Therapeutic Outlet: Bach and Forth

Transcript

No body can miss them for me That’s reason why I try both If all is gold, I can see a thousand times all day No body can miss them for me You’ve probably heard bits of Bach’s world-tempered clavier Bits of it turn up all over the place, it’s usually played on piano and there’s lots of it It’s a collection of fugues and preludes Effectively structured pieces for several voices The structures and rules of which are, I’ll come back to another day It’s all very interesting but it gets really technical Anyway, the world-tempered clavier was composed in two parts First one in 1722, well at least that’s when it was completed The second one in 1742 Each one of them consists of 24 preludes and fugues Each one of them in one of the 24 major and minor keys of the Western musical canon Both in their own right, quite a feat of musical technicality and artistic inspiration The definitions of the way that these were constructed and whether or not other composers had attempted to create music in all 24 keys is debated to an extent, but Bach is generally considered to be the first to really nail it The first part is the first half, the first 24 pieces is probably roughly what you might be imagining from a Baroque-era, keyboard-led collection of related pieces The world-tempered clavier simply means in modern parlance the world-tuned piano Although it can mean harpsichord, clavichord and all the various key instruments were around at the time, the piano or piano forte being a new invention at that point and various of Bach’s later works were specifically designed to take advantage of the wider dynamic reach of the piano versus the popular incumbent, the harpsichord Anyway, I digress The first half is pleasant and varied and I think most modern listeners would find most of it at least pleasant and enjoyable Some you might absolutely love, bits of it you’ve almost certainly heard and may or may not like There’s a bit of something for everyone If you don’t like classical music, I’m sorry I’ve got nothing for you I’ll send you an email and I’ll send you some death metal recommendations but it’s a highly accomplished and extremely popular collection of musical pieces The second half, 20 years later, is to some degree similar in parts but for the most part comparatively speaking musically punishing The intervening years had seen Bach turn from a virtuoso musical artiste into something resembling a musical mathematician, wizard, Yoda type Jedi and he again revisited the 24 keys and this time he was going to do it properly and properly he did it and some of the, particularly the fugues in there, known anyway as a style of composition as frequently complex and unpredictable where individual voices and melody lines and tempos and even time signatures overlap back and forth and it’s most simple, for example, canons which is the same musical refrain overlapping itself perhaps slightly altered or reversed or inverted or something the classic example is Ro Ro Ya Boat another one is Freya Rajaka, ya know, ya campfire group songs fugues are considerably more complicated but a lot freer in their style and their rule set but when put in the hands of the more mature Bach became an absolute mind boggling, musical and tonal, smalker’s board just trying to listen to it and unpick parts of it and even follow along what’s going on is daunting, confusing and sometimes it’s better left just to wash over you rather than trying to follow any particular refrain or thread through the music as opposed to most music which is most songs you would encounter as a bit of a river it goes in one direction, it flows, there’s the odd bend in it maybe it splits and goes around a rock it might go faster and slower but really you know where you’re going and once you’ve been down it a few times you’re pretty comfortable with it even through the rapids Bach’s fugues on the other hand are more like being on an ocean in a storm interspersed with hitting the eye of the storm and everything being calm and then being tossed around again you don’t quite know which way’s up and which way’s down you can’t tell the sky from the sea you’re breathing water, you’re being lifted up and down and around and you’re completely lost maybe you snatch sight of land every now and again but mostly you’re dizzy and just like that ocean there is logic on order within the chaotic environment every wave created when it encounters another wave creates a third hybrid wave and when you overlap waves upon waves as well as the surging nature of the wind creates something that looks for all intents and purposes like chaos but is actually quite an ordered system anyone who’s listened to this podcast for any period will have noticed my obsession with chaos metaphorically, mathematically and literally and I’m really drawn to Bach’s more complex work which is particularly prevalent in his later works the second half of the world temple clavier the art of fugue, musical offering and no doubt lots and lots of bits in it I’ve yet to encounter and maybe don’t have enough life left to do so I don’t necessarily love much of it in fact most of it I don’t think my brain can make any sense of but I don’t view it in the same way that I would view a pop or a rock song or a nice little musical ditty Johnny Cash on his guitar or Olivia Rodrigo kind of a punk pop those things are moments there there’s something to be listened to whether it be the words or the ambiance of music or whether you’re watching a video and that’s what’s accompanying it you’re not always paying attention when these things come on but you’ve got that track on because it does sum it for you emotionally these are moments to be present for music to accompany the moment and to recognize the moment and a lot of popular or mainstream music is like that and that’s awesome I listen to that type of music all the time but that’s not what these pieces by Bach do and he’s not the only one doing it but he happens to be the one that is obsessing me at the moment it’s also not the bastion of classical I could name countless examples in rock and electronica and I could look at certain types of trance progressive trance, ambient trance vast swathes of pink floys early to middle work is like this there’s a ton of it in post rock and post metal and what is less about that moment, that track that emotion and more about an ambiance, a landscape and a state of mind I don’t want to use the word transcendent because it’s overused and abused and I can’t say, I do feel like I transcend but the experience of this music I let the music wander, I let my mind wander and more often than not it’s happening when I’m wandering around like I am at the moment and like those waves on the sea the different undulations of thought and music and movement and wind on my face grass brushing at my legs and the music my breath, the clouds and the differing light coming from the sun as it dips in and out of visibility if I’m listening to one of my favourite tracks I’m there for it, I’m there, I’m all over it and that’s awesome but much of the time I don’t want to be there for it I want to be wherever the tides take me and so having a clear idea of where the music’s going is for me distracting it takes me into that moment and that’s not what I want some of these musical works and this was particularly taken to extremes over the 20th century with artists like Schoenberg, Bartok, various others Philip Glass, John Cage and Lamont Young at its most extreme and also jazz, freeform jazz Miles Davis, John Coltrane have a similar signature you need to be not at one with the music unless of course you happen to be playing it but I don’t think those guys were either they were communing with everything they were communing with all their senses and that is what it helps me do it helps bring it all to life and I can get that to a degree by walking around without my headphones on but I love the experience of it I love that chaotic harmonisation and I think that when you’re making artworks and I think when I experience this type of state which let’s be clear is just a normal state it’s just a different flavour of consciousness nothing mystical going on here I feel like I understand abstract art, abstract painting a bit better I feel like I understand why Bach went from making attempting the same feat 20 years apart but the second time he was like this shit’s going to be bonkers I feel like as you let your mind explore its own crevices you let the world in and around and envelope you as opposed to trying to hide away from it you get a sense of that abstract I think the Buddhists are an extreme example particularly the Zen Buddhists with regards to altered states of presence and I think this is on that spectrum but I don’t think that’s necessary I think that every now and again experiencing something that jars with your expectation of what’s the thing supposed to be verse chorus verse chorus bridge quiet quiet loud quiet quiet loud and does almost everything unexpectedly in fact structures itself in such a way that the unexpected is a compositional element rather than just a state to leave the listener in I tend to believe that Bach created the voices in his fugues without fully knowing what bersarities they were going to present and what’s so brilliant about it is some of it in the middle of something that seems congruent and harmonised and almost normal and suddenly it’ll just get whipped up into an atonal vortex for a little while and it feels like none of those notes had any right to be there but somehow they did because you’ve heard them all before within the same song they just turned up in a place where it felt like they almost weren’t supposed to but next time you listen to that track it won’t feel like that perhaps not so much and that’s part of the beauty of this type of music and this type of experience, this type of art is to break you out of your expectations and norms and it’s what the greatest artists have always done we think of them as being radicals but all they do is offer a different perspective they offer something jarring amid a sea of relative predictability and that’s what makes them stand out do you like it? do you have to like it? hell no does it make you feel something? if the answer is yes it was worth the experience and it will have left a little mark or indelible chink in your armour of expectation and when you start to loosen that armour up a bit especially if you do so in environments where unexpected things can appear and that doesn’t have to be unfamiliar environments I walk through these woods several times a week I always see something new I think that the level of assault on my expectations that comes from having such challenging music in my ears also puts my mind in a framing where I can also see and notice things that I haven’t noticed before or maybe that wasn’t there before or to see something I’ve seen a thousand times in a different light and I think this is mindfulness I’m not describing anything new or radical here but I am trying to draw a parallel with the experience of great art and I think that every piece of art created by anyone has a flavour of this simply because everyone’s an individual but I think the best artists, whether they’re known or not are the ones that surprise you not necessarily like a sledgehammer to the face just chip away at your armour put things or state things phrase things or arrange things so they’re slightly offer where our expectations would have them beauty dies where there’s homogeneity I’m 99% certain that’s the thing that’s come up here before but it’s a fact if everything was equally beautiful that would make nothing beautiful and ugly things make beautiful things more beautiful everything has its purpose and everything is just a fact of raw, unassailable statistics if you can put something at one end of a scale then there must be something at the other end of the scale there must I think that’s the fact that too many very smart people fail to appreciate or deliberately ignore that’s for another conversation entirely I actually set out here to talk about not having to fill the urge to finish something not to put the pressure on yourself to always have to deliver because that’s the enemy of mental health and my point was going to be around Bach taking 20 years to complete what we now look at as the world-tempered clavier although I believe was never officially presented as such and it’s only really seen in retrospect as a monolithic collection but even then within the individual collections the books as they’re called he would draft and redraft over long periods changing little things, tweaking things here and I doubt he ever considered anything truly finished and that’s great, that’s exactly how it should be and so yeah I’ve made my point that was supposed to be the whole point and I think what I’ve done here is illustrated another related point which is well I’ve got a few different things going on here the other one is just because you set out to do one thing doesn’t mean to say that’s the thing that you should do it’s good to point yourself in a direction because otherwise how are you going to start it’s good to push off and go I’m going over there, I’m going to that island over there but just let the tide take you and you might not get to that island there’s a bunch of them out there hopefully you’ll find one of them and it’s probably going to be all the more interesting for it so I think lesson number two is don’t worry too much about sticking to your plan I just started talking about a piece of music and this is what came out I think it felt to me like what needed to be said whether it be the more important thing to say about that piece of music or a comment or a facet of my state of mind at this very moment and then we have this idea of things where they don’t belong and allowing reality to wash over you rather than trying too hard to focus on one thing and to be there for one thing just be in there in the Malay the chaotic bobbing of the ocean and then what comes out was whatever I just said and so to know feels like quite a neat little encapsulation of a whole bunch of interrelated points that I accidentally monologue together while walking through one of my favourite walks and maybe that’s exactly it maybe I always think of it as inwards things and thoughts happening within my head and it’s just as valid to be outwards that’s because I don’t have an audience as you can see the bees and the pigeons I’m talking to myself I walk past people every now and again probably think I’m nuts yeah just go wondering and talking to yourself maybe keep the talking internal especially if you’re walking down the street lots of people around you listen to Bach’s world temper clavier just let everything wash over you once in a while stay happy people and see you again soon Thanks for watching!