In anticipation of our Road to Bach Concert this Friday March 11, Conductor and Director of Choral Organizations, Donald Nally reflects on the program and “the ‘truths’ that draw us to music now”.
A few years back, our University Chorale sang a work of Ted Hearne’s called Fervor. It was based on one line from J.S. Bach’s motet, Komm, Jesu, komm. With just two words, “the truth,” it engages the call and response of antiphonal singing as a metaphor for the call and response observed in the echo chamber which is the media and political discourse pervading our Time.
Ted’s work is a rather in-our-face example of music that references earlier compositions and compositional techniques—a study in the value of historical knowledge, a “where we came from” that magnifies the “here we are.” If you know Bach’s motet, you instantly realize the distance we’re traveling from it in the course of Ted’s piece. If you don’t know Bach’s motet, you’ll still feel the tug of an 18th-century musical language as it is recontextualized and again recontextualized, tripping over itself, unsettled.
Photograph by Stephanie Kourkounis for the New York Times
We hear this in many contemporary works of our time, particularly choral: Techniques and direct quotes of Early Music appear often, with the effect, whether intended by the composer or not, of touching our nostalgic brain and triggering recognition of what we perceive to be a simpler time. Certainly, the music of our “Road to Bach” concert, ranging from the Schütz of mid-17th-century Dresden to the Bach of early-18th-century Leipzig immediately transports us to a time when composers had far fewer musical resources and tools than today. The extended motet of Schütz (c.1650) that we’ll sing has no dynamics, no tempo indications, and no articulations. Bach offers little more; in the later cantata sung on this concert, BWV 103 (1725), there are but a few articulations and two tempo indications (which we get a kick out of, since one is “Tempo Primo” even though he didn’t give an initial Tempo!). Even the cosmopolitan and well-traveled Johann Pachelbel apparently relies on his musicians’ understanding of the conventions of the time, offering little information beyond the notes.
Thomaskirche (1735), where both Bach and Schelle served as kantor; credit to J.G.Schreiber (1676-1750).
Those conventions employed a standard vocabulary of rhetorical gestures, producing emotional contexts we still recognize and love. Stories in which the music takes us beyond the messages of redemption and sacrifice that dominated their musical works. Hundreds of composers worked in European churches of the time; they all line The Road to Bach, each with their own contribution to music’s evolution. Indeed, what separated a Bach from, say, Johann Schelle, his quite-capable predecessor by two at Leipzig, was the way in which Bach mastered those gestures, made them his own, and had the confidence to move beyond them when the “opportunity to preach” appeared. Schelle, too, embraced that responsibility to preach, perhaps with a bit less imagination, as did Pachelbel and Schütz. Their heads rise above the crowds of composers on the road from Perotin to Caroline Shaw as being of a particular kind of imagination. An imagination that raised the Occasional Music—the composer-as-sermonizer required by the Church—to a level of dramatic effectiveness worthy of the theatre then, and of longevity now, as we return to them to “hear” the culture of their time, unique in that little else of their time seems relevant.
Northwestern University – Bienen School of Music – The Messiah © Todd Rosenberg Photography 2016
In our graduate conducting program, we often talk about the relationships between eras – how one composer informs another. We’d have no Britten and Poulenc as we know them without Stravinsky. No Brahms without Beethoven. No Michael Gordon without Louis Andriessen. Exploring these relationships allows us to see the subtle ways in which music evolves over short and long spans of time. These connections dissolve the sentimental attachments in the hearing of an ancient work, bringing it to life as if new. They can help us see that we don’t make music in a vacuum. Our exploration of the “Road to Bach” is not a road to a temple on a hill, but rather, a well-worn road on which Bach is just another stop, leading to us. Sure, the music may be ‘simpler’ in construction and forces than Mahler, but it is by no means simple: Music that moves us with just a turn of a phrase is not simple. Instead, we marvel at these composers’ story-telling abilities and their virtuosic command of the musical ingredients developed to date.
We crave storytelling. We relish recognizing ourselves in those stories. That recognition is what has long been referred to as ‘truths’ (Ted’s die Warheit) in music, and those truths have not changed in the four centuries since Schütz took up his post at Dresden and began influencing the five generations of composers that led to Bach taking up his at Leipzig. These stories hold the ‘truths’ that draw us to music now, as in the 17th and 18th centuries: reminders of our humanity, and of the possibilities that we do better when we listen. Indeed, this concert is both a series of stories that composers chose to tell and the story of how those composers informed each other’s’ works, “on the road to Bach.”
– Donald Nally, Evanston, IL (March 2022)
Northwestern University Bienen School of Music – The Messiah © Todd Rosenberg Photography 2016
Please join us this Friday, March 11 at 7:30pm in Galvin Recital Hall for our concert, The Road to Bach, featuring Bienen’s Contemporary/Early Vocal Ensemble and the Callipygian Players. To learn more about the pieces we’ll be performing on Friday, join us for our lecture demonstration this Wednesday March 9th in Galvin Recital Hall.
These events are presented by the Evelyn Dunbar Memorial Festival of Early Music.