![]() ![]() Crafting a good bass line was the key, and in fact, the first step, in writing an effective piece of music. While the melody was central to harmonic thought in Classical times and later, the bass line was central in the Baroque era. For Bach, however, the distinction between melody, harmony, and bass line was blurred. By then, a composition typically consisted of a melody, a bass line, and harmony. In Bach’s time, the concept of "melody" was different from what it had become by the beginning of the Classical period.Bach’s compositional style, as I have come to understand them. Therefore, I will enumerate some of the consistent elements of J.S. Of course, terms such as "old fashioned" and "timeless" are highly subjective, and not much use in understanding the nature of Bach's music. His music has a timeless quality that makes it sound fresh and alive, almost three hundred years after it was written. ![]() Today, it hardly seems possible that anyone would describe it this way. What is it that makes Bach’s music what it is? How can it be distinguished from the music of his contemporaries, such as Scarlatti or Handel? His contemporaries would have been quick to tell you that Bach’s music was "old fashioned", harkening back to a time that dense polyphony was the rule rather than the exception. If I am being a little arrogant in thinking I can really mimic the incomparable music of Bach, then I believe a little arrogance is called for here, as long as it is tempered with honest realism. It would remove any great need to attempt a faithful reconstruction, and almost certainly guarantee a mediocre product. If I were to display false modesty and say, "Of course, there's no way my reconstruction can approach what Bach himself would have done", then this would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not difficult to do once the composer’s music gets "under your skin", which is an appropriate way to describe my relationship with Bach’s music after over twenty years of study. Finally, while Bach was attempting to forge his own individual style from the techniques he had learned, I am merely trying to copy an existing style. Unlike Bach, who studied music by painstakingly copying the scores of other composers, I may listen to his works in the comfort of my own home while following the score, and I may read about the conclusions that musicologists have reached after studying his music. Many volumes of literature have been written on the music of Bach, and practically every extant composition has been recorded for mass distribution. I merely need to borrow from Bach, and I need not study his music first hand to do so. Bach spent decades perfecting the infrastructure that was his mature style, borrowing techniques and structural concepts from other composers of many different traditions. If I am able to create something equal in quality to what Bach had achieved, and in the same style as Bach used, that does not make me as great a composer as Bach. ![]() While it may seem to some people an expression of extreme arrogance bordering on heresy to attempt to reconstruct the music of Bach, I disagree. Hopefully, it will make clear both my motivation and the techniques I used to approximate the composer’s style. This essay is an attempt to explain my thinking in trying to recreate the lost cantatas of J.S. Concepts of Bach's Composition Style Concepts of the Composition Style of J.S. ![]()
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