The very first blog post! I thought I'd start with a composer I adore, and a question which always niggles me as I develop an interpretation...
When we listen to a piece of Baroque music today, our ears are already laden with the sounds of over 300 years worth of the music which followed. While many artists strive towards authentic, historically informed performances, even if they were to strike gold and reproduce the exact sound Bach himself created, the ears of the modern audience are totally different and so the music would be understood differently.
This raises the question of what exactly is the music, or rather, where does it occur? Is it just the sound at the performer’s end, or is it the feelings aroused in the listener? I believe that it is a combination of the two – that music is an expression as well as being pleasing sounds. (Of course, there is some music which is entirely conceptual and absolutely not pleasing to listen to, and some music which is quite the opposite.)
So when we play Bach, manage to create the exact sound but fail to touch the audience in the way Bach touched his, have we really given an accurate representation of the music? It is just like translating poetry – a word-for-word translation would be no good. It would miss the rhythm, the rhyme if it’s there, and the unique shades and connotations of words in their original language. We could appreciate the rhythm and rhyme in the original language but would still entirely miss the meaning. The translator must use some artistic license – translating the words while trying to find a cultural equivalent, and trying to maintain some of the metrical features too.
Similarly, we must make a ‘translation’ of the music to create the same feelings in the audience as Bach would have created with his audiences. I’m not suggesting to go wild and perform this music on electric guitars with a drum track thumping behind (although there have been some brilliant transcriptions of Bach’s works, see the Swingle Singers “Bach’s Greatest Hits” album, or Webern’s Ricercare), but rather to enjoy the full expressive possibilities that the music offers.
Here is my most recent recording of Bach - his Prelude & Fugue in e-flat minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book I. I have taken a fairly indulgent approach in my interpretation of this piece, enjoying all the rhetorical gestures of the Prelude and using the full possibilities of my instrument, pedal and all. The Fugue is reminiscent of organum, early church music, with modal inflections and you can almost catch the smell of frankincense. It later culminates in a dramatic three part-stretto (when the theme is overlapped). I hope you enjoy it!
And a little disclaimer: this is NOT to suggest that there isn’t value in historically informed performances or the use of period instruments. Indeed they can open up entirely new understandings of the musical meaning – compare recordings of Bach’s St Matthew Passion using a full choir, and recordings with only 8 voices (such as Karl Richter’s vast and terrifying recording vs. Paul McCreesh’s extraordinary clarity), or explore the way different fingering technique on the harpsichord leads to different expressive possibilities.
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