...What is it about visiting Bach’s imaginary world that is so soothing? I recognize that if I were to actually visit eighteenth-century Thuringia, I would hate it. In his book Bach Against Modernity, Michael Marissen argues that Bach had very little in common philosophically with most of his present-day admirers. (If you can’t or don’t want to read the whole book, Valerie Stivers hits the main points in this review.) Bach was a pre-modern person whose Lutheranism was extreme by current standards. He was aware of Enlightenment-style thinking that elevated reason, and he was emphatically not on board with it. As Marissen puts it, “a great many music lovers do not, strictly speaking, value Bach for the things he may, strictly speaking, be about.” In order for me to enjoy his music, I have to downplay or ignore major components of Bach’s worldview.
Valerie Stivers says that when we listen to Bach without understanding his stern religious message, we miss the point.
Knowing what to look for, I can sometimes hear the relentlessness of the divine order in the music’s superstructure, and feel the tension between its power and the futile activities of the fallen humanity whose cares the composer illuminates. To know that the music takes a negative view of human activity explains the strains of bitter mockery one sometimes hears. Elsewhere, the essential futility of our endeavors deepens the music’s tragedy and enhances its compassion. To grasp the emotional subtleties without the religious framework seems more difficult at the very least. And to be unaware of the intricacy of the theology, and the impressiveness of its musical expression, also seems like a loss.
Aspects of the worldview revealed in Bach’s music are threatening to our way of life and worldview, and would be unpopular if audiences understood them, and they aren’t, in every circumstance, for everyone. An argument for continuing to listen to him that grounds his greatness in the particulars of his historical and cultural milieu would be more convincing, because it would open up genuine if difficult dialogue with alien values.
By this logic, Bach is your stern and merciless Lutheran dad, giving you big stacks of difficult music to practice so you don’t go to hell. When I play through something like the prelude from the G Minor Lute Suite, I feel a serenity that seems like the thing religious people feel when they pray. But there’s also a penitent aspect to it. I’ve been indulging myself in all that sinful pop music, and now it’s time for something rigorous. Bach looks at me disapprovingly and says, okay, time to systematically work your way through every possible permutation of this musical idea. I don’t worry that I will literally go to hell. But I can feel the residual cultural guilt, along with the residual glow of approval when I work through Bach successfully.
I find this interesting because I'm, full disclosure, a Christian and not just a Christian but an actual Calvinist who likes to read Puritans like Richard Sibbes and looks forward to reading Richard Muller's Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. I've been on a bit of an off-line marathon of reading through the Swiss Reformed theologian and pastor Emil Brunner on the one hand and the Anglican political historian John Neville Figgis on the other (contrary to what some guys in Moscow, Idaho would tell the world an evangelical Anglo-Catholic could and did advise fellow Christians to reconcile themselves to a secular pluralist state back in 1911 by way of Churches in the Modern State--I recently finished David Nicholls book on Figgis and other early 20th century British pluralists). In other words, colloquially it's generally understood that Calvinists and Puritans are even more stringently fastidious than earthy Lutherans about entertainments.
And yet I blitzed through Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha this summer and had a blast. Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart is a pretty worth wrap-up for anyone who knows what "Go Team Venture" means, in my opinion. And if you get what this reference means ...
"Just so you all know, I'm not running for my life, I just realized I forgot to get in my cardio routine today, and I'm doing it now while I'm thinking about it."
... you have to have seen a fair amount of the Black Dynamite cartoon.
Barry Webb, in his fantastic commentary on The Book of Judges, pointed out that the book is disturbing at multiple levels because of stuff like the Levite and his concubine, for instance, and because the demise of Eglon is straight up toilet humor. There are tons of things in biblical literature contemporary readers can and will find troubling and offensive ... but then I just name-checked enough animated films and shows that would be inconceivable to 18th century Lutherans I don't doubt someone like J. S. Bach would find it impossible to be a fan of the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Yet in the 21st century we are, I think, saturated with film.
One of the threads in Rethinking Bach I've appreciated is highlighting that Bach had a musically humorous side to him, discussed by David Yearsley in his entry in the book. Yearsley pointed out that J. S. Bach's son Emmanuel felt obliged to point out his father's lively and comic music in protest of the stern Lutheran image that was getting propagated in the wake of his father's death. I am starting into Bach Against Modernity and I expect I shall enjoy it but there's something that probably needs saying, which is that Lutherans inveighing against lottery reason hardly means Lutherans were humorless or that they couldn't revel in earthy humor. It probably doesn't need much rehearsal for people who have read Jeffrey Burton Russell's books on the devil in Western thought to recall how scatalogical Martin Luther's rhetoric could get. The way in which academics now imagine Lutherans to have been what academics imagined Puritans were a century ago is a curious moment for me, and I mention that to note that Percy Scholes wrote an entire book debunking what he regarded as Anglo-American historical malpractice against Puritans on the topic of music.
But now I get to David Yearsley's fun book Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint, particularly pages 95-110. If you take the time to read it you'll learn about how even among otherwise orthodox Lutherans strict counterpoint was viewed as a kind of musical alchemy that was thought, potentially, to unlock the secrets of the cosmos. The odds that Bach was the kind of Lutheran who would subscribe to such a view is a bit debatable. Yearsley proposed that Bach as anti-Enlightenment polemicist took aim at ideas promoted by one Johann Adolph Scheibe, who ripped into J. S. Bach for writing tortured music rather than clean, elegant, dignified fare. Advocates of nascent Enlightenment thought, Yearsley shared, complained that Bach's counterpoint was too learned and not conversant enough with the enlightenment of the day. There were complaints that Bach would apply strict contrapuntal development to downright inane or hackneyed material rather than please the senses and the mind. Yearsley proposed that Clavier Ubung III can be thought of as a grand-scale musical riposte to the Enlightenment advocates of Bach's time who were claiming the old man needed to get with the program. Bach lived in an age where galant style was becoming popular and by the aesthetics of the new galant ethos his music was over-wrought and over-thought. Yearsley suggests that it is in light of such public polemics in which Bach's music was subjected to vigorous (if not always rigorous) criticism that Clavier Ubung III can be understood as a kind of musical, ahem, unidigital salute.
Duetto No. 2 in F major starts as simple and direct as can be and hews to all the ideals of simplicity and directness that the nascant galant style could ask for.
But that's just up to 41 seconds into this particular performance. Not a second later Bach introduces absurdly tortured chromatic writing on the same core materials that opened the Duetto. Yearsley pointed out that the start of the duetto has everything Johann Adolph Scheibe could have asked for but the A material in the duetto gets subjected to in-your-face chromaticism in the B section, which is a lot larger than the A section. Bach, Yearsley proposed, did an epic rug-pull on Scheibe's ideal of musical beauty that is simple, elegant, direct and unforced.
John Neville Figgis once quipped that the flesh and blood people who make history are never as simple and flat as historians want them to be. Yearsley has made an interesting proposal that Bach's Clavier Ubung III as a whole but the Duettos particularly, can be heard and read as rebuttals to the bottles of ink being spilled by polemicists like Mattheson and Scheibe who claimed Bach was behind the times and needed to drop all that stupid puzzle music and write music appealing to the heart. The learned church musician needed to write stuff that the new bourgeois audiences and amateurs who were buying music wanted to play to entertain guests, not do these weird musical stunts where a tortured chromatic subject is set in canon against its own retrograde stuff. That Bach's political sympathies were autocratic and his religious views would lean toward authoritarian is not a big surprise.
I'm starting into John Neville Figgis' The Divine Right of Kings and he opened early with an observation that the joke of the concept is that it wasn't developed in the medieval period at all but a relatively new invention of the sixteenth century. He has a dry observation early in the book about how early 20th century thinkers laughed about how stupid the idea of the full sovereignty of a monarch is but any theory of political sovereignty will seem idiotic to those who don't subscribe to that theory's central tenets. What a historian needs to ask about the invention of the divine right of kings in the sixteenth century is what real-world political problem was the theory attempting to address, and what alternatives were at hand? Figgis proposed that the concept of the divine right of kings modified earlier notions of the unitary sovereignty of the state developed in Roman ideas of the state on the one hand, and papal supremacy on the other, shifting the consolidated/autocratic claims of papal supremacy away from the pope to, you probably guessed it, the king. Figgis pointed out that the divine right of kings and the sovereignty of the king/prince was invented in the sixteenth century by Protestant polemicists who wanted their kings to not be beholden to popes.
Not everyone took that route--the Swiss, for instance, leaned toward a city-state and covenantal concepts of distributed government (I was reading a sermon Emil Brunner gave about an anniversary of Zurich being included in the Swiss confederation earlier this year, and he pointed out that it was a credit to the Zwinglian/Bullinger strand of Protestantism that they didn't go all in for the divine right of kings when people were doing that in England, France and Germany). I've been mulling over an idea in the last few years about how art-religion of the overtly Germanophile and Anglophile varieties evolved as it did whereas there doesn't seem to be something comparable in the Swiss traditions. Maybe when Zwingli and Bullinger banned music altogether from churches in their rejection of the entire patronage system of indulgences used to bankroll mensural polyphony there were secondary effects of creating, as Charles Garside Jr suggested in Zwingli and the Arts, a realm of secular music that didn't have to serve the throne or the altar.
The Anglican theologian Jeremy Begbie has proposed over a couple of decades of writing that as unpopular as the Swiss Reformed tradition featuring Calvin, Zwingli and Bullinger has tended to be (with high flyer Anglicans particularly, and I can't help but mention the late Roger Scruton as an example), we shouldn't ignore this alternate strand of Christian thinking about music and theology precisely because the highbrow Anglican and Germanophile art-religious impulses in Western music education have been so strong we need to remember alternative schools of thought. He hasn't made that case overtly but it's something I'm extrapolating from his work. I have to get it back from the music director of my church but William T Dargan has made an interesting, if admittedly speculative case, that the lining out tradition in black American churches emerged in the low church and Calvinist traditions of Anglicanism that spread out into the American colonies. Metrical psalmody (so loathed by Scruton) and the lining out tradition were low church customs that found a home in the nascent African Methodist Episcopal and primitive Baptist traditions. It's too bad I don't have Dargan's book on me because I've meant to blog about it for years. Given the way life has been in the real world I'll have to keep that on the back burner but Lining Out the Word is well worth grabbing! If you can find it in a university library it's worth reading just for the amazing discography. That spate of blog posts I did linking to tracks from Wade in the Water Volume 2 is because I found out about the Smithsonian series via Dargan's book.
For long-time readers of the blog my idea has probably snuck up implicitly but I'll make it more direct--comparing notes across histories of music, liturgical practice and Christian traditions may give us opportunities to see how and why some ideas we may disagree with evolved as they did. I think it's telling that much African American popular styles developed in what Dale Cockrell described as lowbrow musical theater contexts on the one hand and in the realm that Anthony Heilbut described as black Pentecostalism. Because so many music scholars default to highbrow and their art-religions default to "high flyer" rather than "storefront" (except in pop music where the situation is utterly reversed) I think it's helpful and beneficial when musicians and scholars compare notes across the often scholastically preserved and promoted divides. Thus, I've been having fun blogging in response to Ethan Hein's blog posts. What we have in common is an interest in questioning a few of the received wisdoms of music. We're also both guitarists and Taruskin used to say the guitar was not really in the musical mainstream of what's conventionally called classical music. Yeah? Well, I'm reminded of Matanya Ophee telling fellow guitarists we shouldn't have any inferiority complex about what we can bring to conversations about music. So there. :)
Anyway, all that said, Yearsley's proposal is that Bach's music was heard as more humorous than we've allowed ourselves, via musicology, to hear it as being in its own time and place. Bach was an anti-modernist as we'd understand modernity, yes, but now that Bach's music has been canonized all these centuries it may take generations of scholarship to recover the way that the canonized composer was seen as unhip, uncool, out of touch with the nascent Enlightenment ideas of his era and was scolded for subjecting alternately trivial and tortured musical ideas to too-much-technique.
I've been a bit sparser in blogging this year but I get inspired now and then. The Yearsley book is not cheap but if you want to read a fascinating account of the debates about counterpoint in Bach's lifetime and how Bach responded to it musically (basically never by written statements), Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint is a must-read.
