Reading Bach's Ideas, Part II
Published: 2000 Author: Jonathan Leathwood
II
Reading Bach’s Rests
i Rhythmic levels: Bach & Chopin
Such punctuation of the bass line as we find in the lute works is nothing unusual for Bach. It is consistent with the notation throughout his instrumental music. The general principle is easily stated: given an initially static bass (for instance a tonic pedal), and when more than one voice is moving above the bass, Bach will likely allow himself fully sustained note values (without rests). Otherwise more articulated bass notes are the norm. A comparison of the praeludium with the allemande, in the First Partita for keyboard BWV 825, illustrates the distinction (examples 2a and 2b):
Example 2a
BWV 825, Praeludium
Example 2b
BWV 825, Allemande
These considerations show us something characteristic about Bach’s attitude towards rhythm and pulse. For him—once described by an eye-witness, Gesner, as ‘full of rhythm in every part of his body’[9]—metre depends on the sounding together of several distinct layers of pulsation (for instance, crotchets, quavers and semiquavers). Hence if a single upper voice is flowing in one note value, he will prefer to articulate the bass with rests so that it clarifies a layer of pulse which is moving perhaps twice as slowly. So rhythmicised, the bass becomes a kind of audible ‘conductor’ to the treble, and both together make a sounding metrical framework.[10]
To clarify this point, let us compare the allemande just cited with the opening of Chopin’s Prelude in G major, op. 28 no. 3 (example 3). In both pieces there are two overt levels of rhythm. But in Chopin’s texture it is the semiquaver and the minim which are represented—two layers are missing in between (the crotchet and the quaver).[11] This omission, naturally, serves the purpose of a ‘poetic’ blurring of the rhythm in the left hand, whose irregular figuration already hints at the melody to come. In the Bach allemande, on the other hand, the rests link the level of the semiquaver in the upper voice with that of the crotchet in the bass. The two together are enough to clarify the intermediate level—the quaver (this level is also implicit in the figuration).
Example 3
Chopin, Prelude in G major, op. 28 no. 3
An awareness of these superimposed rhythmic levels offers other benefits to the interpreter. For it proves to be of great value when one wishes to avoid the interrupting effect of metrical accents in the moving part (at least as long as the rests are strictly measured). Example 4 cites three out of many cases in the lute works, where the player might be tempted to accent the upper voice at the place marked with a non-accent (
). The stopping of the bass notes notated at these places, by contrast, provides a quite different means of marking the metre, making the accents unnecessary.
Example 4a
BWV 997, Prelude
Example 4b
BWV 995, Courante
Example 4c
BWV 1006a, Praeludium
ii Cadences: Suite BWV 995
In Bach’s music—not only in Bach’s music!—a rest is an action: to silence a note is as pointed a gesture as to sound it. For some illustrations of this, I turn to the Lute Suite BWV 995—assuming here and there that readers will have their own scores to refer to—beginning with its allemande. Certainly this is a more challenging texture to realise than the examples just cited: observe the rests with the right hand (play the rests, we say) and it becomes hard to sustain the cantilena above (example 5):
Example 5
BWV 995, Allemande, mm. 5–9
What happens if we try? Whatever does happen, it makes its point as we arrive at the cadence, when we encounter a startling example of Bach’s feeling for texture—when, in fact, we come across a general principle that governs many of Bach’s discourses: that is to treat the fully sustained texture as a special effect, used especially to mark and illuminate the cadence (example 6):
Example 6
BWV 995, Allemande, mm. 16–18
The same change from short to sustained bass notes highlights the final cadence of this allemande, too. Here again, it may well be that Bach’s notation extends the kinds of texture known to contemporary lutenists. After all, confronted with only the tablature for this piece, how would one play? It would be easier, more ‘natural’ even, to allow the opening chord and the subsequent bass notes to ring on. But Bach imposes a difficulty: stop the note. Later on, as the section reaches its goal—the cadence
Active silence and active sustaining likewise govern the unmarked opening section of the prelude to this suite. However, now the bass contains two ‘rhythmic characters’ (example 7):
- a single crotchet followed by a rest (m. 1)
- a ‘walking’ figure of two crotchets, again articulated by a rest (m. 5)
Example 7
BWV 995, Prelude: rhythmic characters
Turning now to example 8, for a moment it might seem that in this prelude m. 3 contains an anomalous three-note figure, but once it is realised that halfway through the measure the music returns to its opening sound (namely the octave of m. 1), it becomes obvious that these two rhythmic characters follow one another in succession. Example 8 aligns the second half of m. 4 with the opening so as to highlight their equivalence.
Example 8
BWV 995, Prelude, mm. 1–4
Hence a new start—that is, an articulation—is necessary at the midpoint of m. 3. Just as crucially, the player needs either to reproduce the first sound of the piece or meaningfully to transform it. Needless to add, the final measures of this opening section (before the très viste) replace the bass’s short crotchets with fully sustained minims so as to evoke the texture and ‘feel’ of cadence: another opportunity to balance the texture in favour of the bass.
As a final instance of ‘cadential texture’ let us consider the sarabande. The first part of the binary form is shown in example 9. In mm. 1, 2 and 4, it is surely best to avoid an entirely legato line from one measure to the next, and instead to make a slight break (without a pause) between measures. In this way, the crotchet bass notes become a rhythmic ‘character’—crotchet plus rest. In m. 5 this rhythmic character is shifted onto the first beat, articulated by rests until the first cadence in m. 8. Now the additional length of the C in m. 8 sounds earned, and can be enhanced by a different kind of attack.
Example 9
BWV 995, Sarabande, mm. 1–8
To communicate the significance of this long note is all the more necessary in that there is a danger that it will seem static. This tendency is common at Bach’s cadences (c.f. the sarabande of BWV 997): it happens because the preceding note values (here, the quavers) tend to continue in the listener’s mind and subdivide the final long note (making it sound like several short notes tied together, so to speak). Ironically, an intabulation of this suite for lute by a contemporary lutenist ‘solves’—or rather perpetuates—the problem by filling in one of the beats left empty by Bach (example 10).[12] It might be better to insert a momentary break or breath before striking the long C, whose new quality of attack must set it apart from the crotchet bass notes already established.
Example 10
BWV 995, Sarabande, mm. 7–8
Given the rich variety of long and short bass notes in Bach’s manuscripts, it is curious to consider the elaborations that guitarists have made of his solo violin and cello music. As a rule these elaborations are indifferent to the question of rests in the bass line, preferring sustained note values throughout. Example 11 gives the beginning (a) and first cadence (b) of another allemande: that of Cello Suite I, BWV 1007. I have added a minimal number of bass notes (along the lines of example 2b)—not because I wish to argue against more elaborate bass lines, but simply to show the deployment of rests that is such an integral part of Bach’s style.
Example 11
BWV 1007, Allemande, opening (a) and cadence (b), arranged for guitar
iii Rests in the Prelude to BWV 998
Yet perhaps none of this is quite enough to make us feel entirely comfortable with the notated rests in the Prelude to the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro BWV 998, for these rests do indeed make the bass notes extremely short. This is not to say that we do not now know rather more about them, and what creative opportunities they offer the performer. After all, at the final chord there is a slight increase in the bass’s sustain (as also at the climax, the fermata in m. 40), and before all—from the very first note—there is the question of the layering of pulses. Since the upper voice flows in an unbroken series of quavers, we might well expect Bach’s rests to articulate the next main level of pulse, namely the dotted crotchet—and certainly, it is not so uncommon to hear the prelude realised as in example 12.
Example 12
BWV 998, Prelude, with bass notes lengthened by a quaver
In the event, however, Bach chooses to describe an intermediate rhythmic level peculiar to compound metres: he divides the dotted crotchet into a long-short pattern (crotchet and quaver). This division is indicated clearly enough from m. 11, but it is at its most explicit in m. 30 (example 13).
Example 13
BWV 998, Prelude
Thus far our understanding of Bach’s rests as metrical and structural markers. But before any further discussion of texture and articulation in this prelude (resumed in part iv), it is time to consider the rather different matter of the role played by the bass, both within the two-voice framework and in the elaboration of the large design. Not that analysis and performance is an easy marriage: perhaps analysis can never really tell us exactly how to play. And yet just as the intuition invents possibilities, it is analysis which sets the limits, warning us as we weigh each creative idea of what in the composition we might be obscuring. As we shall eventually see, the way in which Bach achieves this prelude’s structural build-up has a crucial effect on the texture.
- Gesner’s testament appears in a note in his edition of Quintilian’s rhetoric, published in Göttingen in 1738. It is quoted in The Bach Reader, ed. Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel (New York, 1945: Norton), p 231. Gesner was rector at the Leipzig Thomasschule, where Bach was cantor from 1723 until his death. [back]
- The notion of contiguous rhythmic levels is explored to some extent in Dance and the Music of J.S. Bach by Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne, who speak of the ‘beat’, the ‘pulse’ and the ‘tap’ levels (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991: Indiana University Press). [back]
- Of course, Chopin’s rests articulate the phrase, but do not rhythmicise the line in the way that Bach’s do. [back]
- This intabulation is anonymous and is supplied in the edition of Bach’s lute works edited by Hoppstock (op. cit.), who does not identify its source. [back]
©2000 Jonathan Leathwood