that quill specially cut for music?‘The Autograph 5 Everybody who loves and admires Bach's music will prefer to work from te a copy of the autograph. It is the real thing ~ infinitely more inspiring, ¢ than playing from some modern edition. Surprisingly, after so many years, our notation has remained much the same; only a few things are different. Sharps and flats, for instance, are for one note only, oF for qwo or more notes of the same pitch in a row, even when there is a bar-line beoween them (bar 5-6). ‘There are no signs for up and down-bow in these densest of violin scores, which doesn't mean that bowing was considered to be ‘small matter.’ Ir has more to do with mentality: ‘If my piece is well made and \ follows m consistently, such markings are superfluous." ‘The slurs themselves occasionally send more-or-less clear messages too (bar 11-12 above). Problems in interpretation - and there are problems - mostly arise from matters that were taken for granted then, or that are taken for granted now. These works were composed by a real violinist who had the bowings in his mind while he was writing them, And although it seems his left hand rarcly left the first position, few pieces in che repertoire requite a more elaborate bowing technique. Here is real musical rhetoric with inhaling, questioning, inviting up-bows, and exhaling, demanding, and sometimes quite contented down- bows. The music is never about ‘big lines’ or inane singing without noticeable syllables. Gradually, when playing this wealth of different slurs, one comes to realize chat the bow should always lie on the strings, relaxed and ready for action. Furthermore, when working from the autograph, one discovers that small details have been unwittingly changed by modern editors, such as separate notes between slurs ~ those small shufile, litle syllables, ‘oh’ or ‘why,’ as in a spoken text (see bars 1, 3, 8, 10, 11, 12 ete.). = rst one I used the 2“ chord in bar 1. Sustain the long note ‘Three lictle exercises follow. For the while adding the other For the other two I used bars 11-12. a) ‘Divorce’ the two hands, move over with the bow and ‘visualize’ the next note during the rest, then play it. As the bowings in this music are so detailed and varied, occasionally there will be a slur on which opinions may differ... (bar 3, bar 10).10R Bach's Own Violin Playing From a letter by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to a Ms. J.N. Forkel (1774), about his father: He could hear the slightest imperfection even in the thickest orchestrations, As the greatest expert on and judge of harmony, he loved playing the viola the most, wherewith indicating where che music should be force and where it should be piano. From his youth until the onsct of old age, he played [the violin] well and clear, and thus was able to hold an orchestra in better order than he ever could have donc from behind the harpsichord. He understood the possibilities of all the stringed instruments perfectly. One can see this most clearly in his solo works for violin and for cello without bass. One of the greatest violinists [Pisendel? A.B.] once said to me that he had never found a better way to become a good violinist than to study these solo violin works. Nor could he think of a bettcr suggestion for someone wishing to learn to play the violin well than the aforementioned violin solos without bass ‘This is the only mention of Bach's violin playing that I was able to find. In the biography (1802) by the same Forkel, and in other contemporary books and letters there are many references to him practicing the organ and the harpsichord, never of him ‘working’ his violin. Personally, though, T cannot but think of him as basically a violinist, who had to go with the times. In comparison with the many beauties of the violin, the harpsichord cuts but a poor figure in every way, except for the number of notes one can play at the same time, at great speed and in all possible keys. Still, it was the harpsichord and the various keyboards that came after ~ maybe precisely for their lack of quali- ties - which stimulated so many new ideas. Henceforth almost all composers became ‘clavierists Clavier Uebung became the word! Bach's violin playing, and that of people like Johann Georg Pisendel, who is described in older editions of the Riemann Lexicon as playing ‘equally well in the French and Italian styles,’ belonged toa highly developed culture which totally vanished. What happened to Bach's solo string pieces afterwards appears to be quite a litany of misconceptions. ‘The autograph and the few existing copies went into obscurity, were seen by some as good study material only, and the first edition of the Sei Solo wasn't published until 52 years after his death. In the meantime, violin playing turned from counterpoint and ‘speaking’ to homophony and ‘singing.” Fashion changed and nobody knew how to play in the old contrapuntal style anymore. Even geniuses like Mendelssohn and Schumann felt it was necessary to add a piano part, Special bows were invented to play all four notes in chords at the same time. Musicologists and conductors were happy to tell the ever docile string player about bowing rules fom the famous French accompanying orchestra Les vingt-guatre Violons du Roi and how to apply them to Italian solo music and to Bach’s masterworks. It may be a good thing that the man didn't live long enough to hear how famous violinists of today perform his double concerto. “Well,” a modern violinist might say: “If this score is so well written, what’s your problem?” And he will go on doing his job, maybe on gut strings and with a period bow, in the beautiful unity of conception of modern violin technique, while he’s at it changing some little things where Bach’s playing was obviously still somewhat primitive. And of course there is no problem with this ap- proach, but not much fun to be had either:B But this same colleague, like all music loving players, will have come to know the strange, uplifting experience of going into the ‘Zeitgeist’ - the ‘spirit of the period,’ knowing: ‘Bach would surely have loved it tonight!" ‘The notion that violin playing formerly was worse than it is now is untenable. If those guys of old played so badly, how could they have composed so well? ‘The manuscript of the Sei Solo should be studied in awareness that Bach was an excellent violinist. Not only did the conception of violin playing change during the half century in which this music was no longer heard, the whole perception of art drastically changed. his is the 18" century we are talking about, ladies and gentlemen, which started out with blatant feudalism and ended with the French revolution! Theatre, which had always been about kings and gods, would soon be about Wozzek, Faust and Carmen, Music, which for the most part had been polyphonic in nature, became harmonized homophony and unabashed singing about oneself. Composers now gave expression to their own feelings, convinced that if their compositions were worthy, the listener would recognize their feelings by proxy: Egalicé, Liberté, Fraternité! The musician becomes a Napoleon, 2 Casanova, a Prophet... But Bach’s music precedes those days. A violinist may have seen himself as a responsible and dedicated servant, a minister in his pulpic, who loves his congregation dearly, knows most of the people personally and, wishing to console them, speaks to them about fate and hope, but refrains from mentioning his own sorrows. iS On the next two pages there is an enlarged photocopy of the Grave from the A minor Sonata. ‘My, does this man know what he wants!ET aS a a ee rien oa a F 0 x i 7 8h gg gah an 7 a Eten et ee [pen pe j fi le Rel» 1 ph a og ete os (a) 1 hy — pg oe eee te ee gt og te aa jag 8 Sh Rite ge ee i! S a ee SS a £ aA frre yer mye + ae et ig A7 a ae ee a t ee Sig ot a Bee Os Peg ele Ch abelbetoe—1- ae ae pae-/ 2 +e 4 =16 The Grave of the Sonata in A Minor “Dzloooh, Doh di da do-je da da Tsjah-de-dah, Humpf, la-de-la-de-da, Rhomp-de-day” is how it may sound, more or less, when sung in the abstract musicians’ language detested so much by family members and friends, Without a doubt this wonderful Grave is a spoken text, an address, a sermon maybe, rhetoric in any case — to be spoken from a pulpit, and to be played standing up. It is a text about great events, about fate. It is not about the private feelings of a composer, let alone those of a violinist. Playing tacitly, just moving one’s arms, can give so much insight to the meaning of the music: the open g-string on che 2" beat in the first bar or the ‘haughty’ down-bow bass-stroke on the 4" beat, or the long, broken chord starting on the 2! note in bar 3, or the ‘inhaling’ high a” in bar 4; all of them are real physical pleasures. Taking this Grave to be a spoken text, it can hardly come as a sur- prise that che bowings, just like the syllables in words, are so very different in lengch. a Viline ft vope bf Although the title may suggest otherwise, there is definitely a bass here. It is a bass incorporated in the violin part and it is @ bass in the thoughts of the listener too, who keeps it alive in his mind, and occasionally adds one or two bass notes for himself. Below is the bass part of the Grave. The square notes are the ones the listener adds in his thoughts. A bass is imperturbable, and ie seems to want to be played in short notes and not to wobble with vibrato, This bass here is like a chorale, and in order to learn more about the counterpoint between top-line and bass, it might be a good idea to play it once or twice by itself, in short jabs, while thinking all the rest Rave In this music it is the bow as much as the left hand that tells the story. And just as one would nor want co cake liberties wich the notes, one wouldn't want to take liberties with the written slurs either; they are wonderfully spirited and varied. Sometimes we see many notes in one stroke and sometimes just a few. ‘Ihe color change between the constricted sound of the ‘many’ and the free breath of the ‘few’ apparently belonged to the fashion of good violin playing in those days of ‘speaking,’ In order to bring out the counterpoint, nuances in tone color were welcome anyway, and in more ways than one, for instance, in the alternation of open string and 4" finger.7 A bass note often has its own separate stroke (bar 1, 6, 10, 14, and many other places), and occasionally another note from the same chord stands in for it (for instance c for a, as a first note of bar 3), Ie’ one of those little games between player and listener. Just as in the larger chords, the two notes making up a double stop are rarely equally long. Each note should be played keeping the line of its voice in mind, and quite often a note is shorcened for the benefit of another voice (bar 1 on the 4" beat). The famous down-bow rule from the contemporary French style (a down-bow stroke on the first beat of every bar) does not apply in this music. Changing the text for such a French down-bow, or taking a second down or up-bow in order not to ‘come out wrong,’ plays havoc with the story- telling of the right arm, For the clarity of the voices all three or four notes in chords should be arpeggiated; not two and two notes together: Ka-chunk, Ka-chunk, Never! Chords are small machines, small factories almost: the bass note always comes in alone, at a rhythmically precise point, in most cases a+’ or a A before the beat, the middle notes then follow, soft and unassuming, and the top note arrives precisely on the beat ~ or what one feels to be the beat — even when another voice continues afterwards. In that case, the top note has the length that is normal for the accompaniment (bars 10-11) ‘When a slur begins on a soft, weak, passing moment of a bar (call it what you will), its first note should be soft (bar 11). [As is casy to sec, everything worth knowing can be said using Bach's bowings, with either a baroque or modern bow. Only imagination itself is not on paper. Below are owo examples of something which you will not find in the ‘canon of modern violin technique.’ Why don’t violinists play the double trill here? Put down 1* and 3* fingers first and play the 2~ finger a bit on the side of the string. With a good bow arm ir will sound well enough. Another example is the Prelude of the Cello Suite no. 3 in C major.cs (ies ie as ava vn20 Chapter 2. More About the Bass ‘The Menuets of the E Major Partita In the first of these wo menuets the bass and the top line are so close together, it almost looks like a duet, but of course it’s not. Ic might have been easier to recognize this if the text had been But here, almost at the end of the score of the Sei Sola, having solved so many writing problems, the Master may have thought: “They should know by now!” Actually the real length of basses and other accompanying notes in chords is hardly ever written down properly. Often they are just given the length of their ‘melody’ note, and a nice example of this is the 1* menuet of the 2 Cello Suite (transposed duodecima for the violin). ! sea byl Thave scribbled the possible real length of the bass-notes underneath, They are in their own logical relationship and should probably be played a bit arpeggiando, for consistent audible perspective. The more one comes to think about it, the more one realizes that the written length of notes tells us all kinds of things, but not necessarily how long to play them... ‘The variety in note length in ‘spoken’ music, like the variety in dynamics and length of syllables i speech, is endless anyway; it is impossible to write down all of the rests, dots and heavinesses which continuously happen. Even if it were possible why would one want to? A gifted player won't need them, and will only feel hampered by superfluous information! Pertaining to this speaking with different lengths, Georg Muffat writes in the introduction to his Florilegium 11 (1699) (or was it in the introduction to one of his other volumes of musical works): “Italian dances are constructed in such a way that in the repeats all bowings are opposite.’ He even writes a musical example; see Denkmaler Osterreichischer Tonkunst in your music library Well, for an orator, ‘same words, different diction’ is quite helpful: “The variety of dynamics in spoken music is altogether endless,” and “The variety of dynamics in spoken music is altogether endless.” ‘The strong syllable in che words in italic will come out down-bow, I would say. Bach must surely have known Muffar's work, or at least was familiar with his way of thinking, and there are definitely examples of such bowings in his music. “The bowing in the 1* half of the 2™ Menuet of the first Cello Suite is opposite in the repeat. A a A h uw ve See also Bouree II of the 4" Suite (p.71).And does this apply to the E major Menuets as well? begin up-bow and the 2” half of the movement wi Here in the E major Menuet the repeat will start down-bow. seme ro : - Huck qu, 1 Je \ \ bar 27. bar 35. A bourdon note is in the mind of the listener, When a note is repeated, it is not a bourdon any- mote.2 The Loure From the 3" Partita About Bowing All beauty in string playing originates from the thesis and antithesis of up and down-bow. Unlike the 1 Menuet of the E major Partita this Loure is definitely a duct. It is @ dialogue between ‘two voices, in which the second voice from time to time doubles as a bass. Maybe, because of this, the basses here have real length, nor the token length most of the accompanying notes have in this music. ‘The Loure has to start down-bow, I presume, because the last bar of the first half is so definite, almost like a proverb — ‘Home sweet home.’ Finishing this last bar up-bow doesn't feel right some- how. This means that the bow should be retaken (n *) for the repeat. Loure bar 11. Asa little exercise one may start the Loure both up and down-bow ~ as a kind of private discussion with Bach the violinist. Two things are clear: Much elegance is thrown away when doing the same thing twice, but at least the composer seems to have taken care to illuminate the ‘given’ in different ways. Luckily, when starting both times with a down-bow, the diversity is guaranteed. The same motives are continuously varied.4 More About the Bass Called ‘Senza’ Largo From the C Major Sonata 1) Bach’s music is a spoken music. Like in sentences, slurs divide the sounds into ‘words’ and ‘syllables.’ Ic is never difficult to find words that fit (for private practice only) ora Lo Bethlehem, O kleines, holdes Stidtelein 2) Largo! In the first few bars of this movement the basses stand so far apart, it almost looks as if it is in two! Icis not, but every well-made piece, while the denomination may be in 4, will have bats in 2 and sometimes in 1, occasionally even in 8. Ie is the bass that sets the pace! It is also the bass that mostly rules the harmonies that give meaning to the story as told by the top line. 3) In double stops the notes hardly ever have equal lengths; they belong to different voices. A little example might make this easier to understand (bars 4-5). Is the pace 8/8 here? 4) In bars 4 and 9, on the third beat, we find what very well might be the famous French ornament called tierce coulée. It is in the books, my friends! © Cx a v Notation: ‘ase Execution: ? f a 5) In bar 2 something happens which should not happen at all: two up-bows in a row — but in this innocuous place, should it not be given a ‘nod to the wise?” 6) And in bars 18-19 a little cadenza appears ~ always fun, to play alone (when already playing alone) i Later the same unanswered question from bar 13 reappears in bar 20, somewhat more subdued... ik Please mind the slurs when speaking%6 More About the Bass ‘The Siciliana, Third Movement of the G Minor Sonata After having constructed an entire fugue on his lone violin, Bach now gives us a trio-sonatas two upper-voices (oboe d’amores?) and a bass — another puppet show. “The bass plays the role of father figure, of course, with authority in the d notes, but it also sings wisps of melody. As in the fugucs, there is a limit to what four strings can do, but less may be more, for a good listener knows how to make connections himself. Much can be left to his sense of logic and co his abhorrence of parallel fifths and octaves, and he can be relied upon for his capacity to silently complete chromatic and diatonic runs. He will hear his bit of chromatic scale even when the notes have been changed to evade a double third (bars 15-16). He will not change a latent harmony as long as it still fits - he is not a composer, and how eminently he is able to hear, after just a couple of bars, whether he likes the guy’s playing. Below I have attempted to unravel the voices in bars 12-18 in order to get somewhat nearer the contrapuntal mindset of Bach and his friends. ‘The hemiola in bars 16-17 (like the ones at the end of the B minor Sarabande or the one at the end of the Ciaccona) is in one voice only, and not in the bass. I added notes in brackets as an example cof what might be in the mind of the listener, and I left out some notes in chords that are only there to make string crossings easy. - sy 7 Fe = ty Looking over his writing, Bach may not have been too happy with his @. and (LLL 's in this piece. At any rate, after this Siciliana, there is hardly a slur that is not crystal cleat. Funny, when four sixteenths are slurred, the second one likes to be a little bit late and softer. (On the next page is my appraisal of the slurs. I'm sure the reader will see some of them differently.DoT2B From the Sonata in A Minor for Violin Without a Bass The 34 Movement — C major - Andante Andante means going or walking. All of the 0) in the bass of this piece must be regularly spaced. Don’t let that walker limp. Both legs must carry the same weight. The notes may be played: nynynyn vnvn DIMA or DID) It might be a good idea to learn first how to perform this ‘step’ — andante — bar-line accents or limps, with an occasional double up or down-bow stroke. Dod Naturally, in every score, what one finds on the page is as much about how something should be performed, as it is about how it is understood by the listener. These two are not necessarily the same. Our bass, in this case, allows us little freedom, but in the top voice there is still room for some interpretation, and the listener might not even notice that all of the longer notes are shortened (unless the bass playsmn or 1, of course) ‘The musician becomes a magician! There are so many possibilities for legerdemain with double stops. We set to work, well aware that no violinist, ever, was able to play chords like these as written: NS pee 3B ‘Thus bar 1 and 2 might become: ‘The first note e” is fastened to the second bass-note and reaches out, its shadow grasped by the 2"! e’, which may be on the short side, but not as short as those ever-traipsing basses. How well Bach- the-poet, by means of, on the face of it, faulty notation, makes himself clear to other poets! Performing with puppets, telling stories. ‘Two hands seemingly independent! Once in a while the regularity of the stepping may, for a moment, be taken up by the top note in the chord. bar 3. £ eee2 Note the slurs in bars 15 and 19.30 About the Adagio, First Movement of the C Major Sonata ‘One might imagine Christ carrying the cross... This Adagio is so typically ‘violin’ — it would be hard to find another instrument on which it would sound better (viola da gamba, possibly?). Nevertheless, this piece is often considered quite ‘unviolinistic,’ which may have to do with the way we currently use the bow. Teaching is restricting, and we are hardly conscious of the fact that the many do's and don'ts we have been saddled with from early childhood are also just opinions, What we take for granced when reading may be quite different than what Bach thought he wrote. Although the bass of this Adagio looks very different than the bass of the Andance of the A minor Sonata, it is quite similar ‘The problem is that we ‘moderns’ might easily think that we have to sustain all notes as long as they are written: 2 in the second bar and z in the third bar. ‘The dots in dotted notes should be played gently, in a lighter way, so that they sound like resonance. When we sing we do likewise. Nobody will sing LAAAAH-LA-LAAAH instcad of Laaah-La-Lah, ‘This might seem like a minor point, but the dotted notes in this piece are to be played both slurred and back and forth, and the two seem very different indeed. However, by ‘dropping’ all of the dots, slurred or separate, they become brothers! Here is a little ‘drop the dot’ exercise (Adagio) Needless to say, the dotted rhythm in this Adagio is not martial, but rather lyrical, whether slurred or separate, The beats always begin when the top note of the chord arrives, even when a middle voice continues afterwards. Whatever happens, the top note has to be on the beat Reflection: Ic is not so hard to play an Adagio like this; itis hard ro write it down properly!2 ‘Senza Basso 7. The Corrente of the D Minor Partita Among Bach's Flute Sonatas there is one in C major (or was it F major?) with a masterfully composed flute part, but a bass part that is quice awful. Rumor has it that this bass was composed by one of his young sons as an exercise, to learn how to write a bass. Reading through it, and trying one’s own hand, it turns out to be much harder than expected. One feels teacher's Cheshire cat smile over one’s shoulder... In the Corrente of the D minor Partita, both the cf in the first bar and the low ‘a’ in the second bar are included in the slurs, which might mean that they are not part of some secret bass-line Now, after having read all this about the senza basso, the reader might like to have a go himself. Thave furnished the first half of this Corrente with my own homemade bass, and | invite the reader to do the same for the second half, ‘This is an Italian Corrente, a dance sometimes depicted as fleeting, running, or trotting like a horse. In the background it seems to flow along in eighth notes, even in the triplet passages and during a pause. No matter what the rhythm is, the eighth note trot always shines through — two gems for the price of one! (More about triplets: see page 67.) ‘The dotted notes should sound rather colloquial, somewhere between JJ and J I would say. Possible bass line to the Corrente of the 2" Partita.3 More About Correntes Fora violinist it is not as easy to get an impression of the character of an Italian Corrente as it is for a cellist who has five of them at his command. To get to know Correntes better, two of the Courantes from the Cello Suites have been included here, transposed a 12* higher for the violin Violoncello senza Basso sounds like Basso senza Basso, and sure enough the 6 Suite: ¢ Violoncello Solo senza Basso are the ultimate in frugality. Even more dissonants and basses arc left to the imagination of the listeners, and one would almost say: the fewer the notes, the more expressive the slurs. In the Courante of the first Suite every possible way of slurring 6 sixteenths seems to have been tried, and in the Courante of the third Suite one finds the typical bowing preferred by cellists when playing alternating notes on two strings: ym /m (bars 29-36). To sight-read intricate, irregular bowings is another pleasure forgotten in our day. OF the six Courantes in the Cello Suites, only the 5* is a French Courante. Suite I Courante.Suite III Courante.36 Chapter 3. MnBev cyav — Nothing Superfluous In the Gavotte en Rondeaux from the E major Partita there is a fingering on the fifth line. ‘A fingering by Bach? It almost feels like a betrayal, a broken promise... Bach is so eminently thrifty. He must have really loved it: discarding unnecessary things. Even page numbers appear only on every other page, and double sharps (E major Partita) have one sharp only; the other one is already in the key signature ~ enough is enough! As we come to know our hero better and better, we come to realize how unremittingly he counts on the good sense of his readers. So much of what happens in the music is not on the page Dots, for instance (‘Keil’ in German). Not a single dot is to be found in this score, although one smay assume that the composer himself played them with gusto! (D minor Partita) And did he play the whole 16% passage from the 3" ro the 5 bar up-down-up-down, joking! Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi~ What Jupiter may do, the ox may not? Usually basses and other accompanying notes simply have been given, on paper, the length of their top voice, and what to do with them is left to the discretion of the player. There would be too much clutter if all those rests and chords were written down precisely. Bach expects his player to know about the meaning of bar-lines, and to know some of the basics of thetoric; only deaf people speak all of their syllables equally loud. So why would he need to indicate crescendi, decrescendi, accents or sforzati in his ‘spoken’ texts? Their place in the bar and their position over the bass will make syncopes, or dissonances and consonances clear to any good player. “The first mention of an echo is always the 2, thef just means ‘back to normal.’ The hierarchy inside the bars pertains to both the loud and soft periods, of course. It should never be mousy pppe’s after booming gs; such terrace dynamics are for the poor organists only, they have so little else. Apart from these echoes, and two places in the A minor Fugue (bars 49 and 57) that are very similar, there is only one more ? to be found in the whole text of the Sei Solo — at the very end of the fourth movement of the same A minor Sonata. And that marvelous pia means a lot more than just soft!a ‘Apart from the fingering mentioned before and another one in bar 5 of the Bouree of the same Partita, there are no markings for open strings or fourth fingers in this score; there is no ‘zero! or 2 vide ever. Like everything else, the meaning should be clear from the context. ‘Without 2 doubr itis the right arm that leads the dance in this music. Oh, those wonderfully baroque slurs, an intrinsic part of the creative process: Bach must have mumbled them while writing! One small example out of the many, Ciaccona bars 28-33. As frugal as he was, Bach was still able to make room for little extras, like in the following example. In chords, most of the stems of the notes point up (which in counterpoint is quite strange, but does save a lot of room). However, every time the first note of the Chaconne bass appears (every fourth bar), its stem points downward, for some installments at least. “This is where the bass starts again,’ is the message. wv Are In the bowing culture of the old Italian masters, and of Bach-the-violinist, it was a must to bow same things NOT in the same way. Bach's consistency in drawing the bow back and forth and never retaking it, nm or \ \, belongs to 2 now lost world of expression in which words, when repeated, were pronounced differently the second time, or rather a synonym was chosen in the form of an opposite bowing. In Vivaldi’s music ‘we see this 00, in early editions at least.38 Unfortunately, under the influence of orchestral playing, bowing seems to have become merely a practical matter. There seems to be no room for playing similar motives differently nowadays, and no shame for blatant repetition. Here are a few now half forgotten bowing lessons from the days of counterpoint, when the violin ‘was an autonomous entity of music: ** The bow should be on the string, never up in the air, and should always point in the direction of the next move. * Ina row of chords the bow should always park on the middle strings, and when playing ‘melody notes’ it should moye over slightly towards the bridge for clearness of tone. The top note should be played precisely on the beat, even when a middle voice continues. * Never should one have to stop the arm at the end of a stroke. It should be like underlining one’s signature; one never stops the pen either, the energy one gave it at the beginning is just enough. * It is worthwhile to make one’s hands independent of cach other: cross over with the bow to the desited string, relax (relaxing can be done as quickly as squeezing), AND GO! mal So, mal So. The subjects of the fugues in the Sei Solo ~ at last pieces truly senza basso — have been composed in such a way that the answer, the comes, always mirrors the dux with opposite bowing. And as the beginning of a down-bow is heavier by nature than an up-bow, the response will say the same little phrase differently. The German expression mal So, mal So comes to mind (“This way, and the other way), usually accompanied by a little smile.2 Every movement in these works for violin and for cello solo feels like an adventure, which evolves in alliance with the sense of logic of the gifted listener. Even in the writing itself the learning process is evident. Looking over his first Adagio, Bach still found little chings which could be improved (see page 8). In the G minor Fugue, which follows right after, there are also indications chat ic may have been a first effort. It is curious, for instance, how the rests are still all dutifully rendered, whereas in the A minor Fugue they have been given — in what actually appears to be faulty orthography (bar 5 and on) ~ a new function. Also in the C major Fugue, in double time now, one single rest is often used to announce the entrance of a new voice. Not being solfége teacher's pet anyway, Bach gives little hints to the player in the form of double stops, impossible co be sustained as written. More questions about the G minor Fugue + Why should one start down-bow? Well, assuming that the 16* passage in bar 6 will start down- bow, and noting the litele slur there, and counting back to the beginning of the piece, the first note d will be down-bow. +The eb — d” chord in an up-bow, on the first beat of bar three, feels somehow ‘right.’ Did Bach like to play strong dissonances up-bow, like in bar 6 on the first beat? Up-bow and dissonance, in other words unfinished business on an important beat of the bar, is sure to engage the imagination of the listener. + Because the lower voice plays short notes, the tied-over notes in bars 15 and 17 can only have been meant as a token presence to be heard by the listener but not played. In this music, bowings like “7 are never played as £3) when the other voice has short notes. “There are quite a few similar places where slurs are indicated — but not played. They are also in the other fugues: in the A minor Fugue in bars 128 and 177, and in the C major Fugue one sees them quite often, in bars 8, 103, 117, 135 and so on. In most cases there are three, but on occasion four separate notes under a slur, and the last one in this illusion is always a dissonance and an up-bow too.0 Bars 35-41 are not of the clearest and one might get the wrong idea how to play them. Further on in the score, in the Chaconne, the words arpeggio and arp appear, and that might have been helpful here too. But Bach didn’t like unnecessary additions. Isn't the text itself enough? Of course it ist Arpeggio is the one and only fitting way to play this passage. Es In the G minor Fugue there seems to be a new idea about communicating counterpoint on a single violin, too. Retaking the bow in order to enhance the beginning of a new episode adds a nice little comma 4 a Couperin. Given the context of the surrounding slurs one cannot help but suspect two down-bows in bar 14, and also in bars 55 and 82 (the coda). On the other hand, there always was so much convenience and so much variety in just playing up follows down and down follows up — even when it occasionally curned out to be quite awkward. Atleast one never had to grope for last minute solutions in front of one’s audience. ‘Two down-bows — the French way — ‘that wretched way’ in Geminiani’s words — almost feels like rebellion against beautiful, well-proven consistency! Of course, Bach was familiar with the style of the famous French accompanying orchestra Les vingt- quatre Violons du Roy and their perfection as a well-trained group. He knew the boast by the French that la perféction de la musique is by nature French. And, thorough as he is, he moulds the freedom and fantasy of the great Italian soloists into something perfect too: Germanly modest, learned, passionate and thrifty, with no need for dots or signs for down and up-bow, hardly any s’s and ps, and never markings for accents or gz. It’s almost shocking to find 2° for trlls! Like in the French way, it is not music for nice ex tempore embellishments either. Slurs are always perfectly drawn in this manuscript, and my example below is one of hundreds (bars 65-68 in the A minor Fugue). It is only by following the slurs as precisely as I could, that I surmised that here and there, two consecutive down-bows may have been intended. In the A minor Fugue there are more of these possible double down-bows ~ they occur even more frequently, it seems, than in the G minor Fugue. But in the next one, the C major Fugue, there are hardly any, apart from the two measly, obvious ones, in bars 159 and 232, which might easily go unnoticed. Why did Bach not use a sign for these relatively rare double down-bows? Did he consider it unnecessary — trusting, or maybe overestimating the compositional prowess of his players?41 ‘When it happens, it seems to be only in special, meaningful places: at the beginning of a new chapter of the composition, or in the coda. Was Bach just too stubborn to mention them, or was he thinking of the German proverb Jede Konsequenz fiubrt zum Teufel! (All consistency leads to the devil) (Lucher?] ‘Two consecutive down-bows may occur in the following places: in the G minor Fugue in the A minor Fugue in the C major Fugue Bars 14, 55, 82 (coda) Bars 43, 61, 81, 103, 174, 189, 221, 262 Bars 159, 232 (two innocuous spots) ‘Then, at the end of the G minor Fugue, like in the very last bar of the foregoing Adagio, there is another small writing mistake, and the run in 64%-notes in the bar before is quite impossible to play in this tempo. In a text which represents such complex violin playing and counterpoint and in which possibilities for corrections are minimal, to write pages like these without making mistakes must have felt, even for Bach himself, like walking on eggs. Imagine him, dear reader, promising himself a glass of beer after finishing these two pages with ‘utmost concentration, and then making that little mistake in the last bar! But how could the man ever have wormed that in, between the notes already there?! ‘On the very last page of the Sei Solo, after the Fine, there are some notes that Bach scratched out as, best he could with his trusty penknife. What are they? Another Double for the B minor Partita? Or did he accidentally keep writing the Bouree on the right side of the large sheet of paper which he bought to write these works? (sce the autograph, page 22, top corner.) “The notes in these one and a half lines of discarded music look smaller than those in the real text. Having a hard time to understand at all how anybody could make so few mistakes in such complicated stuff in one single line, I find myself thinking: is it possible that in ‘hairy places’ the Master started with just a speck of ink, which he later either fattened up or hid in a stem or a beam?45 About the A Minor Fugue, Also ‘Senza Basso’ “he fugues of the Sei Solo are all Senza Basso! We are supposed to think in four equal voices — not that they all speak at the same time. From bar 106. A long trip by plane or train, wich a litde drink in hand and the violin in its case, may be the best time to really appreciate and relish all the permutations and elegancies that pass by the window. When one is playing, one might be too busy, and the counterpoint may not be as apparent to the player as it is to the listener (bar 124) In the next bar the inversion of the theme appears for the first time, . It would be too drab co begin the theme down-bow every time FL\, and although some people may hesitate to play four-part chords up-bow, actually to play four-part chords up-bow is not any more difficult than stroking one’s hair. Intriguing are the many bars ~ almost too many bars — with four chromatic quarter notes in a row, set against the rhythm of the theme, Why does this happen so often, this Fortspinnung, this ‘spinning on?’ Is it some sort of exercise? Well, with Bach there is never a doubt about that. But an exercise in what? ‘This requires some explanation. As violin music became so much more homophonous, violinists lost much of their knack for counterpoint. A four-string chord, nowadays, may easily sound like dropping two heavy cases on the floor: Ploink! Ploink! In more contrapuntal times, every note of a chord belonged to its own voice. In this fugue these four chromatic notes are notated as «, but can only be played as Apparently some suggestion of length in these notes is intended. ‘The royal theme from the Musical Offering comes to mind (I quote from memory): pee ett eS Fe As everybody tends to sing and play chromatic steps a bit more legato ~ more sostenuto than the surrounding diatonic ones — nobody in his right mind will ever sing or say:“There are so many bars with these four quarters in this fugue! Would it be possible to hold the chromatic notes just a tiny bit longer by crossing voices with the bow? In other words, to play it a bit like this? A minor Fugue, bars 73-78. “There must have been many more of such delicacies in the playing of people with a contrapuntal mind, and to perfect the necessary technique wouldn't have taken too many years. Stil, some latter day Darwinists-in-music may find it hard to believe that master playets of yore were able to do some things better than we moderns. But the violin, this incredibly beautiful and versatile instrument of music, is sure to have granted many by now forgorten wishes to its admirers in the more than five hundred years of its existence. Sometimes, rarely, one gets the idea that Bach-the-violinist didn’ totally agree with Bach-the- composer — very rarely. Bar 43 is the most uncomfortable bar of this fugue and the only one that occurs twice! (bar 278) 1. Would he surreptitiously have taken another down-bow on the diminished 7" chord? 2. Or would he have preferred two up-bows on the two ds in the next bar? 1 ono vay n48 About the Interludes in the A Minor Fugue Bach plays around with the material from the theme in all of the interludes. + From 45 and on, rather concealed ~ the three opening notes and che rhythm. «In bars 112-123 (below), the first three notes of the theme. Nice, but not so important matter In the fourth bar of this fugue, in the first answer to the theme (comes), the notes are: G F#A Gt, which is a literal translation of B A C H (B = Bb and H = Bs in German) “This only comes again at the very end of the fugue, bar 288: CH D Ci Did Bach keep it tucked away until the very end? Bach the Guildmaster signing his work? Bar 4, Bar 288 Every day these wonderful works, though almost forgotten at the time of Bach’s death, are played by tens of thousands of people, uplifting them and making them happy. It’s almost unbelievable, but true! Some of them are bound to have found this BA C H as well50ss About the C Major Fugue Some ideas from the G and A minor Fugues return in the C major Fugue: * “The separate notes under a slur (from the G minor Fugue). C major Fugue bars 117-121 * ‘The (supposed) double down-bows in the G and A minor Fugues are not present here, except for the two perfunctory ones in bars 159 and 232 ~ as if Bach decided he'd rather stick to his principles. What about the notation in double time in this fugue? Could ic be that Bach wrote an earlier version in quarters, but lacer decided that the counterpoint would be more clear in halves? TR i 1 ) aaa ‘The texture of the music is quite similar to that of the other fugues. There is no reason to play it as if it were Perotinus or something, all of a sudden. In the beginning of this chapter we have seen that Bach does not use dynamic markings if he can help it, nor any of the customary sforzati, commas, dors, dashes, signs for up and down, crescendi, and the like. The basic hierarchy of the bar, the reasoning of che harmonies, and the logic of the ‘spoken’ slurs, combined with the musical sense of the listener, should be enough, But he also loves to write impossibilities: short and long bow strokes to be played at the same time or the drawn-out chromatics mentioned earlier. He may have relished things that are impossible on paper but are actually, on a violin, quite playable. Looking with a pianists or conductor’ eye at the little excerpt starting at bar 8, there is nothing. y to see. But by being customarily so precise in his writing for violinists, Bach was sure to engage their attention when serving them impossibilitics to digest.5 ‘After so many years of solfége exams our notational system has become gospel truth for most people, but for players of ‘spoken’ music it is only an estimate. ‘To play such complicated counterpoint, to make such pop-up books in the minds of the listeners with one’s lonely violin, one needs to know about the listener's expectations and his uncanny memory. How could all of it ever be written down, if not by blatantly giving the notes wrong lengths? Ie feels very much like ‘in perspective’ drawing and painting: depicting more by well-drawn uncruths. Truly, the bow is a magic wand! In violin music all of this perspective comes from the same family: the family of chords. Before, I spoke of them as being little factories. As no violinist will ever be able to play four-part chords as written, ‘audible perspective’ is what one has to create. It is the listener who will decide whether the communication is successful, whether he experiences the chord the way it looks on paper! As in drawing, distortions are required. It is important to know how to play the chords suggestively. I have written down the actual distortions in bars 94-114. If the chord is preceded by a half note or a quarter nore, the basses are simply played an eighth note earlier by shortening the previous note. If there is no room for that, because the note before the chord is only an eighth note, one has to add an extra eighth note’s space to the bar to fit in the bass note of the next chord. ‘Actually the bar now becomes an eighth note too long, but, surprisingly, nobody complains. As long as the player gives the proper weight to the top note of the next chord so that the listener knows ‘where to tap his foot, all is well. When speaking, this happens all che time: clearing one’s throat, for instance, or making a fist, without changing the effect of the bar. Apart from these places, the music should be played as written. “The bars below (94-114) are also written on four staves on the next page‘The Interludes in the C Major Fugue After the barrage of learned stuff — imitations, canons, what have you - the interludes in this fugue may feel like playtime; a bit of freedom before it all flows back into more work and stretti, into the al riverso, ot into the very beginning of this unusual da capo fugue. The interludes seem to be free-flowing paraphrases, where occasionally the subject pecks through the curtains of the ongoing quavers — and it isn’t even so easy to sce how it is done (for instance, see bars 242-246). Bar 232: Perfunctory double down-bows? Here is a little exercise to learn how to make some notes stick out without using more bow. ¥ ei aby v JSecond halves of pieces often have same bowings both times, apparently.6 Chapter 4. MENTALITY. For Bach, the writing of a Sarabande must have been like creating an atmosphere, adopting a mentality ~ a mentality of strict reserve hiding great passion, In the violin soli there are only two Sarabandes, plus the theme of the Ciaccona. In the Cello Suites there are six more, all of which are unquestionably Sarabande in character, but how different they are from each other! ‘Two thythms are typical. ‘There are the bars with three haughty equal quarters, and there is the famous rhythm + 4,.)J«, always present, sometimes implied. In the later, ‘swinging’ rhythm, the first and second beats are like brothers, close together. The second one arrives a bit early, as if asking a rhetorical question, creating a passionate silence (bar 6), before moving on in three straight quarter notes. Top notes of chords are always strictly on the beat of course, even when a middle voice continues afterwards. + In bar 7 the slur over just ewo 16% notes results in apposite bowings in the repeat. + In bar 17 there is a separate note next to a slur, which happens quite often in the Sei Solo — just as it does in speech. * In bars 18-19 it is hard to be sure of the bowing. Did | read it right? ° OOF @,4443/4 a Oued mash tel Turning now to the other Sarabande in the B minor Partita, one might be a bic taken aback at not finding any of these ‘swinging,’ typical sarabande rhythms. Maybe a healthy sniff little early on the second beat of the bars with a doc would help. ‘The hemiola in bars 30-31 is in the top voice only, of course.6 To learn a bit more about this wonderful Spanish mentality, I have included here the Sarabandes from the Cello Suites I & II. Playing an opposice bowing in the first repeat seems quite feasible for all of these sarabandes, but in the 2" Suite, the bowing is already opposite after 4 bars! Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Sebastian Bach, taking pleasure in playing with the inflections. ‘There are interesting and unusual chromatics to be found at the end of the D minor Cello Sarabande. The composer, having frequently invited the listener to fill in missing notes in che bass lines, now asks him to add a note in the middle of the chord, and to think of the top notes (4. asa third voice, suggesting, for a moment, three voices. GE hoa i df J, bert Gin |. yA Here are the Sarabandes of Cello Suites I and I, with transcriptions for the violin. For all their differences, Sarabandes are very strictly in multiples of two-bar phrases, often with a clear transition in between. Suite I ‘Again: repeats in the second halves seem to have the same bowings.Suite II Sarabande ve ym ¥ ets ea4 The Presto of the G Minor Sonata: Capricious Fiddling! The bow remains on the string, of course. Play with a loose wrist and loose fingers. A lovely, old-fashioned exercise for string crossings comes to mind: rest the arm on a table or other comfortable place, and let the wrist do all the work. With the bow always on the string, how easy isto | ¥y ye give litle pushes to enhance the 3/8, which should j not be mistaken for 6/16 — excuse me for my arrows. ‘The alternating shorter and longer bar-lines in this movement are bound to mean something heavier and lighter bars, one would say. Soon after in the Corrente of the B minor Sonata we find them again, but in the second bar of its Double Bach's quill seems to decide against any further use of them (see page 67). The thought behind those very special bar-lines may have been to make long sequences sound less repetitious by suggesting a kind of ‘two-bars-are-one’ system, but preconceived ideas so easily become a harness. Only a few pieces seem to fic this two bar treatment. A likely candidate is the Courante of the third Cello Suite, but we don’t have the autograph to be sure (see page 35).When bowing the alternating slurs and separate notes, the slurs should be played with little bow and a bit nearer the bridge (not to end up at the tip all the time). They might sound somewhat constrained, but apparently such a constipated sound, alternating with the freedom of the separate notes, was well liked and might have been an aspect of the aesthetics of the time.66 Some vireuoso places bars 32-41. The quill is a wonderfully precise instrument. Bars 54-57 and 133-136 are final bars. The thin bar-lines there dont feel quice right. Wouldn't Bach have preferred a nice hemiola?tet eee ee et ae ssi with BACH in targe bold letters om the cover of his music, i's hard co relate to the artist, Actually, all modern prints of these solo works have a way of dehumanizing the author. Looking in the autograph at the second bar of the Double of the Corrente of the B minor Partita, and seeing how he does away with the idea of smaller and bigger bar-lines with one double dash, gives a warm feeling for the man. ‘There are more places where the notation was insufficiently clear, and on its way out, For instance, it can be very confusing when slurs with little 3s used to designate triplets are also used for bowings. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen very often. ‘A good example is the Allemande of the B minor Partita, bar 17, 20. ‘The same kind of awkward places are found in the Cello Suites (2" Gavotte of the 5" Suite). One has the feeling that Bach decided triplets are much easier to read when written in 9/8 or 12/8 bars as in the Prélude of the 6" Suite. Bur we don’t have Bach's autograph of the Cello Suites. All we do have is, by common opinion, a copy made by Anna Magdalena, his second wife. Ic is so splendidly written that one has to pinch oneself to be sure it is not the very autograph. Some details are different: the form of the C’s in the key-signature is & here, not like in the Sei Solo Z and the stems of the notes stick though the bottom line of the beam less often then those of her husband (ferninine neatness?) 188. CLES AMB. 1 cy On the next page is Anna Magdalena’s copy of the Allemande of the 6 Suite for Cello. On the page after [ have scribbled a violin transcription with some low notes taken up an octave. The adaptation here for the 4-stringed violin will give the reader-violinist a chance to get to know a marvelous piece by Bach, which he, at last, can approach as a poet, unhampered by the do's and don'ts of a lifetime of teaching. A long note, for a poet, may be a time of thought, not so much of playing, Apollo, demonstrating with his Lyre... Short, separated notes may be the pushing out of lips And before a note of drama, the last syllable may be truly softly spoken...70 The Allemande of the 6" Cello Suite The 6 Cello Suite was actually written for the Viola Pomposa, = a large five-string viola played with a strap around one’s neck, and strung C-G-d-a-e’, For a modern violinist this Allemande is a kind of virgin ground where he can walk around frcely unbothered by spurious notions that: 1) same kinds of motives should have the same bowings ~ rather, same kinds of motives should, of course, not have the same bowings! 2) consonants should be as loud as dissonants (referred to as singing) ~ rather, as in speaking, sense should be made of the differences between them, So-called lincar counterpoint, more than any other kind of music, is a game between equals, one building riddles and the other resolving them. And the charm of this mode is very much in the ever- changing balance between agreeing with the harmony, and wondering about it. A few basics have to be understood: 1) The beats in 4/4 bars form a strict hierarchy — like in an army ~ the first beat is the most important (general), the third beat is the second in command (colonel), the two other quarters are still important (captains), eighth notes between them have some worth (sergeants), and so on and so forth, lighter and lighter. In 3/4 bars the hierarchy of the quarter notes is more varied, 2) The sequence of bass notes unfolds in a scale-like progression most of the time. 3) The bass note rules the harmony until the next one appears (which may skip an octave or exist in the mind of the listener only). 4) One should be able to recognize pedal-points and dissonants with their resolutions, even when only one of the clashing, dissonant notes is played. 5) Good listeners will recognize stand-ins for the bass. Linear counterpoint, like most good music, is ‘spoken’ music, zhetoric, and it is never difficult to find words — any words ~ to understand the diction of the bowings: ie hie hiehicbster Vac-terhr-r” — or something, Asin speech, some syllables are long, others are short. Yet modern editions often mistakenly include separate notes in the slurs ‘for better singing.’ But it shouldn't iru vav AV nw\M sing, it should speak And of course there are questions. The down-bows in the first bar, for instance, are impossible to sustain in a singing way. Holding the first one tonelessly, like in speaking: did anybody ever try a thing like that? In another copy of the Suites, by Johann Peter Kellner (1705-1772) (an organist who, for his own pleasure, copied what he could lay his hands on of Bach's works) there is an E minor chord on the third beat of the 2 bar of the Allemande and whar is clearly a 6 on the second beat as wel Ie looks as if these notes were in the lost autograph. ‘lo give an extensive argument ‘why’ would take too long here. Essentially, without this chord, the f¢ in the bass on the first beat, resolved by the imaginary g on the third beat, and the little fin the top line going to the same g, might sound to the listener like parallel octaves. ‘Ach Vacate,n ‘A composer of linear counterpoint, limited to a bare minimum of notes, has co be careful to avoid parallel octaves and parallel fifths in the minds of his listeners. Here are examples how Bach might have dealt with this problem. -In the Prélude of the 3" Cello Suite, attention is diverted from the fifths by doing away with the slurs in bar 17. ‘And in the Gavotte en Rondeaux ~ parallel sevenths only, but somebody might feel his leg being pulled! ‘Apart from Mrs. Bach’s marvelous work, there are only three more known copies: the (unfinished) one by Kellner and, from an apparently later date, two more. Lets call them ‘Westphal’ and ‘Viennese Anonymous.’ All of these are casily found in the newest Barenreiter edition of the Suites [As sources they are hardly interesting, but it is wonderful to see how these unknown copy possibly old men by the time they wrote these scores and living in a world which was much more familiar with the music of the Mannheimer School or Johann Christian Bach ~ still have the irregular bowings of the likes of a Bach, Pisendel or Geminiani in their ears. Could these latecomers still have relished slurs like those found in Anna Magdalena’s copy in bar 3, ers cer Fy} in bar 6?n Would they also have loved weird harmonic associations halfway through the endlessly downward- sloping scale, which begins the second half of this Allemande? Here are some bars from the two manuscripts. Ah omaphe ieneeve Kemp masAll chese treasures can be found in the Preuifische Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, including Mrs. Bach’s copy of her husband’s Sei Sola for the violin (mus.Ms. Bach P 268). It is noc as beautifully written as her copy of the Cello Suites, more fleetingly one would say, but it is very precise. Possibly it was made for somebody passing by, who showed an interest. For cellists, one look at both the autograph of the Sei Solo and Mrs. Bach’s copy will be enough to realize how badly they have been served by modern editions of their Suites. ‘Anew life will start for the Cello Suites when cellists at last throw away all of the modern editions, and begin studying the Violin and Cello manuscripts in earnest. Leh Leh Leh Len Lent In Violino senza basso, apart from everything else, there is a sense of gallantry. “What I do on my harpsichord, I can do on my violin too; four-voiced fugues ~ Ha! No problem: Violoncello senza Basso is quite a different cup of teas it almost sounds like Basso senza Basso! ‘Too many double scops in this low register can easily sound cluttered and unclear. Many more of the natural basses have to be implied. OF course, there is always a bass in the critical mind of the li For example: somebody sings, someone grabs a guitar and accompanies, but accidentally plays a wrong chord. “Wrong!” says the singer. Never underestimate the listener! ener. In the Sei Solo quite a few of the basses are left to the listener. And what a wonderful form of communication it is; see the Grave of the A minor Sonata (p. 16). In the Cello Suites this phenomenon is even more prominent in Bach's thinking. In the Allemandes of the 1 and 4 Suites basses are often latent. In the G major, there is a bass in the first bar, bur the E flat Allemande doesn't even have a chord on the first beat of the first bar. What harmony is the liscener supposed to hear? NO! What harmony is the listener sure to hear? I do hope the listener will agree with the notes I have added. ‘A good conversationalist will imply much more than he actually says, a good player will be very aware of what he conceals, and a good listener will appreciate all chese implications — or what he takes them to be...7m A Few More Words on Mrs. Bach's Copy of the Violin Solos ‘Anna Magdalena Bach's copy of the Cello Suites is such a marvel of writing, It looks very much like her husband's writing in the Sei Solo, They must have just been married when she wrote it. Am Ian incorrigible romantic, sitting here imagining the ‘two of them working at the kitchen table? Do have no sense of musicology? Mrs. Bach's copy of the Sei Solo with another (now lost) copy of the Cello Suites are from a later date because the title page lists @ Leipsic (after 1723). In comparison with the autograph, there are only a few slurs which are different in Mrs. Bach's copy, and they seem to make sense, Could ic be that the Master scribbled some corrections in his autograph (with a piece of coal from his pocket), which were unwittingly removed by a 20" century scientist while editing our so beloved autograph? In Mrs. Bach's copy bars 2-3 and bars 18-20 of the Adagio of the G minor Sonata have different slurs (sce examples), but the strange et in bar 3 is still there (see arrow). However, the half bar-lines in the Presto of the G minor Sonata and the Corrente of the B minor Partita have disappeared, but the fingerings in the Gavotte en Rondeaux and the Bouree of the 3" Partita are there! Somebody should look into the matter. BrAbout the Gavotte en Rondeaux from the Third Partita Ac the end of the Sei Solo all of a sudden French words appear: Loure, Menuet Ire and 2de, and Gigue. Before, the titles were always: Ciaccona, Giga, Fuga or Borea. Especially that long title Gavotte en Rondeaux is surprising. Could it be a hint: take a new down-bow on the first note of every refrain? — bow like the French here? ‘On the next page I have marked ic in the score this way. Bur of course I have no more proof than you do, readet! By the way, about the reprise: the final bar-line has four dots! Should the very last refrain be repeated? Gavete on next page, fingerings appear; fingerings not intended to make ic easier to play, but to enhance che counterpoint by playing the e’s on different strings. On the fifth line of the Gavotte there is a‘I” and a°3,’ and in the 5th bar of the Bouree a ‘I’ to encourage one to play with an open string ot fleshy finger and that way enhance the difference between the voices. aime 113 2 101s For the real counterpoint freak there must be many more undetected ‘4's’ and ‘0’ in this score. Here are two more examples in the Grave and Fugue of the A minor Partita — not that I necessarily like them so much, ‘The reader will easily find better places! 4301 Seven bars before the Da Capo there is a long e” and, just before, some longish gts. Should they be played short like in so many places before (for instance in the bars 8-10 of the C major Fuga), or should they be sustained? It may be a case of @ discrétion.8 Conclusion ‘The Gavotte en Rondeaux from the 3° Partita brings this book to a close, I’m afraid, ‘The main point has been made: there is always a bass in the mind of the listener, and communication is always with the whole fabric of the composition, whether latent or tangible To reach each other through music or word passes through thin air anyway... AB. For good measure, I would like to add a kind of eulogy to Mr. Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762) with citations from, and short commentaries on his masterful book, The Art of Playing on the Violin (1751). ‘Thete is no doubt that this is the best book about violin playing written in Bach’s time, and it is our good luck that a photocopy of the autograph is readily available, published by Oxford University Press in London. Reading it once more after finishing my own ‘Bach senza Basso’ makes me feel like a naval archeologist who, after years on the beach looking for pieces of leather, textile and molded wood to prove his point that there must have been shipbuilding on this coast, sees an ancient galleon heaving into sight. Pl use this book as a kind of second opinion to check my own assertions. ‘The Exxempii are in Italian and the explanations in a wonderfully expressive English. ie a 2 Bie ws In this are contained 20 Scales in different Keys, very uleful for acquiring Time and the ftopping in Tune. Here it muft be obferved, that you are to execute them by drawing the Bow down and up, or up and down altemately; taking Care not to follow that wretched Rule of drawing the Bow down at the firt Note of every Bar. Quotation from Essempio VIIL By ‘wretched rule’ Geminiani can only be referring to the French orchestral practice of taking two consecutive down or up-bows, a habit which actually still does a lot of harm today. a: ef 24 os a 6 63 oe cher 7 Playing the long notes in the beginning of this Ess. VIII, which accompany all those consonances and dissonances, 2 newcomer, without a word said, will intuitively develop a good ear for the beauties of sensitive bowing.Quotation from Esempio XVI The Letter (g) iit! denotes that the Bow is to be drawn downwards ; and the Letter (s) (s that it muft be drawn upwards, “The letcers g and sare only found in the Essempfi, not in the Compositione, As in Bach's autograph, the same gallant mentality is at play here: “If my piece is well written,” it seems to say, “it will not need any of these markings ~ itis clear enough as itis!” “The same applies to fingerings. In the Fisempii there are many of them, bus later in the Compositione there are only a few (“You are a big boy by now, pup Quotation from Essempio XXII ‘This contains two Compofitions of Scales of double Stops, which are thrice repeated with different Tran{pofitions of the Hand, in order to remove all Pain and Difficulty in the Prac- tice. It is impossible to sustain all of these double stops as written. For every two notes # new stroke should be taken, one would say... “The notes with two fingerings ate interesting — do they indicate a change of position on one bow? Double stops like these are also found in the fugues of the Se Salo. Thave added some bowings, for discussion only. a woain vunly Nyvivev Bids dd | + —H f=0 Quotation from Essempio IT In This Example there are 13 Scales, compofed of the Diatonick and Cromatick Genera, Many may, perhaps, imagine that thefe Scales are meerly Cromaric, as they may not know that the Cromatic Scale muft be compofed only of the greater and leffer Semitones 5[ ‘Take notice that the Sign (ma) fignifies Major or greater, and the Sign (mi) Minor or lefler. 2 a5 Ik Ie's all about meantone tuning, of course ~ as one would have learned it at the time, as a boy singing in the church choir, Well-tempered playing was such a new thing, and really for keyboards only String players must have performed tonic, dominant and subdominant chords in ‘just’ intonation, in which by nature the major thirds are not too big and minor ones not too small Maybe it was only for practical reasons that Geminiani referred to greater and lesser half tones instead of greater and lesser thirds, in order to make the reader understand in which direction to move the finger. But in meantone tuning the main issue, of course, is major and minor thirds. Efsempiol. zo ge grace t 2 bi? i oil _ = The examples of chromatics in distant keys in Eiempii IV and VI are surprising, In real life those keys don’t happen very often. Maybe Geminiani wanted co make people aware that in keys with flats, most of the open strings, combined with the first half tone on the next higher string (first finges), form a major chord [g -eb’ = Eb major] (a minor sixth), which therefore should be a ‘ma (major half tone) with che open string. ‘The idea of narrow, longing, clinging ‘leading notes’ is awful in this music A wonderful case of the adventures in meantone tuning can be found in the Prélude of Bach's 4° Cello Suite. Around the bend is a whole world of acquired taste forgotten in our time, thanks to the pounding of rwelve-key octaves on the piano. bar 62. N.B. The added 5 before the B» equals Bo». +81 Cello Suite No. 4 — Prélude ‘The Ab in bar 66 (eb in the violin part) should be ‘Ma’ with the bass in bar 64, and also the at two bars later (e4 in the violin part) should be a ‘major’ half second. In this way the whole fabric of tonality will be lifted off the floor and the harmony of the Ab minor (E> minor for violin) in bar 74 will be very weird, after which the open string in bar 76 will nail us back to reality, and again that Neapolitan chord in the strange key of F> major (C}- major for violin) bar 80 will be halfway to heaven, and the resolving chord Bb -d in bar 81 will be like a homecoming! Ie might not be such a good idea to do this in one’s exam. Quotation from Essempio XVIII. About the 14" ornament of expression, the Close Shake (vibrato) ‘This cannot pollibly be defcribed by Notes as in former Examples... and when it is made on fhort Notes, it only contributes to make their Sound more agreable and for this Reafon it fhould be made ufe of as often as poflible. Geminiani doesnt say ‘continuous vibrato,’ which is not an ornament, but a meaningless wobble. Ess, XVIII is worth reading in its entirety. The reader should study it himself rather than looking at an abbreviated version here. Ie contains a detailed list of all kinds of ornaments, not ex tempore embellishments but written out ones, very much like French music! (Couperin) Essempio XIX. 02 Here is Compositione I (with all the gimmicks) ptt th Compot me “ak PP» is this a close shad? Sign for cresedhdo Quotation from Essempio XXIV From this Example the Act of Bowing will eafily be acquired, and alfo that of playing in Time. The Letter (g) denotes that the Bow isto be drawn downwards ; the Letter ('s.) that it multe drawn upwards, ‘The Sign (+&% ) fignifies a Repetition. You mult (above all Things) obferve to draw the Bow down and up alternately. ‘The Bow muft always be drawn ftrait on the Strings, and never be raifed from them in playing Semi-quavers. RK RP ae es ae 2 5 7 Sa ee eaeBowing as it comes is the comerstone of this whole culture of playing. To play in the opposite way, to start (g) or (5), does not mean that the two should sound the same. On the contrary, in this style, when Geminiani wanted the notes to be the same, he had to mark each one expressly. uotation from Eisempio XX ° 2 30 ° ” DE Acris cae oie titan on A Aedegia,0 lad” Cumo, AMediore. Buco. ao 52 oe Ci pusipinr Lt biguepot, tabla Chee Z » W.B. In the twentieth Example the Word Buono, fignifies Good ; Mediccre, Middling Cattive, Bad ; Cartive, o Particolare, Bad or Particular ; Meglio, better; Ostime, very good 5 and Pefimo, very bad. “There are more examples on this page, Allegro o Presto. Ie’s not always easy to understand what irritares the man, It seems to me that his greatest concern is thar the playing is not mechanical and that the bow should always stay on the string. 2 ° Wise Me Fore 4g rt MU! 0 Presto 62, tal tty Buono. ° sos ip 0 trot 5 Cattivo, Buono. tino. Othinoa Once more from Essempio XVUI Men of purblind Underftandings, and half Ideas may pethaps afk, is it poffible to give Meaning and Expreffion to Wood and Wire; or to beftow upon them the Power of railing and foothing the Paffions of rational Beings? But whenever I hear fuch a Queftion put, whe- ther for the Sake of Information, or to convey Ridicule, I {hall make no Difficulty to anfer in the Affirmative, and without fearching over-deeply into the Caufe, fhall think it fafficient to appeal to the Effeé. Even in common Speech a Difference of Tone gives the fame Word a different Meaning. And with Regard to mufical Performances, Experience has thewn that the Imagination of the Hearer is in general fo much at the Difpofal of the Mafter, that by the Help of Variations, Movements, Intervals and Modulation he may almoft ftamp what Impreffion on the Mind he pleafes. Thele extraordinary Emotions are indeed moft ealily excited when accompany'd with Words ; and I would befides advife, as well the Compofer as the Performer, who is ambiti- ous to infpire his Audience, to be firft infpired himfelf; which he cannot fail to be if he chufes a Work of Genius, if he makes himfelf thoroughly acquainted with all its Beauties ; and if while his Imagination is warm and glowing he pours the fame exalted Spirit into his own Performance, Geminiani speaks in the above with so much passion and respect for music and for “The Playing on the Violin’ (and I think that he was thinking very much of his own playing too), that one cannot but realize that playing in his time, and in thar particular style, was not ‘primitive’ at all. Maybe it was even more refined than it is in our time, with infectious delicacies of bow, diction and tonality, of which a professional of the 21* century might love to know about. Let music stay alive, friends, and not die the slow death of brainless repetition. Painting and composing weren't primitive in those times, and are known for their inimitable finesse and perfection, and wouldn't that have been the same with playing? SILENT EXERCISES x) Put the bow on the string and think what you want to play. x) Without leaving the instrument, think down-bow, on all four strings. 9) Think up-bow now and let the ghost of an imaginary stand partner accidentally bump your arm ~ upbeat. x) Think down-bow on one string, move over to the next string, think up-bow and be aware of the distance between the two strings. x) With bow on strings, become an up-bow - become a down-bow. x) Now decide what you're going to say.