The Bach controversy

So a friend and I got into a heated debate over whether pedal should be used in Baroque music.

For those of you unacquainted with it, the controversy is centered on the fact that the keyboards in Bach's time (harpsichords and clavichords, they were called) lacked pedals. Thus, for the classical music purists, Bach's music should not be tainted by something that did not exist in his time.

I agree with this. But that goes not to say that I am a purist myself.

My friend argues on the novel fact that Bach has been dead for several centuries. There is no use in musing over whether he would like what we did with his music, since, in her words, "he may or may not hear it, and he can't complain squat about it anyway even if he wanted to."

Well, she has a valid point there.

But there are also practical concerns for this. You see, the damper pedal removes the all dampers from all the strings, so the sound does not stop, even when a pianist removes the pressure on a key. So you can play an entire sequence of notes while holding the pedal down, and the notes will all fall in a blur, without separation. You could even close the lid, and the sound would continue to resonate. The problem with this is that in four-part counterpoint, four melodies sing at the same time, and small, detailed articulations help distinguish one voice from the other. With pedal, these articulations are lost.

And, I argue, that pedal can easily over-romanticize a work to the point that Bach sounds like Chopin or Liszt. Not good. But I also acknowledge that it can help reveal the hidden emotionalism and passion lurking deep within every piece of Baroque music. Very good.

But, again, I leave it to you. Here are two performances of the same piece, the first with pedal, on a modern piano, the other without, on a harpsichord. It is, by the way, the Aria from Bach's Goldberg Variations.

A fugue

In music, a fugue is constituted of two or more voices repeating a motif, or central theme. After a brief introduction by one, the other voices overlap and interweave, conversing with each other over the motif and accentuating all its eccentricities. Then, the music wanders from the motif and undergoes modulations, or "episodes." The hard structure melts, and what was originally a cut-and-dried theme is now a fluid mixture of sound, comparable to several conversations at once. The music becomes less and less distinct as the voices cascade over each other in counterpoint, swelling and falling to the mood with a life of its own. Then, after a number of episodes, there is a climax, a brief coda, and then the end.

This is the technical definition. Spiritually speaking, I believe it can be deeper than that.

Life, or, more specifically, history, is like a fugue - there is no single story independent from the others. One tale overlaps and influences the other; every action has a cause and effect, like a melodic pull-and-push factor that influences the present, future, and how we perceive the past. For example, we can't just study the American Civil War - we study the tensions between the North and the South, the white and the black, the slave and the free. Within the big picture there are little details, and within the little details, there are small emotions and drives within the individual. Sometimes we think independently; other times, we move as a body. And above it all, there are always recurrent themes, a motif, repeating without end, chasing itself in evermore complex patterns. But every so often, the motif wanders, fades, sometimes forgotten in our memory as we get caught up in the episodes. Then, when we least expect it, on the sudden, the motif returns, sometimes like an explosion, other times like gentle voice of a familiar friend chiming in from an unfamiliar crowd.

But that's just what I think. How about you?