J.S. Bach, Man of the Ear: On the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, an attempt to grapple with how challenging it is to listen to his work.
Woven of independent and self-sufficient
musical lines that interact with split-second imitations and
sinuous counterpoint, his multiple-voiced works unsettle the mind
because, even at their simplest, there seems to be more
happening than can be comprehended through mere listening. His
fugues make us want to reach for the remote and stop time, so as
to untangle and hold up for scrutiny the passing show of musical
logic.What happens to Bach’s music between the notes on the page
and what we hear remains enigmatic. There have been periodic
attempts to define the larger, sociological resonance of his
music, attempts to answer the question, “How do we as a society
hear Bach?”…All of this lies to the side of the most troubling and most
rewarding aspect of Bach’s music: that its complexity still
terrifies us like no other body of composition. Bach remains the
intimidating composer par excellence. His contrapuntal
complexity has become synonymous with the very definition of
profundity in music. Composers seeking to demonstrate depth in
their work–from Beethoven to Liszt to Shostakovich–turn to the
fugue, a highly ordered work of multiple interacting lines of
counterpoint, as if it were the only form adequate to express the
most serious imagination.
Washington Post
