Bach achieved a religious, mathematical, and musical ideal: he combined extreme complexity with impeccable stability, at once defining and surpassing Baroque ideals. From painting to music to architecture, the arts of the Baroque era took embellishment to its limit without surrendering...
[more]Bach achieved a religious, mathematical, and musical ideal: he combined extreme complexity with impeccable stability, at once defining and surpassing Baroque ideals. From painting to music to architecture, the arts of the Baroque era took embellishment to its limit without surrendering harmony or unity. Johann Sebastian Bach was the exemplar of this effort, and the man who exceeded its aim: he was the first to move beyond formal harmony to tonal dissonance.
Bach was not an innovator in the contemporary sense of the word; he didn't break from predecessors in order to create a new musical form. He took up contemporary forms and brought them to fruition. A master borrower, Bach did not merely mimic those composers he admired, he devoured them. Vivaldi, Monteverdi, Buxtehude, and Frescobaldi were all among his victims. He discovered within each of them something they were incapable of discovering themselves; he mined their most obscure elements and laid himself down there.
So rather than setting himself apart from his contemporaries, as artists of genius are often said to do, Bach set himself inside them. His novelty is a function of his passion for repetition, which in his case is not an act of imitation but of variation and modulation. Bach fleshed out musical forms to the point of overflowing.
In fact, repetition is the internal engine of Bach's compositions. Take, for example, his fugues. They begin with a single theme stated at the outset. The theme unfolds and grows increasingly complex as it moves through its variations. A single melody becomes multiple melodies, a web of echoing and answering. Melodic lines bifurcate, ramify, meet for a moment and diverge again; melodies rise to the level of harmony as harmonies descend to become melodies. In fact, many of Bach's fugues transcend the distinction between melody and harmony; they evolve as an organic whole, with each of their parts an attribute or affectation of this whole.
Bach's passion for unity and multiplicity was not only a musical passion; he organized his life with as much rigor and scrutiny as he devoted to his compositions, seeking spiritual unity and harmony in both. Bach was a deeply religious man; early in his career, he composed a cantata a week for the Lutheran Church. Although the later fugues and canons often seem to parody the simplicity of these early cantatas, they in fact express a much higher religious vision. They manifest Bach's incessant drive to push every form to its limit, and then beyond.
[show less]
