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Paul Elie, for many years a senior editor with FSG, is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. His first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle award finalist in 2003. He lives in New York City.
Prelude
Three hundred years later, you can inspect his manuscripts under glass, see the Bible he marked up while composing the Passions and the Mass in B Minor, walk the aisles of the churches where he made music. Eisenach, Arnstadt, Weimar, Leipzig: Bach’s greatness is total and inviolable, and the holy sites associated with him are well maintained, the artifacts set out as if to counter the fact that it is hard to know what he was really like.
“Look for a glass harmonica invented by Ben Franklin, a flute played by Frederick the Great, and Johann Sebastian Bach’s cembalo. The mighty Wurlitzer is cranked up at noon on Saturdays.” So says Lonely Planet’s Germany, so I go straight from the train station to the Musikinstrumenten- Museum-Berlin, in the Kulturforum, near the space-age hall where the Berlin Philharmonic plays. The place is more showroom than museum. The floor is comprehensively carpeted. Men in dark suits stand at attention doing nothing with great intensity. There are instruments as far as the eye can see—pianos, electric organs, banjos small and large, a brass family, some bassoons racked like weapons, a tin drum.
I doubt there is another place on earth where so many assembled musical instruments are so quiet.
The harpsichords are upstairs. Most are obviously too recent to have been Bach’s. But here is one tagged “Cembalo, Gottfried Silbermann, um 1740”—a cherrywood harpsichord by the instrument maker who worked with Bach to renovate pipe organs all over Saxony. And over there, against a wall in a proverbial corner, is the thing itself—the Bach cembalo.
I consider it the way an estate assessor would. It is a third smaller than a baby grand piano, low-slung, like a European compact car. The body is shellacked brown wood; there are knots in the curved sides, and the legs are stout and tapered, plain rather than carved. The lid is propped open, and if you look closely you can see that the instrument has no strings on it.
There are two manuals, or keyboards, one atop the other, each with five sets of twelve keys plus one more. Each is a negative of the piano keyboard: the big keys are black, the small ones white. There are scalloped pieces of wood at the two ends, like bookends made in shop class. Above the manuals, where Steinway or Yamaha usually goes, dark woods are inlaid in squares and diamonds, setting off an ivory inlay, a compass or cross.
I move in and marvel. The white keys are yellow. The black keys are worn down to a color akin to the skin of an eggplant. It is amazing to think that they were worn down by Bach himself—that his fingers ranged across those keys over and over, playing the minuets children learn, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the fifth Brandenburg concerto with its exuberant cadenza, the Goldberg Variations.
Amazing: and yet something is lacking. I don’t know the reason, but this cembalo actually owned and played by Bach himself seems inadequate to him—disconnected from him. There is a gap between the instrument and the music he made, and not just because, unstrung, it is unplayable.
It takes a stranger calling out spontaneously from another corner to make me realize why. “Hey, look—they have the synthesizer Pink Floyd used on Wish You Were Here . . .” I follow his voice, and there it is: the EMS VCS3 Mark. II (London, 1972), a keyboard cased in walnut veneer and connected to a console with rows of brushed aluminum knobs.
This is the real thing: the actual instrument played on an album I have heard a hundred times.
The Bach cembalo is something else. Yes, Bach owned it, but its sound is conjectural. He played it, but we don’t know what it sounded like when he played it, and we don’t know him through its sound the way we know Pink Floyd through the sound of the gurgling synthesizer—this very one—on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” Bach is thought to have been the greatest keyboardist who ever lived, but none of us has ever heard him play. Only through others—other musicians, on other instruments, in other times and places, by other means—can we know the music he made.
That’s all right: and, if you ask me, it is true to the music of Bach. There’s a portrait of him on the wall, but he is not here. He is in my pocket.
This is a book about the music of Bach and the ways it has been reinvented in our time.
Sixty years ago Leonard Bernstein said that you had to go to certain churches or special little concerts if you wanted to hear Bach; and although he was stretching the point, he did have a point. Already things were changing, though. Al- ready classical musicians were approaching the music of Bach with thrilling creativity and passion. At the same time, the music was making its way in society through film, television, and pop music. By the time Glenn Gould re-recorded the Goldberg Variations in 1981, his 1955 recording was a cultural touchstone, like Lolita or Annie Hall; and the Goldberg Variations themselves became touchstones, heard in the films The Silence of the Lambs and The English Patient, in an episode of The Sopranos, and in plenty of other places. On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks the music of Bach was at the World Trade Center site, played by Yo-Yo Ma; Yo-Yo’s friend Steve Jobs introduced the iPad to members of the press by playing Bach on iTunes. A couple of years later Bach was declared the greatest composer ever in a reader-participation exercise conducted by The New York Times.
Some would say that the music of Bach is in revival; and to say that is to enter into a conversation about Bach that has gone on for two hundred years.
From Martin Luther onward, religious revival has been a distinctive Protestant practice, rooted in the conviction that something vital is passing out of this world and can be saved only through ardent personal devotion and a return to the original sources of inspiration. Bach is the greatest of Protestant artists: born in Eisenach, where Luther was schooled, a true believer himself, a public “servant of God” as organist and music director at Lutheran churches, the composer of sacred works beyond numbering.
For many years it was an article of faith that his music had been saved by revival. In a commanding book about Bach, published in 1908, Albert Schweitzer told the story of a Bach revival in the nineteenth century as the background to his own argument that only a further revival of Bach’s music and the human values associated with it could save European civilization as it hurtled toward world war.
Over time, a rival view formed around the evidence that Bach’s music has thrived all along—that it has been central to musical life in the West ever since he wrote it, taking different forms in different times and places.
Revival has a key role to play in the telling of Bach’s story; but I think it is more precise and illuminating to say that the music of Bach has been reinvented in our time: by performers, and scholars, and scholar-performers, who have produced fresh truths about the music and how it was created. At the same time, the music has been reinvented through astonishing developments in recording technology, which have enabled musicians to approach the music in the inventive spirit of Bach himself.
Bach was technologically the most advanced musician of his era—a technician of the sacred.
He served as organist, keyboardist, cantor, and music director, and his biographer Christoph Wolff sees these roles as stages in his life’s way as a “learned musician”—the most learned of the age. He was especially learned about the pipe organ, the most complex mechanical apparatus of his time: he built, repaired, and renovated pipe organs, and put dozens of them to the test throughout Saxony and Thuringia.
But there are good reasons to see him, rather, as an inventor—an artist whose career was rooted in the Baroque conception of inventio, drawn from classical rhetoric. He invented a musical instrument, the Lautenwerck or lute-harpsichord, and composed the two-part masterwork the Well-Tempered Clavier in part as an investigation of the nature of tuning, or temperament. He wrote the Two- and Three-part Inventions—short, tight, sparkling keyboard pieces, fifteen to a set, each of which reaches a frontier of sublimity, then vanishes into thin air.
Together the two sets of Inventions take less than an hour to play. But the notion of music as invention applies to Bach’s vast body of music: as one of those scholar-performers, Laurence Dreyfus, argued in a book a few years ago, invention is the essential pattern of Bach’s creative life. For Bach an invention was an idea—a melody, a pattern, a contrapuntal motif—worth developing. Invention was also a term for the act of discovery, and for the mechanism—the application of rules, the habits of art—that made discovery come about. An invention was “a strong foretaste of composition,” a “workable idea” developed just to the point where it could be most fruitful and suggestive and delightful to others.
The idea of invention is itself worth developing. It enables us to push past the preoccupations with fugue and counterpoint, theme and variations, sacred and secular, that characterize the writing about Bach’s music. It allows us to see Bach not only as a technological adept but as an inventor in his own right, a Leonardo of sound.
It also enables us to look to Bach to understand our own era and our experience of music.
The change in Bach’s reputation has coincided with a profound change in the way we hear music, due to the spread of recording technology. In the years after the Great Depression, as record players dropped in price and radio broadcasts multiplied, it suddenly was as common to hear music via a piece of furniture as from a musician standing nearby; it became common to “play” music by twiddling a dial or flicking a switch. For the next half century, the story of new developments in music generally involved the corresponding story of a breakthrough in technology—the 78, the LP, stereo; the car radio, the hi-fi, headphones; the cassette, the compact disc, the iPod and smartphone—and a corresponding change in the role music plays in people’s lives. The age from the 1930s to the present can be called the age of recordings, and our experience of recordings—audio, video, film—defines our age and sets us apart from our ancestors as distinctly as democratic capitalism, indoor plumbing, or air travel. In the age of recordings, the past isn’t wholly past and the present isn’t wholly present, and our suspension in time, our intimacy with the most sublime expressions of people distant and dead, is a central fact of our experience. This is at once a benefit and a quandary, and in it, I would venture, are the makings of a spirituality of technology.
More than any other classical composer, Bach anticipated this state of things. Along with invention, he made profound use of transcription—the “writing across” of music from one context to another: a cello suite for lute, for example. And he used parody—the recasting of cantatas written for civic occasions as sacred works, so that something like the same chorus was used for the investiture of a local potentate and in the Christmas Oratorio. All through his working life Bach was continually adapting his music for different formats and contexts, and the music’s openness to transcription is one reason for its staying power.
The story of Bach’s music in the age of recordings is in many ways the story of its encounter with new formats and contexts. Bach’s music has been interpreted to suit new inventions from the 78-rpm record and the LP to head- phones and the Walkman to the compact disc and the digital file. And these inventions, in turn, have situated the music in new contexts, taking it into the parlor and out on the highway, into the isolation chamber of the recording studio and to outer space—where the Voyager spacecraft carried a recording of the first prelude from book one of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
This book, then, is a story of invention—a series of variations about inventions in different media, if you like. The musicians who figure into the story, all of them steeped in the music of Bach, deliberately or intuitively worked out patterns of invention through their encounter with the music of Bach by way of new technology.
Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould, and Yo-Yo Ma; Leopold Stokowski, Rosalyn Tureck, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Dinu Lipatti; Wendy Carlos, Joshua Rifkin, Masaaki Suzuki, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson: all in their different ways made music in the aural space that one of them, in a celebrated set of sleeve notes, called “the realm of technical transcendence.” They were not technicians only. No, they were artists who were inventive in the way of Bach: leaving the invention itself intact, they developed it through tech- nology, completing it by taking it to unexpected places. From invention they fashioned a particular kind of transcendence, at once faithful to Bach and distinctly contemporary.
Not revival or invention, then, but revival through invention, which is revival’s counterpoint or flip side: this is how old art forms are made new through the encounter with technology.
So familiar is the language of revival that we can overlook how fully it pervades the discussion of the arts—classical music, opera, painting and sculpture, dance, literature, drama. The good thing is going out of the world, threatened by questionable forms of progress, and stands in need of revival. This is the story our society has told itself about the arts for a century or more—really, ever since the arts were firmly established in this country—and the arts themselves thrive on the notion that they are threatened with extinction.
There is a certain kind of listener for whom classical music is a lost paradise. Like Joseph Cornell consecrating shadow boxes to long-dead ballerinas, this listener measures greatness in terms of remoteness from the present. It makes sense, in a way. All recorded music represents a past event; music characteristically takes us out of ordinary time—and so all the better if the music was made in a time other than ours, and if the aural space created in the music overlaps with the thin air of history. Obviously, the effect is compounded by recordings—which, as often as not, are what elicited this listener’s devotion to the music in the first place. Cornell never saw his muses dance, and so he imagined them spectacularly with his boxes. But the devotee of, say, the string trio of the interwar years called the Holy Trinity knows its music intimately through recordings, knows it better than the people who heard the musicians in performance—knows it through recordings made with equipment that was considered tradition-killing at the time.
The drumbeat of revival in classical music—often set up in opposition to the shriekback of a popular culture enchanted with technology—obscures the fact that, for most of a century now, technology has been the means of classical music’s survival.
So this is a story of the revival of a traditional art through the technology that was supposed to be its undoing. A new electronic medium, invented half a century ago and in common use for a couple of decades, is suddenly ubiquitous—the usual and natural way of doing things. The presence of the new way does not mean that the old way will disappear in the near future. But the new way will have profound effects on the nature of the art and its place in our society. Past is prologue here. In literature, for example, the change now taking place is from an experience rooted in books printed and bound on folded paper to one rooted in texts shown on screens. What forms will literature take? The story of the reinvention of Bach in the age of recordings is as good a guide as any. In classical music, the sudden ubiquity of recordings—on phonographs and the radio—didn’t stop people from playing music “live.” They kept on making music on stringed instruments, playing and singing it in their homes and churches, performing it for audiences, teaching it to their children. It is possible to argue (and many have) that the spread of recorded music dealt a blow to amateur music-making and to music in public life—and that it banished classical music to the margins. But it is impossible to deny the extraordinary quality of the music-making in those years—the sixty years between the time when Pablo Casals recorded Bach’s cello suites in London and Paris and the introduction of the iPhone in California. That was a golden age, and we know that it was because we can hear the music for ourselves.
The reinvention of Bach in the age of recordings makes this clear. Again and again in the age of recordings the music of Bach has been used as a whetstone for new technology, a test of what a new medium can do.
And yet, for all that, the experience of Bach is still strikingly immediate and uncomplicated. Via wax cylinder, 78, sound track, LP, stereo box set, CD, or compressed digital file, Bach comes through. Bach is not simply the sum of what we make of him, a shape-shifter congenial to a postmodern age. The more various our encounters with Bach, the more objective his genius is. The many recent takes on Bach, rather than competing or canceling one another out, have deepened our sense of him in such a way as to make him seem more human and more complicated than he seemed in past ages.
In a sense, the power of the music to cut through the white noise of society is the key to its appeal. Bach is the great exception, a site of purity in our sullied lives.
In another sense, though, the music of Bach is a leading edge, an opening to an understanding of technology as a source of awe and wonder. The music of Bach, it seems to me, is the most persuasive rendering of transcendence there is; and its irreducible otherworldliness, its impress of eternity even in a ring-tone or mix tape, suggests that these qualities have not, in fact, been mediated out of existence, but are there for us to encounter in our lives if we are open to them.
Our lives are half-lives, our experience mediated, and so diminished, by technology. So we are told by our age’s best and brightest; and the literature of the varieties of media experience has all the traits of the literature of religious experience, an account of the adept’s valiant struggle with our fallen state—of the struggle to stay afloat in the sea of artifice, the polluted data-stream.
To this conviction, the recorded music of Bach is contrary testimony. It defies the argument that experience mediated by technology is a diminished thing.
That is my own experience, at any rate. Though it has come, in my case, almost completely through recordings, this experience of Bach is as rich an encounter as one could hope for in a lifetime. It is as direct, as real, as the experience of a young woman learning to play the piano in a mining town in the Rockies, or a dangling man going about the streets of the city with a song in his heart. It is the thing itself—and often the experience feels more real than the rest of life, not less so.
And what is the experience? It is an experience that the movement of the music into new formats calls forth and makes obvious. It is of music and art as life’s counterpoint—a presence at the center of our lives, at once personal and objective, that enables us to make sense of the world and our place in it, enriching our lives and helping us to understand them.
With that experience in mind, I have sought to tell Bach’s story, and the story of his music in the age of recordings, through a sequence of inventions—ideas developed to the point where they offer a foretaste of the music. The music itself, after all, can be encountered through recordings—encountered in ways I have sought to dramatize in the pages that follow
Copyright © 2012 by Paul Elie
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