Johann Sebastian Bach (32 page)

T
ABLE
6.5. Autograph Manuscripts Outside the Cantata Repertoire

“M
USICAL
T
HINKING
”: T
HE
M
AKING OF A
C
OMPOSER

The choice Bach made at the turn of 1714 to delve further into composition and not limit himself to keyboard genres and virtuoso organ performance did not come like a bolt from the blue. The decision grew logically out of a deep-rooted drive to commit musical thoughts to paper, to think about and embark on their further elaboration, to refine the technical skills necessary for the theoretical underpinnings and compositional control of the musical substance at hand, and constantly to challenge his musical imagination.

The earliest, most thoughtful, and quite informative (if not unbiased) discussion of Bach's beginnings as a composer can be found in Forkel's 1802 biography, in which the pertinent section begins with a plain statement: “Bach's first attempts at composition were, like all first attempts, defective.”
³⁹
Like the Obituary, which emphasizes that Bach was largely self-taught as a composer, Forkel stresses that he started essentially “without a guide” to conduct him “from step to step” and, therefore, began as a “finger composer” who liked “to run or leap up and down the instrument, to take both hands as full as all the five fingers will allow, and to proceed in this wild manner till they by chance find a resting place.” Perhaps the most prominent surviving example of this course, which Bach “did not follow long,” is the organ Toccata in D minor, BWV 565, as refreshingly imaginative, varied, and ebullient as it is structurally undisciplined and unmastered; and we can understand only too well why the self-critical Bach did not use this coup de mainlater on for teaching purposes (which also explains its oddly peripheral transmission).
⁴⁰

Forkel's reference to the manner of “Clavier hussars (as Bach, in his riper years, used to call them)” appears to be based on reliable sources—reports by the two oldest Bach sons, who may have related their father's own critical account:

 

He soon began to feel that the eternal running and leaping led to nothing; that there must be order, connection, and proportion in the thoughts, and that to attain such object[ive]s, some kind of guide was necessary. Vivaldi's Concertos for the violin, which were then just published, served him for such a guide. He so often heard them praised as admirable compositions that he conceived the happy idea of arranging them all for his clavier. He studied the chain of ideas, their relation to each other, the variation of the modulations, and many other particulars.

 

Forkel's chronological frame is mistaken, for he puts Bach's Vivaldi transcriptions of the mid-Weimar years together with his studying, some ten years earlier, the music of Frescobaldi, Froberger, Kerll, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, and others. However, this conflated view should not detract from the notion that Bach's study of Vivaldi represents a critical moment, perhaps the culmination point, in a development of self-guided learning that began with the study of fugue and peaked in a thoroughly analytical approach to the modern Italian concerto style of Vivaldi, the Marcellos, and their contemporaries, resulting in the emergence of new structural designs.

According to the Obituary, Bach became a strong fugue writer at an early age “through his own applied reflection” on models by Buxtehude, Reinken, and others. And the evidence in both instrumental and vocal examples from well before the Weimar period overwhelmingly supports this view. Forkel's key insight into Bach, however, addresses a more fundamental aspect of musical composition: he writes that Vivaldi's works “taught him how to think musically.” Bach transcribed Italian concertos during the mid-Weimar years of 1713–14 (see Table 6.5), exactly when his experimental tendencies were leading him toward forming a genuinely personal style. The fact that Forkel links only Vivaldi's name to the concerto transcriptions suggests the latter's preeminent role for Bach. Further evidence lies in the relatively large number of Vivaldi transcriptions—nine, of which five are based on Vivaldi's concerto collection
L'Estro armonico
, Op. 3, published in 1711. It is likely, therefore, that Bach himself passed on to his students and family the impression that his experience with Vivaldi's compositions above all “taught him how to think musically.” Forkel elaborates on the idea of musical thinking by emphasizing that “order, coherence, and proportion”—or better, order/organization, coherence/connection/continuity, and proportion/relation/correlation (the original German terms
Ordnung, Zusammenhang
, and
Verhältnis
are not easily rendered by single words)—must be brought to bear on musical ideas. Bach, then, recognized in Vivaldi's concertos a concrete compositional system based on musical thinking in terms of order, coherence, and proportion—an illuminating though abstract historical definition of Vivaldi's art as exemplified in his concertos.

What do order, organization, connection, coherence, continuity, proportion, and relation mean in the process of musical composition? Curiously, Bach's definition of musical thinking (as transmitted through Forkel) makes no reference to form and genre as objects of learning. Indeed, concerto transcription is only a means to the goal of learning how to think musically. Even more surprising, the definition entirely bypasses the fundamentals of compositional technique: counterpoint, harmony, melody, meter and rhythm, thoroughbass, voice leading, instrumentation, and other elements. If Forkel accurately articulated Bach's thinking, then Bach conceived of compositional method primarily in abstract functional terms, as he also defined harmony—that is, as accumulated counterpoint.
⁴¹

This decidedly functional approach is novel both as a concept in the history of musical composition and in Bach's own compositional experience. His earlier study of fugue, concerto, sonata, suite, motet, aria, and other genres had moved along the traditional paths, which he successfully expanded. Vivaldi's concertos, however, confronted him with an entirely new set of problems and possibilities. This is not to say that to him Vivaldi was the first and only musician to develop a new compositional concept, but (beginning with his Op. 3) he was certainly the primary exponent as well as the intellectual and practical architect of a new method that influenced the course of eighteenth-century music.

Concerto composition provided an ideal vehicle for exploring and developing ways of “musical thinking,” and those ways quickly penetrated other instrumental and vocal genres. The concerto as a musical genre or form was a secondary consideration, and the same was true of counterpoint, thematic invention, and other technical aspects of composition, including even word-tone relationships in vocal works. What Bach dubbed musical thinking was, in fact, nothing less than the conscious application of generative and formative procedures—the meticulous rationalization of the creative act.

The inseparable functions of order, coherence, and proportion appear in extreme clarity at the beginning of the Largo of Vivaldi's Op. 3, No. 3 (transcribed in BWV 978) (Ex. 6.1). The movement consists of an essentially straightforward elaboration of a basic, even rudimentary musical idea: a plain D-minor triad. Bach certainly never claimed to have turned to Vivaldi for inspiration regarding the
ars inveniendi
, but he did so here for an example of how to apply a manner of musical thinking to the development of ideas of varying, even poor, substance. The principal components of this process are easily identified: (a) a triadic chord; (b) a linear melodic variant derived from (a); and (c) a coherent and harmonically mutating chordal sequence (Ex. 6.2).

The generative motivic substance (a) contains the potential for developing further motives—(b) and (c), both related and contrasting to (a)—and juxtaposing them. The ideas are hierarchically organized—(a) = tutti, (b) = solo—with an irreversible order. In the course of the movement, both the primary idea (a) and the secondary ideas (b) and (c) develop variants in order to secure continuity and change, yet throughout the movement—in a gradually unfolding scheme of order, coherence, and relation—each measure possesses an unmistakable identity. Moreover, the successive order of measures constitutes a chain of clearly structured correlations and metric periodization, with shifting proportions between chordal and figurative measures. Musical thinking in this movement means something very different from pursuing such conventional compositional techniques as, for example, harmonizing a melody or designing a fugal exposition by finding a proper imitative scheme for subject and answer. Vivaldi's novel method means defining the substance of a musical idea with the aim of elaborating on it, a process that observes the closely interrelated categories of order, connection, and proportion and thereby unifying a piece.

In principle, the design of the first (fast) movement of the same Vivaldi concerto closely resembles that of the Largo. The movement opens with a ritornello (a musical section that returns), each part of which contains motives that function as constituent members of the whole (Ex. 6.3a–d). The antecedent section (mm. 1–2), for example, presents a head motive that gives the entire piece its identity from the outset and makes the ritornello distinctly recognizable as the most crucial part of the movement's formal structure. The two opening measures establish, especially in Vivaldi's original version, a strong contrast: the first measure represents a melodic foreshadowing of the chordal sequence (tonic-dominant-tonic) that follows in the second measure (Ex. 6.3a). Bach's modified version cancels Vivaldi's sharp juxtaposition of the two measures (which, at the same time, foreshadows the application of the tutti-solo principle) and thereby loosens the prevailing asymmetric rhythmic pulse
. However, by changing the bass line in measure 2, Bach gains a new contrapuntal dimension, as a result of which the opening two measures are now linked by motivic imitation and by the continuity of pulse. Both of these features underscore the identity of this head motive and also reflect genuine “musical thinking.” Put another way: at the beginning, a germinal cell is formulated that offers potential for multifaceted elaboration; all subsequent elements occurring in the ritornello as well as in the episodes can be related to the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic contents of this head motive.
⁴²

The ritornello itself, moreover, establishes order by setting up a fixed organizational scheme with the proper sequence of musical ideas (Ex. 6.3a–d), their systematic connection, their correlation, and finally, their logical succession. It introduces a ranking of individual sections by their striking musical character and recognizability and by their classification of harmonic functions (closed, like T-D-T, or open, like T-D). The complete ritornello, lasting just twelve measures, also propels the principle of continuity/coherence through the mutual connection of its members and motives, the continuity of texture and declamation, the regulation of periodicity and sectional interplay, and the preservation of a multilayered context. As Forkel observed, Bach “studied the chain of the ideas, their relation to each other, the variety of the modulations, and many other particulars.” In short, whatever is covered under the proportion principle intimately relates to order and coherence as well. All three parameters are interdependent and interpenetrating.