Bach and the Patterns of Invention 9780674238282

Citation preview

'13acfi and tfie rpatterns of Invention

'Bacfi and tfie 'Patterns of Invention

LAURENCE DREYFUS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright © 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Third printing, 2004 First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2004

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dreyfus, Laurence. Bach and the patterns of invention / Laurence Dreyfus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-674-06005-9 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-01356-5 (pbk.) 1. Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685-1750-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Composition (Music) I. Title. ML41O.B1D63 1996 780'·92-dC20 [BJ 96-32275 Designed by Gwen Frankfeldt

acknowledgments

More than a few people-scholars, musicians, students, and friends (with generous overlaps among these categories)-helped me write this book, a project which has lasted considerably longer than a decade. Some of the chapters revise and overhaul work that has appeared separately in journals and elsewhere, while others arose from lectures published here for the first time. In all cases the revisions and expansions have been so extensive that it seems reasonable to hope that the result amounts to a coherent argument rather than merely a collection of essays. At least this was my intention. Some friends and colleagues read and criticized material from this book at various stages; others offered invaluable advice and encouragement, sometimes in ways they may not even be aware of. To all of them, my sincere thanks. In particular, I'd like to single out Kofi Agawu, David Alcala, Nicholas Anderson, Harry BalIan, Karol Berger, Anna Maria Busse-Berger, the late Howard Mayer Brown, John Butt, Richard Cohn, Stephen Clark, Tim Crawford, John Daverio, Matthew Dirst, Mark Everist, Constantin Fasolt, Margot Fassler, Wim Frankenberg, Don O. Franklin, Henrietta Freeman-Attwood, Jonathan FreemanAttwood, Michael Friedmann, Phillip Gossett, Thomas Grey, Ketil Haugsand, porkell Helgason, Stephen Hinton, Barry Ife, Helga Ing6lfsd6ttir, Kristjan Ing6lfson, Jeffrey Kallberg, Allan R. Keiler, Wieland Kuijken, Paul Leenhouts, Marie Leonhardt, David Lewin, Eva Linfield, Carolyn Lougee, Michael Marissen, Edward Mendelson, GUdmundur Oli Olafsson, Bruce Phillips, Curtis Price, Paul Robinson, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Penny Souster, Margaret Steinitz, David Stern, Jane Stevens, Birgit Stolt, Reinhard Strohm, Jeanne Swack, Christopher Wintle, and Christoph Wolff. I would also like to offer my thanks to Irene Auerbach of the Music Department at King's College London, who turned her sharp eye to a careful proofreading of the manuscript, and to Orhan Memed, whose help in the final stages both with the prose text and with the music examples saved me from infelicities too numerous to mention.

I am very grateful to several universities and foundations who supported the research for this book with fellowship stipends or by granting me release time from teaching. They include, in chronological order, the American Council of Learned Societies, Yale University, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Stanford University. For a substantial subsidy to fund the engraving of the music examples, moreover, I am happy to acknowledge the generous support of the Royal Academy of Music in London. Margaretta Fulton, my editor at Harvard University Press, had the good sense to steer me toward a book on "Bach and invention" and the patience to wait for the manuscript to appear on her desk. My warmest thanks to her for her encouragement and support. This book is dedicated with great affection to my daughter, Emily.

Contents

I

What Is an Invention?

2

Composing against the Grain

3 The Ideal Ritornello

4- The Status of a Genre 5 Matters of Kind

1

33

59 103

135

6 Figments of the Organicist Imagination 7 On Bach's Style

189

g Bach as Critic of Enlightenment Notes

247

Index of Works by Bach General Index

263

261

219

169

'Bacfi and tfie 'Patterns of Invention

What Is an Invention?

Sometime in 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach, Capellmeister to his Serene Highness the Prince of Anhalt -Cathen, inscribed the title page to a small handwritten volume of keyboard pieces which were to be understood as a Straightforward Instruction, in which amateurs of the keyboard, and especially the eager ones, are shown a clear way not only (1) of learning to play cleanly in two voices, but also, after further progress, (2) of dealing correctly and satisfactorily with three obbligato parts; at the same time not only getting good inventions, but developing the same satisfactorily, and above all arriving at a cantabile manner in playing, all the while acquiring a strong foretaste of composition. 1

The fifteen pieces for two voices that followed (BWV 772-786) were arranged in ascending order by key and were each labeled an Inventia. The works were not, in fact, newly composed, for they had already been entered in the Clavierbiichlein var Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, a musical notebook for Bach's eldest son, in which Johann Sebastian and the twelve-year-old Wilhelm Friedemann jointly copied this set of two-part imitative works sometime between the autumn of 1722 and the end of winter, 1723.2 In the Clavierbiichlein, however, Bach had entitled each work a Praeambulum-originally an organist's extemporized introduction to an ensemble work, now commonly referring to a short prelude. For his "Straightforward Instruction:' then, Bach apparently changed the title of these pieces from Praeambulum to Inventia to stress their pedagogical value: they were designed not only to encourage the pupil's facility on the keyboard, he tells us, but also to serve as models for good "inventions" and their subsequent development. Bach's use of the word "invention" may seem confusing unless one realizes that it did not name a recognized musical genre, but rather was a term borrowed from rhetoric used colloquially to designate the essential thematic idea underlying a musical composition. Bach's title-page, in other words, understands

"invention" as a conventional metaphor for the idea behind a piece, a musical subject whose discovery precedes full-scale composition. It is important to realize that this sense of invention (inventio in Latin, heuresis in Greek, Erfindung in German), along with a whole range of related meanings, must be recovered from a time when rhetoric, much like etymology and natural philosophy, was a modeling science par excellence. That is, one must return to a time before the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when critical theory abandoned rhetoric in favor of aesthetics, replacing the perfectible art of invention with the godlike realm of creativity. As late as Alexander Gerard's Essay on Taste (1759), one reads that "the first and leading quality of genius is invention."3 By the time of Kant's third Critique (1790), on the other hand, the paradigm has shifted so that "creative imagination is the true source of genius and the basis of originality:' According to the traditional usage, invention denoted not only the subject matter of an oration, but also a mechanism for discovering good ideas. An orator had at his disposal an entire array of such tools-called the "topics of invention"-and with these topics one devised or "invented" a fruitful subject for a discourse. One basic technique of invention was to study the works of reputable authors both to develop good taste and to spur one's own ingenuity, what Johann Mattheson called the locus exemplorum. 4 In keeping with this pedagogical belief, Bach's "Straightforward Instruction" not only provides suitable examples of "good inventions" but also demonstrates how they can be properly developed ("auch selbige wohl durchzufuhren"). This important notion of development or realization, moreover, implies that a successful invention must be more than a static, well-crafted object, but instead like a mechanism that triggers further elaborative thought from which a whole piece of music is shaped. This is why Bach alludes to invention as "a foretaste of composition": by crafting a workable idea, one unlocks the door to a complete musical work. From a variety of evidence it is clear that Bach, in keeping with many of his German contemporaries, considered "invention" a fundamental concept underlying both the training and the activity of a composer. Johann Nikolaus Forkelwhose information stemmed from correspondence with the composer's two eldest sons-tells how Bach's pupils had to master thoroughbass and voice-leading in four-part chorales before trying to write down their own ideas: "He also made his pupils aim at such excellencies in their exercises; and, till they had attained a high degree of perfection in them, he did not think it advisable to let them attempt inventions of their own. Their sense of purity, order, and connection in the parts must first have been sharpened on the inventions of others, and have become in a manner habitual to them, before he thought them capable of giving these qualities to their own inventions." Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, moreover, reports that his father considered invention a talent that must manifest itself early on in a youth's training: ''As for the invention of ideas, my late father demanded this ability from the very beginning, and whoever had none he advised to stay away from composition altogether."5 This belief in a talent for

2

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

invention, though, did not mean that Bach minimized the role of arduous study in the pursuit of inventions. A "Straightforward Instruction" in "getting good inventions" is proof that he put stock in a rigorous approach to composition, as was his reported answer to those who asked him how he mastered the art of music: "I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far." 6 While there was undeniably some false modesty in this confession, one can also read it as a tribute to the exacting demands of craftsmanship, a skill requiring certain natural talents, but one demanding nurture and self-improvement as well. Bach's attitude was probably not far removed from Johann Mattheson's, who writes in the Vollkommener Capellmeister (1739) that "though invention ... is not easily taught nor learned ... still, when necessary, many a person can be helped and be pointed in a direction which will assist his innate gifts and with which he would be on the right path."7 As a methodical activity, invention belongs to the so-called "divisions" of rhetoric which hark back to Cicero and which were well known in early eighteenth-century Germany-at least in their schematic outline-to anyone with even a modest classical education. According to Cicero's De Inventione, there are five stages in creating an oration: (1) invention (inventio); (2) arrangement (dispositio); (3) style (elocutio); (4) memory (memoria); and (5) delivery (pronuntiatio or actio). Cicero explains them as follows in De Oratore: "[An orator] must first hit upon what to say; then manage and marshal his discoveries [inventa], not merely in orderly fashion, but with a discriminating eye for the exact weight, as it were, of each argument; next go on to array them in the adornments of style; after that keep them guarded in his memory; and in the end deliver them with effect and charm:'8 One can easily see in this classic formulation the obvious affinities between inventing and delivering a speech and composing and performing a piece of music, although it was not entirely obvious, even to humanists, to what extent the analogy between music and oratory should hold. Seventeenth-century German music theory, for example, took over the idea of the divisions of oratory but reduced their number from five to three. Christoph Bernhard, a pupil of Heinrich Schutz, writes that "there otherwise belong to Composition three things: Inventio (Discovery), Elaboratio (Amplification), and Executio (Realization or Performance), which display a rather close relationship with oratory or rhetoric."9 This three-part division hints at a more idiomatic understanding of invention and rhetoric as grasped by musicians, who-within the realm of compositionby and large confined themselves to the binary distinction between discovery of musical ideas, on the one hand, and their arrangement or elaboration, on the other. (Cicero underscores this distinction when he defines invention as "the discovery of valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one's cause plausible;' while arrangement is the "distribution of arguments thus discovered in the proper order.")!O Johann David Heinichen, for example, writes that "it is not ever enough that a composer writes down a naturally occurring, good invention

What Is an Invention?

3

expressing the words and pleasing the good taste of intelligent listeners. It also requires an artist to work out [these inventions) at the right occasion according to the rules and to prove that he possesses knowledge and good taste:'ll Johann Mattheson also expresses this sentiment when he writes: "Many a person supposes, if he has perhaps a small supply of inventions, then he is well off as a composer. This is by no means correct, and nothing is achieved by invention alone, although it certainly comprises about half the matter."l2 Johann Adolph Scheibe, too, conceives of invention as a distinctly musical (and hence less formally rhetorical) category when he writes that invention "is a capacity [Eigenschaftl of the composer ... to think musically" and identifies it further with the main theme (Hauptsatz) of a musical work "in which the invention is expressed." This main theme, according to Scheibe, from which the subsequent material "necessarily arises;' must be distinguished from the rest of the piece, which is mostly "elaboration and belongs to the [consideration of the 1 style [Schreibartl:' 13 Bach therefore places himself squarely in this tradition when his title page to the "Straightforward Instruction" distinguishes between "not only ... getting good inventions, but developing the same satisfactorily." Given this historical support for the concept of invention, can one use this idea today as a critical tool with which to understand Bach? Taking this question as my point of departure, I argue that one can. What is at stake here is not so much a return to the terminology of historical rhetoric or musical theory but rather a fresh approach to musical structure and affect that tries to make historical sense of Bach as a composer and thinker. Instead of restricting invention to a purely analytical category-although it will be revealing to see how far this particular usage can be extended-I have in mind the formulation of a critical outlook that will help shed light on Bach's extraordinary historical and aesthetic achievement, an achievement that differs both in quality and in kind from that of his contemporaries. The problem here is a pervasive one within the study of the arts, no less within historical musicology and musical analysis: the fact that contemporary scholarship, for all its accomplishments and methodological sophistication, so often becomes reticent when it comes to capturing some semblance of a profound musical experience. Both music history and analysis, it is probably fair to say, are well equipped to provide a kind of refuge from the problem of aesthetic understanding, despite the fact that everyone who contributes to these disciplines does so presumably out of a shared conviction in the aesthetic value of the music studied. Although the brute facts of Bach's towering greatness within the canon of European art music are easily asserted, it is a far more complex matter to allow these facts to play a role within a sober and scholarly mode of discourse. The challenge lies therefore in developing a critical language in which this greatness can be transmitted while at the same time trying to say something other than what is already intuited when performing and listening to this music. In this book, I suggest that developing the idea of

4

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

"invention" and its myriad patterns provides a new way forward to meet this challenge. My aim in this opening chapter is to set the stage for the later methodological discussions and then to offer a kind of sample analysis which demonstrates what one kind of invention might look like. I begin by suggesting how one might rescue the idea of Bachian invention from the danger of too intellectualized a reading and then propose that analyzing inventions as structured repetitions reveals aspects of the composer's thinking that are not otherwise apparent. I conclude by explaining how this first foray into an analysis of invention interacts with the kinds of critical reflections developed in the later chapters. Since invention arose as an operative concept of rhetoric, it is important to clarify to what extent Bach could have understood invention in a strictly rhetorical sense, subscribing, as some writers seem to do, to the arcane Latin topics that animated literary and forensic rhetoric. Since Johann Mattheson, more than any other writer of his generation, made a special point of championing the general validity of rhetorical principles in music, and went so far (in his late writings) as to suggest that musical composition was an explicit ars inveniendi, it is useful to detail his views as a kind of benchmark against which to imagine Bach's own. In the first place, it is important to note that even Christoph Bernhard, an important seventeenth-century codifier of musical-rhetorical figures, had not submitted music to a strict rhetorical method but had merely observed "a rather close relationship" (eine ziemliche nahe Verwandschafft) between the two realms. Music and rhetoric are analogous, but not synonymous. By the time of the Vollkommener Capellmeister (1739), on the other hand, Mattheson was unable to decide whether music could be better understood via rhetoric, or whether music in fact possessed substantive rhetorical properties. To be sure, there was no such thing as a unified theory of rhetoric to draw on, so he had to pick and choose. Mattheson began by conflating the fivefold Ciceronian model with Christoph Bernhard's threefold division. In this way he could retain categories that corresponded most obviously to musical activities. 14 Consider Figure 1.1. As can be seen, Mattheson has rejected Cicero's nomenclature of elocution and pronunciation in favor of the more obviously musical categories of decoration (that is, Cicero

Bernhard

1. inventio

1. inventio

Mattheson (1739) 1. inventio

2. dispositio

2. dispositio 3. elocutio 4. memoria 5. pronuntiatio

Figure

1.1

1

2. elaboratio

3. elaboratio

. 3. executio

4. de co ratio 5. executio

The divisions of rhetoric

What Is an Invention?

5

ornamentation) and execution (that is, performance). Cicero's "elocution" ("arraying the adornments of style") is reformulated as "decoration," referring to musical ornaments which "depend more on the skill and sound judgment of a singer or player than on the actual prescription of the composer:' 15 Mattheson has also eliminated memoria, which is naturally irrelevant to a composer who commits his ideas to paper. The third category, elaboratio, stemmed from Bernhard, but its function was already implied in Cicero's idea of disposition. Apparently, Mattheson thought it worthwhile to distinguish between two distinct aspects of disposition: on the one hand, his new, restricted category of disposition refers to the order of events and overall schematic plan for a composition, "almost:' he says, "the way one contrives and designs a building and makes a plan or design in order to show where a room, a parlor, a chamber, etc., should go." 16 Elaboration, on the other hand, "roughly twice as easy," was a more routine process of "filling in" through typical methods of amplifying the basic ideas. In fact, elaboration "requires little instruction, for one encounters a path which has been prepared, and already knows for certain where one wants to go:' These three stages of composition make very different demands on the musical orator. "Invention," he says, "requires fire and spirit" while "disposition" calls only for "order and measure" and "elaboration, cold blood and circumspection."I? Mattheson's overall scheme of "musical oratory" seems to capture with remarkable insight the kinds of hierarchies one detects in the music until he begins, though not without some misgivings, to outline concrete procedures attached to the stages of rhetoric, specifying some fifteen topics of invention "which can occasionally provide quite pleasing expedients ... in melodic composition" as well as six parts of a proper disposition "whose components ... [one 1 will come across in a clever sequence ... [in 1 good melodies:' (Mattheson also alludes to some thirty "great figures for elaboration.") 18 While some of his analogies between rhetorical and musical processes are mere plays on words or involve assigning Latin names to the most elementary musical patterns, others amount to useless fabrications and make it clear that Mattheson was engaged in an essentially empty scholasticism. For example, the first of his listings for the loci topici of invention-the tools or sources for coming up with good ideas-is the locus notationis. In rhetoric, this topic suggests that the orator focus on the actual letters of a name or thing in order to "associate" to new ideas. 19 Mattheson "translates" this topic into music by seeking out etymological resemblances. Since "notation" in music refers to notes (as equivalent to "letters" in written language), he reads the topic as suggesting four ways of varying the notes: "through the value of the notes, through inversion or permutation, through repetition or reiteration or through canonic passages."20 However one chooses to read this passage, the haphazard manner in which Mattheson derives his motley assortment of musical techniques is certainly striking for its arbitrariness: one can scarcely imagine a musician finding any use for this hodgepodge of discovery procedures. Nor do

6

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

the other topics inspire confidence that Mattheson was engaged in anything more than a pedantic exercise. The locus oppositorum, for example, instructs the musical inventor to consider "different meters, counter-movements, the high and the low, the slow and the fast, the calm and the violent, together with many other opposites" as a source for fresh ideas. While the content of the topics is unobjectionable, Mattheson offers nothing more than musical common sense dressed up in erudite Latin. (Mattheson differed from his German predecessors such as Herbst, Kuhnau, and Heinichen in seeking to apply an ars inveniendi to the whole of musical composition. They, on the other hand, had understood the links between rhetoric and music solely as an aid to the composition of texted music. Thus the widely disseminated idea that Bach or his contemporaries composed instrumental music on the basis of strictly rhetorical procedures is on weak ground: the only text to attempt this is Mattheson's Vollkommener Capellmeister [1739], which continually concedes the questionable status of the topics.)21 Mattheson's explanation of the disposition of a musical work, though guarded in the necessity of its application, also insists on an exact correspondence of rhetorical procedures to music. A proper musical composition, he tells us, will conform to the six parts of an oration: namely, the introduction, the narration, the discourse, the corroboration, the confutation, and the conclusion. A sustained analysis of an aria by Marcello then shows these correspondences at work. Yet Mattheson forces his analysis to fit the sixfold division of disposition, such as when he reports that a ritornello, identified as an exordium-that is, an introduction-can both begin and end a piece of music. In oratory, on the other hand, the exordium only makes sense as a beginning point in "which the listeners are ... stimulated to attention." This admission means, then, that a musical disposition does not follow an oratorical one. Mattheson's subsequent discussion of topics for the elaboration and decoration, while less detailed, also indicates that these divisions of rhetoric reflect procedures that "we have already used ... for so long without knowing what they are called or what they mean." As a kind of reductio ad absurdum, Mattheson compares a composer's understanding of rhetorical topics with Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Le bourgeois Gentilhomme, who "did not know that it was a pronoun when he said: I, you, he."22 But the analogy between the bourgeois gentleman and the unconsciously rhetorical composer is unconvincing: whereas Jourdain merely learned to name a category he already understood implicitly, the composer is being asked to recognize a new and random set of terms supplanting a competing group of clearly defined musical concepts. In order, then, for Mattheson to make any sense at all, he must feign a kind of amnesia toward autonomous musical theories of composition, as if they did not really matter at all. While Mattheson would have liked his rules to reflect procedures used by a composer in the daily practice of his craft, they are better understood as attempts to confer a quasi-scientific status on musical composition. There could be no

What Is an Invention?

7

more eloquent witness to the purely academic nature of this theory than Mattheson himself, who, in a remarkable aside, concedes that "authors might sooner have thought on their death than on such guidelines, especially composers."23 This is a startling admission by any account and must be taken seriously if one is not to overestimate the relationship between Mattheson's ruminations and the practical world of a German composer. At best, then, Mattheson's oratorical procedures must be read as translations of musical commonplaces into the metalanguage of rhetoric, an effort that obscured genuine musical insights with both literary pretension and a good deal of wishful thinking. It is perhaps no coincidence that, just at the time when Mattheson's case for a rhetorical art of invention enjoyed its greatest prestige, Johann Adolph Scheibe attacked Bach for "not taking an especial interest in the sciences actually needed by a learned composer, ... [namely in] the rules of rhetoric and poetics."24 As a result of this charge, one might seem justified in lumping Bach with Mattheson's simple-minded musicians "who would sooner have thought on their death" than on a rhetorical super-science guiding musical composition. (Scheibe, a disciple of Gottsched, was not so much interested in the topics of invention as in a rhetorical grasp of the hierarchy of styles.) Yet not everyone would agree. Some writers have argued, in fact, that Bach was a musical rhetorician par excellence; that he had a sure knowledge of invention and elaboration that far surpassed a mere colloquial understanding; that he in fact used his works as a showplace to disseminate humanistic scholarship. Perhaps the most sensational attempt to adduce evidence for Bach as rhetorician is Ursula Kirkendale's study of the Musical Offering, which, we are told, must be read as a page-by-page gloss on Quintilian's forensic rhetoric. 25 To support this claim externally, Kirkendale quotes the response to Scheibe by Abraham Birnbaum-a professor of rhetoric at the University of Leipzig and a personal friend of the composer: "[Bach] has such perfect knowledge of the parts and merits which the working-out of a musical piece has in common with rhetoric, that one not only listens to him with satiating pleasure when he focuses his conversations on the similarity and correspondences of both [music and rhetoric]; but one also admires their clever application in his works. His insight into poetry is as good as one can expect from a great composer."26 But Birnbaum is not entirely credible. His defense was issued in the course of a heated controversy in which he felt compelled to repudiate point by point all the charges Scheibe had leveled at Bach, charges that denied Bach the learned name of "music us" and demoted him to the rank of mere "Musikant." As a confessed musical amateur, Birnbaum may have overreached his grasp of concrete musical matters in his appreciation of these music-rhetorical correspondences. (Christoph Gottlieb Schr6ter, for example, heartened by the tone of Birnbaum's second defense [1739], notes that "the opinion given of the knowledge necessary to a finished composer is a little too sparing;' but excuses Birnbaum "since music is only his avocation.")"7 No other contemporary, after

8

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

all, ever claimed that Bach was a humanist. On the contrary, his sketchy education shows itself in his woefully awkward prose style, the main reason, surely, why he felt unable to respond to Scheibe personally. Scheibe, a former pupil of Bach's, was quick to take advantage of this deficiency when, in a satire, he credits Bach with "never having taken the time to learn how to write an extensive letter;' a needless bit of cruelty, to be sure, but hardly a secret to anyone in the Bach circle. Even Lorenz Mizler, a pupil and defender of Bach, admits in his obituary that "our lately departed Bach did not, it is true, occupy himself with deep theoretical speculations on music, but was all the stronger in the practice of the art." 28 And commenting on this passage to Forkel, Emanuel Bach reiterates that "the departed was, like myself or any true musician, no lover of dry mathematical stuff."29 One is on uneasy ground, therefore, when suggesting that a traditional German Capellmeister such as Bach had anything more than passing familiarity with or interest in the nitty-gritty of rhetorical theory. (Bach's education in rhetoric at the Liineburg Lateinschule has now been shown to consist, not of the likes of Quintilian, but of a poor boy's pocket compendium of Latin terms to be memorized tout court by the pupils for rote recitation. )30 As one of Germany's greatest teachers of music in the eighteenth century (with a host of surviving reports about his teaching methods), Bach seems in fact to have stressed rigorous musical skills to the utter exclusion of any book learning. Apparently his pupils learned counterpoint without the benefit of textbooks, such as Fux's famous Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), and instead cut their teeth on a diet consisting mostly of Bach's own music. Forkel, for example, reports that "as long as his scholars were under his musical direction, he did not allow them to study or become acquainted with any but classical works, in addition to his own compositions."3l The statement by Emanuel Bach mentioned earlier about a pupil having to come up with his own inventions, moreover, ignores any learned "topics of invention" and, on the contrary, suggests that if a student lacked invention, Bach "advised [the pupil] to stay away from composition altogether." For a composer like Bach, what remained, then, from the actual musical annexation of rhetorical territory was a far less analogical but far more metaphorical notion of musical invention, a notion, to be sure, with its own rules and practices. As Emanuel Bach and Agricola put it in Bach's obituary, a central quality of his art was the engagement with "the most hidden secrets of harmony ... No one was able to arrive at so many inventive [erfindungsvolle] and unfamiliar thoughts from otherwise seemingly dry artifices as he was:'32 It was doubtless this notion of invention that held sway with Bach. Between theoretical notions of musical invention and what can be pieced together about Bach's outlook on musical composition lies a substantial gulf, a gulf that I now try to bridge. In the demonstration that follows-as well as in the analyses found in later chapters-I treat invention as a fundamental tool of the early eighteenth-century composer and use it to explore how Bach put

What Is an Invention?

9

together pieces of music. In so doing, I assert (initially for heuristic purposes) that the process of "pulling pieces apart" by identifying and examining their leading inventions mirrors to some meaningful extent what the composer would recognize as the reverse of the way he has put the pieces together. Analysis, in this rather literal sense, is the inverse of synthesis or composition. Taking my cue from Mattheson's adaptation of Cicero and Bernhard, I begin by examining a seemingly simple piece of music-the first two-part invention in Bach's "Straightforward Instruction"-in order to show how one such analysis might proceed. My interest here is to account first for the concrete workings of a complete piece of music by identifying the properties of its core inventions and only then showing how they are "disposed" or arranged during the course of the piece, elaborated by connective links, and decorated by suitable ornaments. While Mattheson's notion of invention is preferable to modern methods premised on large-scale formal processes and structures, it is only a jumping-off point to explore the subtle ways in which Bach conceives of an invention and its elaboration: although Bach maintains a distinction between a basic idea and its development, the surface appearances tend to suggest that both contain a similar degree of artifice. Within the composition of a thematic idea, moreover, Bach is especially adept at encoding mechanisms that ensure its elaboration, which is the same as saying that complex inversions and harmonic twists are worked out in advance. By the end of the analysis, I hope to have provided an account of the entire piece which explains the hierarchical relations between the various parts and the musical thought that underlies these hierarchies. To embark on this kind of analysis is to imagine the piece of music not so much as a static object but as a residue of human thoughts and actions. The analysis also serves to introduce analytic concepts and procedures that underlie discussions in several later chapters, though it must be stressed that the kind of permutational invention that the analysis reveals is not characteristic of every Bachian genre. Finally, to distinguish this approach from other methods, I focus on the advantages of favoring a "mechanist" over an "organicist" analysis, while admitting that the distinction may have greater value as a heuristic tool than as a clearly defined opposition. In considering the familiar work that opens Bach's "Straightforward Instruction:' the Inventio in C major (BWV 772), one can pose an obvious question: where is the invention in it? (See Ex. 1.1.) While a composer need not begin a work with only a single musical object in mind, even a brief glance at this well-known piece will identify the first seven notes as a key component in the invention of the work, its subject. When one examines the piece more closely, it is conspicuous that this subject appears in all but three measures of the piece (mm. 6, 14, and 22), if one considers both its basic form, labeled Subject X

10

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

I

I

•

~

2

I 0[1



l-

- X----,i......J --

.

..,L.

X(lNV)

~

-;;;;;;;;Iiii

~

u

X(lNV) --, ~

.

U "

,-

.~,

---, ,----

.

~4Ii6

GmaJ.

5

6 4

3#

V

f) "

......

12

11 "" . 4 - - - -

U 6

.~. -®-

6

6

"

.

·4

U

r-t.

.....

..... n

6

13

n

b

b

•

.

T

'* •

14

"

~

,-

.ll..

..

~~ ~

- -

X .~

L.~.

XIINV)

--l

21

20

....

'---J 6 I 6

()

~b. . ..

Example 1.3

16

The derivation of f3 (BWV 772)

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

10

iO

--..

.,.,,~

a min:

x --,

15

H.. _~

.

. ....

10

~

-

V

(It makes no sense to view the tenths in mm. 3-4 as a determinative parameter, since this would imply that the obvious links in the melodic chain in the treble were merely a fortuitous by-product of voice-leading.) By the downbeat of m. 5, even though X and X(INV) are still present (see the outer staves of Ex. 1.3e), the pattern of events seems driven by a new motor. This pattern no longer plays on the intervalic properties of X but is ruled by a sequence of (primarily) ascending tenths leading to a cadence in G. (See the voice-leading reduction in Ex. 1.3e.) To read the passage this way is to observe that a fundamentally harmonic activity-the pattern of ascending tenths leading to the cadence-has upstaged the fundamentally melodic operations performed on X. As a result, it is no longer the surface occurrences of X that can be said to pull the strings; it is rather the voice-leading pattern and the cadence in the second half of (3 that assert control. Indeed, as the outer staves in Ex. l.3e show, X disappears in m. 6 precisely when harmonic necessity prevents Bach from finding any use for it at all. The design of (3 was therefore influenced by operations performed on X even though the overall goal of the segment-a modulation-was independent of X. This change in function prompts us to consider the voice-leading reduction in two contrasting ways: first as result and only later as cause. At the beginning of the segment, the voice-leading constitutes an ancillary component rather than an active mechanism. Only at the end of the segment where harmonic concerns take over does the voice-leading assume a clearly commanding role as it moves toward the cadence. Some intriguing manuscript evidence illuminates this shift in the "balance of power:'\6 (See Ex. 1.4.) In the Notebook for Wilhelm Friedemann where Bach had composed the piece, the bass line in m. 5 originally proceeded directly to the cadence as shown in the example, for which I have supplied a hypothetical treble part. From this evidence one can infer that Bach later expanded the original cadence into the final version of mm. 5-6 (with its ascent to the cadence) when he discovered that he could pack yet another statement of X (in the second half of m. 5) into the prime form of (3. As a result of this shift in hierarchy-from melodic to harmonic invention-it makes sense to see the voice-leading only sometimes as structural and determining while at other times it is merely epiphenomenal. Transformed statements of (3 appear twice later in the piece, so that this segment will be considered, like u, one of Bach's underlying inventions for the

3

4

5

ri

Example 1.4 B\VV 772, mm. 3-6, antc-correcturam version found in Clavierhiichlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

What Is an Invention?

17

[! ::: ::::=:+:.:=::: :: b) ROTATE

Example 1.5 From f31 to f32' BWV

772

piece. What logic underlies its transformations? That is, how did the operations performed on f3, result in the ultimate versions in f32 and f3/ Ex. 1.5 depicts a mechanism for the derivation of f32> and thus details the individual steps intervening between Ex. 1.3e and Ex. 1.3f. In Ex. 1.5b, the two voices of f3, exchange positions-that is, they are inverted contrapuntally at the octave. (This operation is labeled ROTATE in the musical example.) Since much of the passage consists of parallel tenths, the contrapuntal inversion produces entirely usable parallel sixths, a feature that was surely built into the design of f3, for precisely this purpose. Nonetheless, as the asterisks in Ex. 1.Sb show, this voice-exchange causes the parts to cross at the end of the segment in a way that unacceptably muddles the identities of the lines. To eliminate this problem, the last three notes of the two voices are "rotated" back to their original positions, as Ex. l.SC shows. In

18

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

Ex. l.Sd, the segment in major is played in the minor: I call this operation a MODESWITCH, that is, when either a melodic line or a harmonic progression is switched into the opposite mode. (Here and elsewhere in this book I use type in small capitals for procedures of invention that can be formalized as quasimechanical functions.) The maneuver works flawlessly until the asterisks, where the minor version produces an unacceptable progression (among other infelicities, parallel tritones between the upper and implicit middle parts at the asterisks). Ex. l.se shows the adjustments reflected in the final version of /32' I need to stress that this imagined derivation is not intended to plot the exact sequence of Bach's thoughts but rather to imagine a plausible reconstruction of the "rules" that would have guided his compositional choices, even if-given the daily practice of his art-he conceived of /32 in a momentary flash. By postulating a hierarchy of processes underlying Bach's compositional actions, the analysis aspires to simulate a kind of "mechanism" that accounts for the preliminary planning within the inventive "work" that ensured the transformations some degree of success as well as the execution of the connective links that constitute the piece as a whole. The composition of /33 boasts the most spectacular "feats" with which Bach manipulated his inventions in this little piece, and its derivation is therefore perhaps the most intriguing. The compositional strategy here began with a sequential chain (now comprised of forms of X) that provided a mirror image to the one used in /32 (see Ex. l.3e). But not content to perform this one operation alone, Bach envisaged a more extraordinary tour de force by imagining a melodic inversion of the entire /3-segment, as shown in Ex. l.3g. (In the version preserved in the Clavierbuchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann, Bach was apparently unaware of how far he could actually go with /31' since the bass in m. 20-a - d - e f-abandons the melodic inversion right from the start. This means that Bach's original imagined version of /33 was faulty, a mistake he rectified only some months later while copying the piece for the "Straightforward Instruction." The mental activity of invention therefore extended even into the process of revision, in which the composer sought even greater discipline in the application of his strictest compositional procedures.) That is, all ascending intervals in both voices are now made to descend while descending intervals are made to ascend, a kind of melodic inversion that preserves the mode rather than the intervalic species of the major or minor seconds. This operation-equivalent to a contrapuntal mirror found in the most arcane kinds of fugal writing-was riskier than any other in the piece and, as Ex. l.3g shows, was far less successful than any other inventive move. For this reason, Bach had to be satisfied with a more modest success. Interestingly, though, he makes use of the transformed segment until the very moment when it becomes unusable (at the third quarter of m. 20) where, unable to persevere with the inversion, Bach sneaks in a misplaced snippet of (3 in its prime form at m. 21 before terminating the transformation altogether. But even this retreat in the face of the contrapuntal odds was not to

What Is an Invention?

19

be seen as ruinous to the overall invention: for this final intervalic progression deriving from /31 (6-10-10-10) neatly "compensates" for the failure of the contrapuntal inversion in the corresponding portion of /32 (last quarter of m. 13), where Bach had been forced to alter the treble. Where /32 had abandoned the strict letter of the invention as a result of its MODESWITCH, a new passage now reiterated what could be done without such a constraint. The derivation of /3/ (notated with a "defective" asterisk because it had to be discontinued in midstream) and its continuation thus illustrates an economic principle common to all craftsmen: learn from failed experiments and put them to good use.

The Disposition With the invention of a and /3 (which embrace all their transformations), Bach had largely determined the content of his piece. And because both segments manifested such clear harmonic functions, he had charted much of its course as well. By its very nature, a could be used to open the work and tonicize important neighboring keys (this function is called DEFINE) while /3 would prepare and execute cadences in secondary areas that modulated up a fifth. The top portion of Figure 1.2 represents the sum of Bach's inventions with their associated functions. Note also that a is designed to link up with /3, so that the invention of the two segments constituted a complete "opening move" for the piece. The invention of segments a and /3, moreover, already implied important aspects of their disposition, that is, how they would figure in the plan of the work as a whole. Nevertheless, it becomes meaningful to talk of disposing the work only when the inventions (and their transformations) are mapped out across the imagined terrain of the completed work. (Naturally this kind of distinction between invention and disposition only prevails when the invention is not wholly synonymous with the harmonic structure in a small-scale movement, as in certain preludes from the Well- Tempered Clavier which formally recall the dance pieces that Friedrich Erhard Niedt generated from a common thoroughbass in his Handleitung zur Variation [1706). Niedt specifically calls his thoroughbass "the foundation of my Invention" and suggests how his method provided "a very easy method [for obtaining) many thousands of inventions through diligence and hard work.")37 A fundamental way to approach the disposition of inventions was to follow one of several recognized guidelines for the harmonic plan of a piece. (German writers sometimes discuss this subject under the rubric of species of cadences, or clausulae.) A composer began by positioning the inventions in the tonic and dominant at the beginning of the piece, saving transposed versions for the middle of the piece. The end of the piece would require either an invention that could end in the main key or some newly composed passage that closed in the tonic. The number of times inventions could be repeated was limited by the size of the musical genre: in a preamble such as the C major Inventio, Bach thought of confining the size to about the length of a page. Disposition therefore means gauging gross size as well as thinking sequentially

20

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

Invention Harmonic Function

Operations

DEFINE ROTATE

DEFINE

MODULATE +P5 ROTATE, MODESWITCH

MODULATE

ROTATE, MODES WITCH, INVERT

(aborted)

+P5

Stemmata

Disposition al--~1--a2--[

I

.. v

l--~3*--[

l--~2--[

V

"VI

Elaboration

y 3

mm.

7

al---~l

I

9

£

11

15

a2------'y---~2

.. v

V

Figure 1.2 Map of C major Invention, BWV

19

21

8---~3 * - - - £ "VI

.. I

772

in time, imagining events from beginning to end. This is why it is useful to think of repeatable inventions in vertical paradigms, while their disposition is best appreciated in a horizontal syntagm, that is, in an ordered string that represents the time (and, if you will, space) spanned by the entire piece. Figure 1.2 displays such a hypothetical arrangement under "Disposition." Whereas convention dictated that the second occurrence of a should take place on the dominant, the ending point for /32 was more flexible: among desirable minor scale degrees, II or III might also have been feasible, though perhaps not in a version with a full authentic cadence. As it turns out, a transposed form of /31 could have ended the piece: Ex. 1.6 shows such a hypothetical ending that begins a fifth lower and thus cadences on C, a procedure used elsewhere, such as in the Inventio 8 in F major. But Bach chose a typically more daring solution by deploying /33' surely relishing the opportunity to show that the melodic chain formed with X(INV) and exploited in /32 also worked

What Is an Invention?

21

Example 1.6 Possible ending for BWV 772 using a transposed form of f3,

equally well with X itself. As a consequence, though, he had to compose a new ending for the piece. The brackets enclosing empty spaces in Figure 1.2 stand for the gaps that needed to be filled for the final measures. Of the twenty-two measures in the final version, fourteen-nearly two-thirds-are already accounted for even in this still rudimentary stage of the disposition.

The Elaboration Elaboration, according to Mattheson, "requires little instruction, for one encounters a path which has been prepared and already knows for certain where to go:' While there is some truth in this statement, it surely misses the surprising care that Bach lavished on his episodic passages. One might even be tempted to say that in Bach's works both invention and elaboration are marked by an almost equally intense mental activity. A crucial difference, nonetheless, separates the two activities: whereas invention is work, elaboration is play. While invention requires foresight, planning, consistency, savvy, and seriousness of purpose, elaboration is content with elegance, an associative logic, and an eye for similarities. The bottom section of Figure 1.2 depicts the composition of the three elaborative passages-y, 8, and E-that can be thought of both as connecting links between the inventions and as faint echoes of their surface patterns. On the one hand, each elaborative segment plays a carefully circumscribed role. As Examples 1.7a and 1.7b show, y and 8 had to travel only a short distance from the terminal point of the preceding invention to the starting point of the succeeding one; each used simple, stepwise sequences to reach its goal. On the other hand, Bach goes out of his way to devise intricate motivic relations between his elaborative passages and inventive segments. Consider the passage connecting m. 9 to m. 11, called y. At first glance, y appears to derive from a by processes of melodic inversion (formalized as the function INVERT) and voice-exchange (formalized as the function ROTATE). But try as one might, y cannot be seen to derive directly from a even though, by preserving the motivic resemblance, Bach takes pains to make them appear similar. A more fundamental difference between the two passages lies in their function. Whereas a announces a beginning by presenting the tonic and dominant in succession, y functions as linear connective tissue linking (by consecutive parallel sixths) a 2 (mm. 7-8) with f32 (mm. 11-14) by alternating forms of X(INV). Given a gap in the disposition between a 2and f32) one can easily imagine Bach's pen elaborating the stepwise linear ascent with forms of X. But logically

22

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

a) Derivation of y

I$'~ ~,

:;j

~

-

,

JO

,

¥rEI'a:uI~

I

.

11

j

"1

.

+-

-----'"-." .

I

1\

lLr cL!rTW '

r

i

I

"

,~

6

h) Derivation of () 1')

II

_1*'•.

~

====

16

• "'0'

..

1*'.L

~-

[-L--

'

. .L~

.

17

-

••11-. ••

-P-

-fL.

..

.

18

19

.

•

-

-.f'-f#-•.•1I-.~ ?

.n

r

6

11-

.b.1I-..•

.~"--H

..

f

'-J

" tJ

I

j

-

}

t---

\~

10

10

j 10

1°...

rt=~ :J.

10

c) Derivation of £

"------

------1

21

22

1':'\

~

-

'.:.I

J

,-,

r Cmaj:

J

iJ 1

=D

~

V

Example 1.7 Derivation of elaborative segments

this move belongs to a later stage of composition: only after having decided on the precise deployment of a and f3 (in the dispositio) could Bach have reflected on a connective link between them. The passage thus performs a primarily local function that knits together an open seam. y might also have resulted from a rejected moment in Bach's invention when he considered whether a melodic inversion could be performed on a. (Voice-exchange, after all, had been used to

What Is an Invention?

23

derive a 2 .) But because a hypothetical a(INV) was unusable-even its barebones outline fails to preserve a key-defining function-Bach resurrected a shadow of its idea when he came to seek out an elaborative link between a 2 and f32' Thus, while there is no doubt that y is a kind of weak substitution for an operation performed upon a that he could not undertake, the fact that y could be temporarily mistaken for a form of a attests to Bach's fascination with episodic play which comes to resemble inventive work. The elaborative passage called 8 is somewhat more complex than the little connective y, but it too provides a link to the subsequent invention by means of a simple linear sequence. (See Ex. qb.) The ingenuity of the passage can be glimpsed from the insight that paired forms of X(INV) and X with an identical pitch-content produce a downward stepwise sequence which "backtracks" when the pattern resumes at the lower neighbor. That is, both m. 15 and m. 16 took the same set of notes (e", £2, g", a to construct the two forms of X which, presented in the order "inversion then prime form;' yielded a patterned sequence that moved twice as slowly as the usual stepwise variety. Considering that the terminus of f32 and the beginning point of f33 are only a third apart in the treble, Bach was able to demonstrate how to fill a substantial space (four measures) with a directed musical motion that, at the same time, covers very little ground. The circuitous nature of this sequence is of such interest-it occurs nowhere else in the piece-that the surface pattern diverts attention away from the subordinate voice-leading and again, like y, recalls the alternating gestures of a, thereby lending a remarkable unity to the surface of the piece. As was shown earlier, the need for a final cadential passage in the piecelabeled E-resulted from Bach's choice to use a defective segment expressing a new element of invention (f33) over a transposed version of a complete segment that said nothing new. Although there is a limit to ingenuity among the highly conventionalized cadence schemes, Bach devises an ingenious ending that hints at yet a new challenge, the contrapuntal combination of X and X(INV). As Ex. qc shows, he took the aborted ending of f33-a statement of X(INV)-and tacked on two notes (d and e) so as to make it look as if X appeared in the bass in augmentation, a special contrapuntal feat. The challenge is only partly successful-Bach has to omit the last note of X in the bass and speed up its augmented version-but the maneuver creates a striking flourish at the finish. This elaborative gesture nevertheless falls short of a true invention: had Bach been able to combine X and X(INV) flawlessly, he would surely have displayed this proud achievement earlier in the piece. Although Mattheson may be right in emphasizing only "order and measure" for the disposition of a work, Bach's own elaborations, with their intricate detail and elegant correspondences, cannot have resulted merely from "cold blood and circumspection." For the refined qualities of Bach's elaborative segments are precisely what separate him from his German contemporaries, who tended to treat elaboration as a far more casual matter. In no other composer of the period does one find such fanatical zeal directed so often toward what others considered 2

24

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

)

the least interesting parts of a composition. Indeed, it is this hallmark of Bach's style that led earlier analysts to conclude that his music was an organic mass of motivic connections. While these connections may have looked to some as if composition consisted of pasting one basic motive across the expanse of a piece, an analysis attuned to the difference between inventions and their elaborations allows for an understanding that is both more varied in scope and more vivid in its uncovering of human actions.

The Decoration and Execution The art of decorating or embellishing rarely affects the substance of an invention; rather it is a matter of matching the frequency and kind of ornaments to the style of the piece. (The well-known variant of the C major invention, BWV 772a, in which Bach substituted triplet sixteenths for the duplet sixteenths on the second and fourth beats of the subject must be considered therefore a product of decoration rather than any change in the compositional intent.) In the C major invention, the few notated decorations-two mordents and five trillsare of interest because they grace only inventive segments. The trills in a , help frame its two-measure length, while the trill in m. 8 in a 2 places weight on the £1' which had substituted for the prominent octave jump in a,. The identically placed mordents (m. 5, m. 13) call attention to the striking leap of a minor seventh that immediately precedes the drive to the cadence in {3, and ensures in {32 that one hears the voice-exchange. The parallel trills in these {3-segments (m. 6, m. 14), moreover, highlight the identical endings in {3, and {32' underscoring that (32 had swapped parts once again at its cadence. It is also telling that no trills appear in mm. 9-10, a significant absence that heightens the contrast between a 2 , a structured invention, and )', a passage of elaboration en route to a more important destination. Of course an argument from absence-ad ignoratiarn-is rarely persuasive on its own. I can think of no good reason, for example, why a performer would not add a trill on the last quarter of m. 20, following the example of mm. 6 and 14. As the one in charge of executing the piece, the player would reason that the composer expected him or her to supply the missing ornament, that this was part of the job of a thinking musician. This logic holds even for Bach, whom Scheibe accused of "expressing in notes every ornament, every little grace, and everything that one thinks of as belonging to the method of playing."3R Naturally this accusation is highly exaggerated. Although there is in fact precious little room in Bach's works to add flourishes of melodic ornamentation, the modest addition of so-called essential ornaments omitted by common conventions of musical shorthand rarely poses any problem. One should not infer from Scheibe's reproach, in other words, that Bach only intended embellishments where he explicitly marked them, although there is often a musical reason that caused him to notate them where he did. Drawing on a colloquial interpretation of the divisions of rhetoric, I have shown how the C major Invention had a subject, namely, the first seven notes, which

What Is an Invention?

25

was treated in different ways. In the first instance, this subject was molded into two inventions, each a complete two-voice framework. While the first invention constituted an opening gesture and was key-defining, the second worked on the subject first through the derivation of a melodic chain and then by using it to approach a cadence in the dominant. Each of these two core inventive ideas was constructed in such a way as to permit orderly transformations of its materials. The process of invention therefore included thinking through the feasibility of operations such as voice-exchange (contrapuntal inversion at the octave), melodic inversion, and a reversal of mode. The various operations were not always realizable, and much of the ingenuity of the piece can be traced to adjustments Bach made to circumvent the contrapuntal or harmonic improprieties as they arose. Sometimes simple substitutions were in order and the basic function of the segment was kept intact. At other times operations could be performed only on part of a segment: here the successful bit of the transformation found its way into the piece while the ungrammatical bit was discarded. Because inventions had clear functions, we were also able to tell when melodic or harmonic processes had the upper hand. By thinking through the deployment of this collection of inventions, it became clear which links in the composition had to be forged and which gaps filled. While the terminal points for these elaborations (and hence their local function) were set in advance by the voiceleading, their content was determined in each case by a unique, if informal, manipulation of the subject. Some elaborations were made to resemble inventions; others evoked the form of an invention that could not be realized. Finally, the piece was decorated with tasteful embellishments (some of which help to highlight the structure) and handed to the player to realize in performance. Taken as a guide to hearing the piece (as well as penetrating its structure), this analysis shows the C major Invention as a product of both inspiration and work. The piece is inspired because Bach was able to discover a subject that could be rethought in myriad ways. The piece demonstrates hard work in the rigorous handling of the inventions, in their ingenious manipulations which manage to sound so uncontrived, in the clever adjustments that keep the transformations viable, and in the elegant connections that cement it all together. The analysis may even alter the experience of the work in that it challenges both players and listeners to draw parallels, to accentuate real oppositions (and to downplay false ones), to hear functions in context, and to note the final decorative gloss-in short, to appreciate the most subtle distinctions the piece has to offer. Finally, the analysis demonstrates how thoroughly Bach has exhausted his little subject, how he has, in other words, understood it. Within the modest world of a little preamble, this is saying a great deal. One might characterize the project undertaken here as an analysis of compositional mechanisms whose workings produce a kind of map of musical thought. This idea of a conceptual map differs somewhat from the more common idea

26

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

of musical structure in that the function and relationships between key ideas outweigh a preoccupation with the sequence in which they are ultimately heard. Inventive processes are thereby understood as pragmatic actions that are in great measure amenable to rational reconstruction. Casting a wary eye at the idea of analyzing music as an organism-an idea allied with later German idealismthis approach builds on the positive qualities valued in the pre-Romantic notion of mechanism, which, in the words of M. H. Abrams, sees art as "a deliberate craft of ordering means to ends."39 Rather than conceiving musical structure as unconscious growth-an aesthetic model that presumes a spontaneous invention beyond the grasp of intentional human actions-I prefer to highlight the predictable and historically determined ways in which the music was "worked on" by the composer. This intention to speculate on Bach's willfulness invites us to imagine a piece of his music not as inevitably the way it is, but rather as a result of a musicality that devises and revises thoughts against a resilient backdrop of conventions and constraints. This is why the analysis of a piece of music can include an account not only of fulfilled intentions but also of frustrated desires. The benchmark against which one measures the plausibility of such readings is far from mysterious: one has merely to take into account the ultimate set of harmonic and contrapuntal possibilities and limitations which Bach, after all, accepted as preternaturally binding. Thus, while it is true that parts and whole in Bach cohere in a way that is often just short of miraculous-a metaphorically guided perception that has always fueled organicist analyses-I find it more profitable to chip away at musical "miracles:' pursuing instead Bach's inclination to regard certain laws as binding and others as breakable, to accept certain limits as inviolate and others as restrictive, to judge certain techniques productive and others fruitless, and to admire some ideas as venerable while rejecting others as outmoded. In brief, I favor analyses that capture Bach as a thinking composer. The notion of invention that underlies this enterprise emerges, then, not merely from historical interest but from a concern that analytic indifference to "inventions" tends to sanction methods that in fundamental ways are grossly anachronistic. Although most analysts believe that the historical appropriateness of a theory is a dead issue-the received wisdom is that theory so often follows practice that theory need only concern itself with logical consistency and explanatory power-it is my belief that historical propriety, and with it the belief in a plausible reconstruction of Bach's thought, is an indispensable component of analysis. In the simplest sense, historical propriety means avoiding explanations for a piece of music that one can assert to have been utterly inconceivable to the composer. Pragmatically, this means being suspicious of terms that collide with well-established concepts and assumptions current in Bach's day, while at the same time daring to theorize beyond what can be reconstructed from explicit statements of eighteenth-century music writings. In one kind of anachronistic model-perhaps the most widespread-analysts

What Is an Invention?

27

will favor form (dispositio) over invention, which is to say that the nominal order of events will be judged more important than the logical hierarchy of ideas. The most widespread kind of formalism is the watered-down version of Adolph Bernhard Marx that has been packaged as "listeners' guides" and "music appreciation" texts, that is, the familiar view that music consists of "forms" comprising patterned blocks of time occupied by themes (binary form, rondo form, sonata form). Judged from this admittedly simplistic standpoint, Bach's music either seems trivial because large-scale musical events are so utterly predictable, as in his arias, or amorphous because of the so frequently blurred formal schemata, as in his concertos. More often from this perspective, Bach's "forms" have to be considered sui generis, which is why fugue (in our century) has been demoted from a form to a mere texture, as I show in Chapter 5. In the early eighteenth century, form was seen instead as an occasional feature of a genre, and not the general theoretical category subsuming the genres that it later became. The anachronistic reversal of priorities, which sees individual genres as illustrations of larger forms, is what sends analysts searching for Bach's "forms" in the mistaken idea that Bach and his contemporaries chose their compositional strategies on this basis. Yet formalists are not merely those who think in adjoining schematic units. They also include anyone for whom the order of musical events is a primary motor of analytic thinking. Schenkerians, for example, who make a special point of downplaying the surface order of events and disparaging the superficiality of Marxian forms, depend on their own formal typologies (one-part form, two-part interruption form, and so on) structured by the number and kind of descents of the UrZinie and thereby stress that the voice-leading of an entire composition, regardless of genre, size, and musical content, is a fundamental determinant of its structure. Historical precedents for what appear to be similar approaches have commonly been cited as adumbrations of Schenker, such as C. P. E. Bach's writings on diminution or F. E. Niedt's expansion of a pre-existing thoroughbass line in a set of dances. But what these appeals to historical models fail to take into account is the question of genre and invention. For as soon as one considers works in which invertible counterpoint is prominent (such as in fugues, arias, preludes, sonatas, even some dances) or genres in which inflected paradigms such as ritornellos are prominent (arias, choruses, concertos, and some preludes), it stands to reason that local voice-leading will often be a by-product of these more involved contrapuntal and harmonic operations rather than some underlying motor. Subscribing to universal schemes of tonal voice-leading irrespective of genre and style results therefore in a futile exercise in organicism precisely because the imagined composer is implausibly made to jump through several hoops located simultaneously in distant rings of the circus. (These issues are taken up in Chapter 6.) Even without debating further this theoretical orientation, it is worth pondering how a primary concern for the order of events elevates the ancillary category of disposition to a position of stature far exceeding

28

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

its importance as an operative concept in Bach's day. As a result, it is easy to see how the paradigms of invention and their related processes may be neglected. Style critics, on the other hand, having appropriated methods of connoisseurship in painting, see the outward garb of the musical material as the defining feature of classification and meaning, so that one frequently encounters arguments that classify or even attempt to date a work on the basis of the external character of its musical subject. Bach's Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, accordingly, has been considered an early work because of its old-fashioned five-part scoring and its use of antiquated viola da gambas: its style, according to these assumptions, determines the character of the piece. (I reexamine this argument in Chapter 7.) In rhetorical terms, style criticism can be said to favor decoration over invention, which makes little sense for any composer so committed to "good inventions and developing them satisfactorily." This totalizing idea of style as an organic composite of all possible empirical descriptions, already dismissed by analytic formalists as superficial, forgets that "clothes don't make the man;' that musical inventions can be clad in garbs of many colors, colors that rarely alter the substance of the compositional idea. To worry about unnecessary anachronism, of course, only warns an analyst away from some theories: it alone does not comprise a theoretical statement. To think positively about the matter of appropriate context means proposing a hypothesis of the historically imaginable, and with it the hope that an explanation might have been fathomable to Bach. Some will think this an exercise in futility. How, given our historical distance-they might ask-can one pretend to think in Bach's terms? But to imagine an explanation that the composer would have found plausible is not the same as saying that we should confine ourselves to the language and conceptual apparatus of the early eighteenth century, although it is always useful to know if an eighteenth-century equivalent for a theoretical term exists. For even more than the usual objection that theory follows belatedly on the heels of practice, one must confront the unavoidable "we-they problem" when attempting to treat invention as both historical category and analytic object. We are interested in analysis of Bach's works to show them as products of genius; they (writers contemporary with Bach) were interested (for the most part) in teaching amateur composers. A more appropriate question might be put this way: how can we appeal to the linguistic habits of eighteenth-century writers if the purpose of their language was never meant to serve our present-day interests? The answer to this dilemma is more a postulate than an argument: the fact is that, intuitively, we understand a great deal about Bach's music and do not find the culture in which he worked especially mystifying. While this statement does not admit of any proof, it seems a good place to begin. At least as an axiom it is more attractive than a position which is indifferent to interpretation and which proposes in its place mere theoretical consistency. While it is true that intuitive understanding must be questioned from time to time, I see no reason for an

What Is an Invention?

29

inveterate skepticism that leads a retreat into abstract theorizing without concern for the composer as thinker. Besides, the often assumed difficulty of reconstructing the commonplaces of musical thought for Bach and his compatriots is highly overrated. Many available sources can provide guidance: there are the theoretical treatises themselves, the music dictionaries, the practical textbooks, the published controversies, all of which impart a sense of what was taken for granted and permit the construction of a context in which Bach could devise his own unique response to his environment. Even in their more casual use of languagesuch as in personal letters, official memoranda, and on title pages-Bach and his contemporaries willingly reveal the common terms of their thought. And from these common terms can be inferred a great many things, not the least of which is that certain of our (anachronistic) concerns are strikingly absent. (The weighty preoccupation with a composition's "external form" is a good example.) Thus, even when the functions of a mechanist analysis are formalized (as in my use of capital letters) to capture the sense of a strict or "automated" procedure, the underlying ideas are for the most part those named and discussed in the first half of the eighteenth century.40 Instead of rejecting eighteenth-century terminology as primitive and inadequate, it is more revealing to unearth its meanings so as to lay bare the substratum of musical thought. It is a truism, of course, that historians cannot be entirely satisfied with terminology contemporary with the events, if only to take advantage of the manifold perspectives afforded both by a backward-looking glance as well as an engagement with the issues of the present. But the question in analysis and theory has often been mistakenly posed as choosing between two exclusive alternatives-either the "historical" language of the past or the "theoretical" language of the present-a binary opposition that begins to unravel upon closer inspection. Although it is useful to suspect the self-evidence of present-day concepts as well as the guaranteed authenticity of those of the past, a sympathetic appropriation of both can spur on a process of discovery that can help attain a closer focus on a musical object and its human inventor. What I hope to show, then, is why pursuing Bach's inventions is an intuitively appealing way to approach his music. Instead of allowing abstract notions of music structure to set the analytical agenda-as in theories demonstrating organic unity-one searches for the historical modus operandi that informs the practice of Bach's daily craft. This goal remains attractive despite the fact that the notion of invention embodies a contradiction, asking us, in effect, to make do with two logically incompatible positions. On the one hand, writers in a long and venerable tradition assert that invention cannot be taught: you must have a talent for it. On the other hand, the same sources maintain that invention is only learned by studying models of good inventions. Yet if invention is inborn, why teach it? The eighteenth century was not bothered by this question and had a ready answer available. As Scheibe put it: "Invention is inborn in us, and art and hard work adorn it in suitable attire:'41 This metaphorical solution suggests,

30

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

perhaps, that it is best to leave the paradox unresolved so that we recognize its power to capture our persistent belief in the metaphysics of genius at the same time that we merrily go about analyzing the "genial:' Invention is therefore no mere historical curiosity but actually a forceful and timely idea, precisely because it crystallizes deeply held views about high art while at the same time challenging us to reflect on the human actions that produce it. There is more to the pursuit of Bach's inventions than merely identifying and analyzing them: ultimately one needs to judge them as products of history which continue to speak meaningfully today. Rather than distilling these ideas into a unitary notion of Bach's "style;' I refer to the range of tendencies that one encounters in Bach's oeuvre as his "patterns of invention." With this phrase I mean to signal the web of compositional thoughts and actions that Bach brings to his works, patterns that not only govern the creation of a single piece of music but, what is far more important, disclose a human experience in which music plays a privileged role. To be sure, the C major Preambulum offers only the most modest foreshadowing of what these patterns of invention are capable, exhibiting, in Bach's words, merely "a foretaste of composition." What the piece nonetheless embodies is a neat paradox embracing freedom and necessity, showing how one is inextricably linked to the other, how the exhilarating discovery of new thoughts brings with it severe responsibilities-in short, showing how one assumes risk and draws the appropriate consequences. This inherent respect for music demonstrates nothing less than a respect for the inherent meaningfulness of the world and every manner of res severa found in it. Rather than seeking a universal method of invention-a thesis that defies both common sense and the historical evidence-the following chapters dwell on distinct kinds of inventive processes specific to various musical genres without any attempt to survey the entire field of Bach's wide-ranging oeuvre. Several genres are observed in some detail, first, to reflect on the nature of their beginning points, and second, to show how these beginning points bring about contrasting procedures of disposition and elaboration in the completed work. By describing how an "invention" depends on the genre in which it operates, I aim at readings that show how Bach's approach to invention results not in well-wrought artifices appealing to good taste, but rather in profound interpretations of contemporary traditions that alter the very assumptions underlying musical experience. Throughout this book, I ask why Bach emulates his models so idiosyncratically, which is nearly the same as asking why his works still cause us to marvel at their enigmatic beauty. I have intentionally begun with a rather limited notion of invention because it was Bach's pedagogical idea to begin with a strictly defined musical idea and observe its development and realization. But one cannot stop here, for "invention" embraces a wide variety of processes and musical actions. Perhaps the most important beginning point is a pre-critical step that apprehends and assimilates the inventions of other composers both past and present. Although this idea has

What Is an Invention?

31

traditionally been studied under the rubric of "influence:' it is worth pursuing in the case of Bach how he adapts, alters, and often transforms in unexpected ways the inventions of others, a process I call "composing against the grain" in Chapter 2. In the case of the concerto and the fugue, Bach's inventions can be understood as eminently practical tools, where the process of discovery is used to formulate a complex mechanism for crafting large-scale movements. Here (as discussed in Chapters 3 through 8) one can observe Bach testing his "compositional machines;' spurring them on to produce beyond their capabilities, and pressing them onward to a point where the distinction between invention and its elaboration begins to evaporate. Bach's inventions can also be construed as beginning points for musical thought in less formally mechanized patterns, as when he works with hybrid genres (discussed in Chapters 4 and 8) in which two sets of inventive procedures overlap or when the conventions of a serious genre are allowed to overcome those of a more modest one. In addition, since Bach was a musician paid above all to compose vocal music, I explore how the realm of invention might map musical ideas to the setting of verbal texts (treated cursorily in Chapters 3 and 8). Taken as a complex matrix of thought about how music is seen to be discovered as well as to discover itself, Bach's notion of invention also represents, finally, a philosophical and theological position about the status of music itself. Here (as seen in Chapters 4 and 8) Bach's music will be situated within the context of an early Enlightenment theory of signs phenomenally ill-equipped to accept what his music was prepared to say. As the discoverer and tinkerer standing behind his inventions, Bach too must be judged as taking a stand on the nature of musical meaning, the ability and power of music not merely to playa humble supporting role in representing the sensate world but also to take a critical hand in interpreting and changing it. While it is true that Bach will never be fully comprehended-much will remain beyond our grasp-we can nevertheless share in a good number of his secrets.

32

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

2 Composing against tfie 9rain

In August of 1730 Bach submitted a carefully worded memorandum to the Leipzig Town Council, in which he appealed for a restoration of subsidies to support the performance of church music under his direction. Funds allotted to his predecessors, Bach wrote, had been withdrawn, and the result was that music-making at the municipal churches had fallen into an appalling "decline." Only a renewed monetary commitment on the part of the town authorities would enable the Thomas-Cantor to attain an adequate standard by permitting him to hire and rehearse additional choristers and instrumentalists. In further support of his argument, Bach noted that the urgency of his "short but most necessary draft for a well-appointed church music" sprang from the increasingly urbane flavor of German musical life. As he put it (in the long-winded style typical of his prose): The state of music is quite different from what it was, since our artistry has increased very much, and taste has changed astonishingly, and accordingly the former style of music no longer seems to please our ears, and considerable help is therefore all the more needed in order to choose and appoint such musicians as will satisfy the present musical taste, master the new kinds of music, and thus be in a position to do justice to the composer and his work ... It is, anyhow, somewhat strange that German musicians are expected to be capable of performing at once and ex tempore all kinds of music, whether it come from Italy or France, England or Poland, just as may be done, say, by those virtuosos for whom the music is written and who have studied it long beforehand. I Underlying this argument in the Memorandum is an implied narrative of renewal and regeneration, and in it Bach charts the arrival of a new cosmopolitanism within German musical life to which the modern composer must selfconsciously adapt. Since so much demanding "foreign" repertoire must be mastered by German musicians, it stands to reason-the Memorandum

33

2 Composing against tfie 9rain

In August of 1730 Bach submitted a carefully worded memorandum to the Leipzig Town Council, in which he appealed for a restoration of subsidies to support the performance of church music under his direction. Funds allotted to his predecessors, Bach wrote, had been withdrawn, and the result was that music-making at the municipal churches had fallen into an appalling "decline." Only a renewed monetary commitment on the part of the town authorities would enable the Thomas-Cantor to attain an adequate standard by permitting him to hire and rehearse additional choristers and instrumentalists. In further support of his argument, Bach noted that the urgency of his "short but most necessary draft for a well-appointed church music" sprang from the increasingly urbane flavor of German musical life. As he put it (in the long-winded style typical of his prose): The state of music is quite different from what it was, since our artistry has increased very much, and taste has changed astonishingly, and accordingly the former style of music no longer seems to please our ears, and considerable help is therefore all the more needed in order to choose and appoint such musicians as will satisfy the present musical taste, master the new kinds of music, and thus be in a position to do justice to the composer and his work ... It is, anyhow, somewhat strange that German musicians are expected to be capable of performing at once and ex tempore all kinds of music, whether it come from Italy or France, England or Poland, just as may be done, say, by those virtuosos for whom the music is written and who have studied it long beforehand. I Underlying this argument in the Memorandum is an implied narrative of renewal and regeneration, and in it Bach charts the arrival of a new cosmopolitanism within German musical life to which the modern composer must selfconsciously adapt. Since so much demanding "foreign" repertoire must be mastered by German musicians, it stands to reason-the Memorandum

33

argues-that the Council should appropriate more money if Leipzig is to "satisfy the latest taste." Now it would astonish no one if this fashion-conscious statement had issued, say, from the pen of Georg Philipp Telemann, whom the very same Town Council only eight years earlier had wished to appoint to the Cantorate in preference to Bach. But since this is Bach's memorandum, one has to wonder whether his argument was genuine, or perhaps was merely a ploy to appeal to the worldly burghers on the Town Council. The charge of opportunism looms large, if only because Bach's church music cannot really be considered especially "tasteful": unlike Telemann's cantata cycles, which were performed all over Protestant Germany, Bach's own Jahrgiinge were not likely to have found favor in German church establishments away from Leipzig, nor to have been published in salable editions as were Telemann's church works. While there is no question that Bach's sacred music made extraordinary technical and musical demands on his players, and that he certainly felt entitled to generous support from the Council, his music was scarcely the way it was because of an accommodation to the latest taste. The key phrase in the Memorandum is Bach's reference to doing "justice to the composer and his work." For it is not as though the Leipzig churches heard much music by French, Italian, or English composers, not to mention Polish ones. With few exceptions during the 1720S they heard as the main musical offering-week in and week out-the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And it was this difficult and challenging music, with the strange reception it accorded foreign styles that cohabit so uneasily with older, indigenous kinds of composition-and not accommodations to the latest fashion-that accounted for the challenges that faced Bach's musicians as well as the composer's corresponding need for increased appropriations from the Town Council. The "mastery of new kinds of music," in other words, referred to none other than Bach's own. Coming from a composer whose church music, despite its obvious debts to music from Italy and France, could not, by any reasonable standard, have been regarded as satisfying "the present musical taste;' the Memorandum might best be read, then, as flattering the enlightened commercial spirit of enterprise that Bach gauged to have reflected the prevailing sentiment on the Council: just as a merchant must adapt to new conditions prevailing in a fluctuating business environment, so too must a musician stay abreast of new developments in musical fashion if he is to keep his patrons satisfied. It is nowhere recorded what the Town Council made of Bach's argument for musical progress. Possibly they judged it both tendentious and self-serving. The Memorandum, in any event, fell on deaf ears: less than two months later, Bach made the dire admission in a letter to his childhood friend Georg Erdmann that the Leipzig "authorities were odd and little interested in music, so that I must live amid almost continual vexation, envy and persecution."2 This revelation is striking both for its candor and for its extreme characterization of Bach's professional situation. It seems as if Bach was now able to acknowledge a kind of

34

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

irresolvable dissonance between his employers and his own musical aspirations that impelled him to seek a position elsewhere. And even though he would ultimately remain at Leipzig until his death twenty years later, there are no further signs of verbal accommodation, no further appeals to the cause of musical progress, and no further pleas to "satisfy the present musical taste." Indeed, the decade of the 1730S ushered in what can be understood as Bach's more self-confident acceptance of his individuality, leading not only to what are termed the "speculative late works" of his final decade but also to a more freewheeling kind of experimentation in which the "progressive" styles of the day were subjected to a rigorous examination and critique. To view both the 1730 Memorandum and the Erdmann letter as a kind of turning point is not to see them as evidence of a new approach to composing music, but rather as an affirmation of a pronounced and personal element in Bach's approach toward musical invention. The seemingly belated acknowledgment of this individuality is a function, surely, of inhabiting a pre-Romantic age in which the very idea of an idiosyncratic or adversarial music is unthinkable. Judged from this vantage point, each of Bach's attempts to minimize his aesthetic differences with his contemporaries is understandable, whether it consisted in concealing idiosyncrasy, in appealing to the value of "hard work;' in subscribing to the venerable traditions of the past, or, in the case of the Memorandum, in flirting with the new German cosmopolitanism. Once Bach had died, his musical heirs no longer nurtured any such illusions, though they had their own problems in coming to terms with the nature of his achievement. While it is true that J. S. Bach became a favorite model for what was later to be called an "original genius;' 3 there was also an element of incomprehension even in Emanuel Bach's admiring description of his father's melodies as "strange, but always varied, rich in invention, and resembling no other composer" or his characterization of the elder Bach's "serious temperament [which] drew him to music that was serious, elaborate, and profound."4 Here was a composer who-during the entire course of an influential career-had committed himself uncompromisingly to a rocky musical road of harsh judgments and rigorous self-evaluation, a musician who composed against the grain. The discussion of the C major Invention in Chapter 1 disclosed an obsession with inventive processes, even within the context of a small pedagogical work. By exposing a tension between Mattheson's neat formulations on melodic invention and Bach's working-through of a kaleidoscope of possibilities, I tried to lay bare the extraordinary sense of purpose that pervades Bachian invention: a process that "invents itself" in order to uncover previously unsuspected "discoveries." It is important to recognize, however, that this nearly uncontrollable pursuit of purposeful design was itself highly unusual for its time. Even Abraham Birnbaum, Bach's defender in the dispute with J. A. Scheibe, referred to "the astonishing mass of [his] unusual and well-developed ideas;' a compliment, to

Composing against the Grain

35

be sure, but admitting an uncomfortable degree of idiosyncrasy at the same time. 5 This is why, in examining Bach's nearly limitless quest for novel combinations, one misses their underlying patterns of invention if his music amounts to no more than well-wrought artifices. In fact, Bach's music often embodies a destructive moment, in that it frequently displays a high-handed disregard and critique of exemplary models. For rather than submitting to commonly accepted precepts of style and good taste-a sine qua non of the conventional rhetoric of invention-one of the hallmarks of Bach's music is its strange distortion of models that were presumably chosen, after all, for their exemplary qualities. Seen in this light, the C major Invention is not just some clever example of craftsmanship, but-judged against the aesthetic standards of Bach's day-the result of a near enslavement to invention: for given the modest aims of its pedagogical task, the piece both demands and sustains far too much attention. It goes too far in pursuing novelty, and thereby risks an offense against nature. It is no coincidence, as I will later suggest, that these are the same characteristics found in the twentieth-century gallery of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century canonic masterpieces. At the very least, this elective affinity between Bach and Romantic masterworks prompts a rethinking of the historical context in which a musician could devise such improprieties so that we can better understand what they might mean. In the sections that follow I suggest some points of departure for Bach's dissonant reception of contemporary musical styles by showing how-rather than simply emulating musical models or merely being "influenced" by themBach can be seen to intervene against the received idea behind a style or genre, thereby altering its value and identity. I begin by considering what is French about Bach's Allemande from the French Suite in G major, BWV 816, written in 1724 or so. In discussing a work such as this one, it is common to point out all the French characteristics that can be viewed as influences on Bach. While this is an important first step, we may miss Bach's individuality if we do not also explain what he has done with these influences. Consider the beautiful opening of this allemande. Here is a familiar work, which, by looking at some rudimentary historical context, we can readily identify as a French-influenced piece. (See Ex. 2.1.) The opening stepwise melodic gesture, the overall harmonic plan, and especially the style brise, the gently spun-out style of broken chords that characterizes the texture of the allemande, all label this piece as inspired by French models. For the sake of comparison, consider briefly a not wholly dissimilar allemande, this time in D minor by Louis Marchand, a French composer well known at the time who figured in a famous near-confrontation with Bach at Dresden, during which Marchand, challenged to compete against Bach at the keyboard, quietly vanished "by fast stage-coach" before the contest could take place. 6 The Marchand allemande (see Ex. 2.2) is an elegant work of pathos in mini-

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

ature, which begins with an elaborate two-fold statement of the lamenting falling tetrachord and goes on to spin out its discursive tale of woe. Its operating inventive rule, as it were, is to avoid repeating any gestures which it has just made manifest. We hear, for example, nothing more of the lamento after the first two measures. Instead-aside from a snatch of imitation in m. 6-Marchand crafts a prevailing sense of peripatetic wandering that is punctuated by brief sojourns on the occasional half and full cadences that observe the metrical conventions of the dance. The melancholy of the piece can be traced to its sophisticated harmonic and contrapuntal "events" that have little to do with one another. Some examples are the strikingly evaded half-cadence at m. 5, the wistful modal mixtures in mm. 3-4, the piquant cross-relations in m. 7, or the densely encrusted suspensions that precede the cadential passage in mm. 9-10. Taken as a whole, these gestures constitute a series of mournful thoughts or Einfalle, which, for Bach, can never have counted as the logic of invention. The style brise can be observed here predominately in the accompanying left-hand part as a self-evident accoutrement of style proper to the allemande, a mild arpeggiating device that ensures a richness of texture on the harpsichord by approximating the "holds" or tenues of the lute which had permitted several strings to resonate simultaneously. This "broken" style figures not so much as an elemental component in Marchand's composition, but rather as a casual marker of artifice that points-sometimes rightly, sometimes dishonestly-to the desired independence of lines that marks the elevated style of this music. (By the end of the eighteenth century the music of the French clavecinistes looked hopelessly vacuous to German observers. Forkel, for example, refers to Marchand's "ideas" as "empty and feeble, almost in the manner of Couperin, at least as may be judged by his compositions:' Bach himself seems, however, to have esteemed these pieces, and there is even a report of his performing them. Jacob Adlung recounts in 1758 that Marchand's Suites "pleased me only once, namely, when I was speaking with Capellmeister Bach about the contest once, when he was here [in Erfurtl. I told him that I had these Suites and he played them for me in his own manner, that is, very fleetingly and with much art.'')7 If one now considers the Bach allemande not so much as "influenced" by French "style" but rather reads it "against the grain" of the French genre, the piece appears considerably more arresting, perhaps even in somewhat questionable taste. For one thing, its melodic materials, once stated, invariably reappear ubiquitously as structural cells, a technique that lends a mildly pedantic character to the piece, as if one were asked constantly to take stock of configurations that appear repeatedly. In doing this, Bach plays up the artifice of his construction and plays down the more expected urge toward grace and elegance. In this way he defies the sense of concealed purpose which the Marchand work achieved so artfully by its tissue of equivocations and evasions. The texture of the Bach allemande also takes the notion of the "broken style" a bit too far: Bach begins with typical French reserve (middle of mm. 3-4), but

Composing against the Grain

37

4

Example 2.1 Allemande from French Suite in G major, BWV 816/1, mm. 1-24

then gets carried away with an insistent and busy reiteration of pedal tones, evoking the incompatible, older manner of a digitally motoric German keyboard prelude sometimes called an applicatio. The effect is one of rising excitement and directed activity approaching the cadence, but an effect that clearly extends beyond the norms of an acceptable French allemande. The Sarabande of the same suite embodies the same kind of obsession when, in mm. 13-16, it takes up the French idea of a hemiola before the cadence as an elegant gesture of displacement just before the reimposition of order. But, as Ex. 2.3 shows, Bach turns the displacements into a regularized "invention" which pits the two outer voices against the inner voice in a systematic metrical dialogue until the cadence is reached. The figural patterns thus traced on the dance floor are perhaps too

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

--

16

r 22

Example 2.1

(continued)

orderly and predictable, yet the music seems to marvel in its ability to transcend the tyranny of the dance rhythm within the duration of a full four-bar phrase, banishing any hope of a downbeat on m. 15 midway into the period. Perhaps the strangest anomaly in the Allemande is Bach's insertion of a chromatic passage just before the cadence. I call this an insertion because the passage is harmonically dispensable, though it is true that Bach surely wanted to fill twelve bars of music in both halves of the dance. As for the cadential progression itself, it assumes a more idiomatic shape only when one leaves out the chromatic interjection. Such an unprepared chromatic detour, invariably signifying tragedy and suffering, in a piece in the major and within the first half of the piece, no less, is a bizarre flouting of French standards: one might even

Composing against the Grain

39

-vv-

. ----I

" tJ

1l

:

.I:--:f

~

I

1

1:

:

r--

---

--1'-

J61=j 11

J-

3

6

"

r ~.

tJ

r

-

Ft=I

-vv-

r--"""::I

-vv-

7'~

W

-vv-

-r

~-

'VV'

r

'I

I

:

IIi

Example 2.2

,

'VV"

-vv-

I

I.

~~

r [J

r"""T

.,. I

U

r

I

I I

'VV'

~

Louis Marchand, Allemande from Suite I in D minor, from Pieces de clavecin (1699), mm. 1-11

call it a gaffe, an impermissible show of self-indulgence. What is especially peculiar about the "insert" is its voice-leading, shown in Ex. 2-4. Composed of a craggy descent of parallel fourths and three successive tritones, breathtaking in their audacity amid such innocence and charm, the passage is the spectacular highlight of the movement and arouses a far more disturbing evocation of the chromatic genus than was even attempted in Marchand's elegiac allemande in D minor. The two affective realms are in fact never really reconciled, and the cq in the "alto voice" in m. 11 stands as a rude reminder of a residual rupture between the chromatic and diatonic "discourses." Since the cql belongs to the chromatic realm-unlike the [II and d 1 which have already reverted to the

40

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

Example 2.3 Sarabande from French Suite in G major, BWV 816/3, mm. 13-16

r-----------------l A

~

oJ

I

-I

1

..I

r---,--or--...,

J

I

, , A

10 _~~

~

12

I

I

J. I

-

fL .. ~.

~7

~7

~7

i

I

I

Example 2.4 Voice-leading in BWV 816/1, mm. 10-12

conventional diatonic continuation of the first half of m. lO-the resolution of dissonances between the fifth and sixth eighth notes of m. 11 is made to sound jolting and crude. Bach's inventive strategy is, moreover, entirely comprehensible: an elegant and aristocratic facade is tempted by a surprisingly tragic pallor which then regains its composure, affecting a kind of amnesia toward the painful event. The amnesia, though, comes at a certain cost, since it leaves behind an unpleasant "twitch" of clumsy voice-leading that draws unwanted attention to itself. Bach is plainly proud of this passage: in fact, he likes it so much that he displays it at the end of the reprise as well, reflecting his common habit of flaunting his most original inventions, irrespective of their propriety. (With his insert Bach also ends up with 12 rather than 11 bars in each "couplet;' and this interest in rounded numbers can plausibly be taken as a "topic of invention" in a dance movement. Interestingly, Marchand is not bothered by this concern since he is perfectly happy with 11 bars in each half of his D minor allemande.) The cadences at the end of each section also betray a willful change in the normal affective stance of the French allemande. Instead of one of the conventional cadential schemes commonly found in the French composers whom Bach knew and respected, Bach writes a weird hybrid figure that merges a pseudo-style

Composing against the Grain

41

brise (already a kind of pseudo-polyphony) with just a hint of a suspended ~ j cadence familiar from the old motet and organ repertories: instead of aristocratic elegance, the piece concludes each time with the heavy overtones of theology. (A similar example-one could name many-is found in the Sarabande of the same suite, where the 4-3 suspension likewise substitutes for the conventional unfolding of the triadic harmony.) And it is not that Bach was unaware of this strange substitution, for-strikingly-he has included a perfectly conventional French cadence midway into the reprise, but in an unusual and peculiar position. (See Ex. 2.5. Bach enjoyed using this beautiful and distinctly French cadential device but invariably used it in the "wrong place." It appears, for example, in m. 69 and m. 82 of the G major fugue from Book I of the Well- Tempered Clavier, a work invoking a gigue, in which this spun-out cadence in style brise is inappropriate.) This is the kind of rich dissonant flourish, with its suspended and accented appoggiatura (which Rameau calls a chord of the eleventh in his Traite), in which the French keyboard composers loved to indulge just before the final cadences in serious dances. The inclusion of the French formula but in the wrong place therefore shows that Bach was well aware of the conventional practice, but chose, intentionally, to rethink its meaning and value. Bach's invocation of the French style brise itself in the allemande is also suspect. In contrast to Marchand's subtle invocation of the "broken style;' Bach uses the notational conceit of the style brise to disguise the workaday exercitio figures of running sixteenth notes that populate his inventions and keyboard preludes. The notation of the treble line in Ex. 2.1 (end of m. 20 to m. 22) could not be more pretentious in asserting its truly French credentials, though the idea that the lower part (with its repeated unison on d is contrapuntally independent should make us smile. Indeed, by comparing this notation with the identical figuration in m. 22 "spelled out;' as it were, in a far more sensible German "script;' one can see that Bach did not take his conceit too seriously. Rather, he usurps it for his own ends. A good portion of his piece can therefore be viewed as music composed by a surly foreigner, one who works not in respectful homage, but who, following the proverb, translates so as to betray. If one examines Johann Mattheson's keyboard suites, self-consciously entitled Pieces de clavecin, one can also observe this German tendency to industrious regularity without those languishing moments that so distinguish French key1

Example 2.5

42

)

Allemande from French Suite in G major, BWV 816, mm. 17-18

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

board music at its best. The difference between Mattheson and Bach is that Bach is aware of the depth of expression possible within the French allemande and emulates this attitude by infusing the piece with his own signs of profundity. That the result remains a curious amalgam, comparable perhaps to a fusion of Luther and Racine, is surely why the piece is so memorable and so rich in insights about the style on which it both comments and takes issue. Bach's concertos present us with an especially revealing case of the composer revising the expectations and values of the genre, a revision that translates into a new approach to its composition and reception. Bordering on much more learned compositions, Bach's concertos are an undeniably serious genre, while Vivaldi's, on which Bach's concertos rely for much of their inspiration, are by and large satisfied with clarity of purpose and a bit of virtuosity: arcane complexities are rarely of any sustained interest. The German rage for the instrumental works of Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) can be dated to around 1711 or 1712 when Vivaldi's first group of great concertos, L'Estro armonico, was published in Amsterdam. Enthusiasm for these string pieces seems to have spread like wildfire throughout northern Europe within about a decade, and one has to ask what it was that drew so many people to Vivaldi. Clearly the music was both innovative and full of visceral excitement: Vivaldi's chiseled and firmly etched ritornellos-the orchestral material that opened individual concerto movements-articulated a clear statement in a particular key without modulating away from it; frequently the harmonic vocabulary in these ritornellos restricted itself to little more than outlining the tonic and dominant sonorities. As a result, the pieces felt harmonically grounded in a new way not observed in the concertos of Corelli, Albinoni, or Torelli. One can, however, advance other, extra-musical reasons that contributed to the allure of Vivaldi's reputation throughout Europe-namely, the particular charms of his famed performance venue: the Ospedale della Pieta in Venice where Vivaldi, known as the Red Priest, directed a celebrated orchestra and chorus of what were commonly thought to be orphaned, abandoned, and indigent girls who premiered nearly all of his early works. 8 Venice by the early eighteenth century was perhaps Europe's leading tourist attraction, summoning aristocratic and other well-heeled travelers with its wealth of diversions-artistic, musical, and otherwise. A number of travelers' reports suggest the flavor of a visit to the mixed school and asylum where Vivaldi was active from 1703, the time of his appointment to the Pieta. An English traveler, Edward Wright, reports on his visit there around 1720: Every Sunday and holiday there is a performance of music in the chapels of these hospitals, vocal and instrumental, performed by the young women of the place, who are set in a gallery above and, though not professed, are hid from any distinct

Composing against the Grain

43

view of those below by a lattice of ironwork. The organ parts, as well of those of other instruments, are all performed by the young women. They have a eunuch for their master, and he composes their music. Their performance is surprisingly good, and many excellent voices are among them. And this is all the more amusing since their persons are concealed from view. 9 The mention of a eunuch as master of the girls, though comically absurd, reveals an often underplayed element in the touristic experience of hearing music at the Pieta. That is, at least some foreign listeners perceived the event as no less than a kind of exhibition at a harem, with all the forbidden pleasures that attend such a fantasy; hence it "is all the more amusing;' as Wright puts it, "since their persons are concealed from view." From the vantage point of the Pieta authorities, of course, the concealment of the musicians with a grille was there to "discourage mere visual admiration of feminine charm," as Eleanor SelfridgeField has put it. 10 On the other hand, the authorities were powerless to discourage visitors from drawing their own conclusions. This kind of sensational reportage is not unique to one wayward Englishman, but shows up some years later in 1739 in a description by a French jurist, Charles de Brosses, who actually met Vivaldi during his trip to Venice. "The transcendent music;' de Brosses writes, is that of the asylums. There are four of them, made up of illegitimate and orphaned girls ... They are brought up at the expense of the state and trained solely to excel in music. Moreover, they sing like angels and play the violin, the flute, the organ, the oboe, the cello, and the bassoon. In short, there is no instrument, however unwieldy, that can frighten them. They are cloistered like nuns. It is they alone who perform, and about forty girls take part in each concert. I vow to you that there is nothing so diverting as the sight of a young and pretty nun in white habit, with a bunch of pomegranate blossoms over her ear, conducting the orchestra and beating time with all the grace and precision imaginable. il Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (written about 1743) make a point of connecting the music of the scuole with a fantasy of sexual stimulation and arousal, and even when Rousseau managed to come face to face with the musicians themselves, his confrontation with reality did not diminish his ardor: Music of a kind that is very superior in my opinion to that of the operas and that has not its equal throughout Italy or perhaps the world is that of the scuole ... Every Sunday [vocal music] for a large chorus with a large orchestra, which [is] composed and directed by the greatest masters in Italy, [is] performed in barred-off galleries solely by girls, of whom the oldest is not twenty years of age. One can conceive of nothing as voluptuous, as moving as this music ... What grieved me was those accursed grilles, which allowed only tones to go through and concealed the angels of loveliness of whom they were worthy. I talked of nothing else. One day I was speaking of it at M. Le Blond's. "If you are so curious," he said to me, "to see these little girls, I can easily satisfy you. I am one of the administrators of

44

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

the house, and I invite you to take a snack with them:' I did not leave him in peace until he had kept his promise. When going into the room that contained these coveted beauties, I felt a tremor of love such as I never experienced before. M. Ie Blond introduced me to one after another of those famous singers, whose voices and names were all that were known to me. "Come, Sophie"-she was horrible. "Come, Cattina"-she was blind in one eye. "Come, Bettina"-the smallpox had disfigured her. Scarcely one was without some considerable blemish. Two or three, however, looked tolerable; they sang only in the choruses. I was desolate. During the snack, when we teased them, they made merry. Ugliness does not exclude charms, and I found some in them. I said to myself that one cannot sing thus without soul; they have that. Finally, my way of looking at them changed so much that I left nearly in love with all these ugly girlS. 12

Although there is really no hard evidence on this point, it is worth pondering whether the rush of excitement about Vivaldi in northern Europe was not connected in some way to a scarcely concealed titillation proceeding from well-circulated rumors of a cloistered orchestra of girls making exciting music. On the title page of an important collection of Vivaldi concertos found in Dresden, for example, one is not surprised to find the girls listed long before the composer: "Concertos for several instruments played by the girls of the charitable asylum of the Pieta before His Royal Highness the Most Serene Friedrich Christian, Royal Prince of Poland and Electoral Prince of Saxony. Music by Don Antonio Vivaldi, maestri de' concerti at the aforesaid asylum. In Venice in the year 1740."13 Yet another notion connected to Vivaldi's concertos is the issue of their commodity value, in which the composed works were exchanged in a kind of luxury trade engaged in by wealthy aristocrats. De Brosses, for example, notes that "Vivaldi became my intimate friend for the purpose of selling me some very costly concertos. He was partly successful in this, and I was successful in what I wanted, which was to hear him and have frequent and good musical diversion. He is a vecchio who composes furiously and prodigiously. I have heard him undertake to compose a concerto with all its parts more quickly than a copyist could copy it."14 The expeditious and businesslike delivery of Vivaldi's concertos to his eager consumers is also remarked on by a traveling German architect named Johann Friedrich Uffenbach, who visited Vivaldi in 1715. On March 6, Uffenbach spoke to Vivaldi "of some concerti grossi that I would like to have from him, and I ordered them from him," and by Saturday, March 9, "Vivaldi came to me and brought me, as had been ordered, ten concerti grossi, which he said had been composed expressly for me. I bought some of them. In order that I might hear them better he wanted to teach me to play them at once, and on that account he would come to me from time to time. And thus we were to start this very day." 15 I mention these worldly associations not to suggest that the young women of

Composing against the Grain

45

the Pieta or the commodity value of Vivaldi's concertos secretly playa tacit role in Bach's concertos-no one has ever hinted at any such association-but rather to say that these factors may have accounted for the lightning-quick popularity of Vivaldi's works among "consumers" and patrons of music such as Bach's young employer, Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar. At the very least the texts connected with Venice and Vivaldi suggest that the reception of the Vivaldian concerto in northern Europe lacked a distinctly high-minded profile, but rather profited from travelers' accounts of the experience of hearing the works in their native venue. This is not to deny that the central experience of Vivaldi's concertos in the North was couched in terms of the novelty of their invention. Even the earliest document characterizing Vivaldi's work at the Pieta from 1704 makes this point: "On Sunday the figlie del coro of the Pieta presented in their Vespers a sinfonia of instruments placed in every niche of the church with such harmony and with such novelty of ideas that people were ecstatic at the marvels produced and supposed that such manifestations must come from Heaven rather than from Earth:' 16 As late as the early 1750S, moreover, Johann Joachim Quantz was still commenting on Vivaldi's novelty in his recollections of the 1710S and drew particular attention to the innovative ritornellos.1 7 It is interesting to speculate how such a set of ideas about the Vivaldian concerto may have contributed to its cultivation by musical dilettantes. And in this connection we do find a direct link to Bach. At the very time of the Amsterdam publication of Vivaldi's opus 3, Bach's immediate employers were the junior dukes of Saxe-Weimar, Ernst August and Johann Ernst. Johann Ernst, the more musical of the two, was sent to study at the University of Utrecht in Holland from 1711 until 1713, when he returned to Weimar with a good many trunks filled with newly printed music. A few months before his return he had been in Amsterdam, where a well-known blind organist by the name of de Graaf was known to have played the latest Italian concertos as keyboard solos on the organ. Shortly after Johann Ernst's arrival back in Weimar-he was sixteen years old at the time-there appear organ transcriptions by Bach not only of concertos by Vivaldi but also of concertos composed by Prince Johann Ernst himself. Although it used to be thought that these Bach arrangements were mere studies by which Bach apprenticed himself to Italian concerto form, Hans-Joachim Schulze has suggested more plausibly that these were simply commissions of the young duke. 18 Bach's arrangement of the G major violin concerto by Prince Johann Ernst, for example, while charming, cannot be taken seriously as anything more than a flattering attempt to cover up the transparent harmonic poverty endemic to the original concerto. Although musical compositions by anyone of noble birth at this time are rare enough to warrant attention, it must be said that we are dealing here with the work of an amateur musician, and not even a particularly talented one at that. The point is that, of all genres, Johann Ernst was attracted to violin concertos,

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

six of which were even engraved and published three years after the prince's untimely death in 1715 by Telemann, who praised "the beauty of the concertos that you have made at such a young age."19 One can imagine that Vivaldian concertos modeled on the Venetian composer's opus 3 collection must have seemed relatively easy to write, even for a sixteen-year-old German prince with nine months of composition lessons under his belt. (The lessons were given by Bach's cousin Johann Gottfried Walther, who was likewise in the Duke's employ.) How then does a young, dilettante composer understand Vivaldi? Johann Ernst's Concerto in G major furnishes us with a fairly good idea. In the opening Allegro, the basic plan is to present an orchestral ritornello (the opening theme that returns throughout the movement) and to alternate it with solo episodes dominated by the solo violin. As Ex. 2.6 shows (mm. 1-14), the ritornello confirms one key-here G major-by employing a rudimentary harmonic vocabulary that remains securely anchored to the main key. The ritornello can likewise be divided up into three phrases (shown with brackets in the example), which correspond to three kinds of functions: an opening key-defining segment, a pattern of sequential rising intervals, and a cadential passage, here linked to the preceding passage and followed by a brief pause. The little solo episode (shown in mm. 15-21 in Ex. 2.6) is signified by a noticeable change in rhythmsfrom duplets to triplets-and modulates away from G major to D major. When the second statement of the ritornello occurs, it follows a typical Vivaldian move of presenting the ritornello five steps higher in the scale and in this case-somewhat unusually for Vivaldi, at least-presents the entire ritornello intact. Thereafter, the movement gets a little out of hand, for try as he might, the Prince finds it difficult to modulate away from the home key. Instead, he keeps finding himself drawn magnetically back to G major, a harmonic goal he ought to reach only much later in the piece. Unperturbed, yet aware that he cannot simply present the ritornello in the original key again, he chooses to alter the melody of the ritornello several times, which at least avoids monotony (see, for example, mm. 45-54). After extricating himself neatly from the tonic, he copes with an unprepared modulation to E minor and nearly manages to translate the ritornello into this, the minor sixth scale degree, but he gives up on discovering a bit of modal adversity and retreats immediately back to the familiarity of G major, his starting point. (See Ex. 2.7.) The movement ends somewhat precipitously with an extended and shapeless tutti that is really neither ritornello nor solo episode, that is, neither fish nor fowl, the Prince having given up on another labored restatement of the opening material. Vivaldi himself may be indirectly to blame for the Prince's troubles, since his own often clear sets of opening moves are most often followed by events that are far less predictable and formulaic than would please an amateur composer bent on replicating a simple recipe. My point here is less to ridicule the student prince than to assert the rather lowly status of a musical genre and style that could be imitated by someone with such obviously primitive musical skills. Johann Ernst was

Composing against the Grain

47

Viola

Vc.&Cemb.

Jl

.

Jl

.J

Solo

14 "

I . -___1':JA# -1'-#-1'- - -

tJ "

tJ

:

"1 r

22

........

3

_.........

............ r3.,

~~

)

.---

#~ -1'-#....---

...--

-~

-

-

~

)

~

Cemb.

r

3

• 6

6

16

6

6

6

1

6 4

Tutti

Example 2.6 Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, Concerto in G major, mvt. I, mm. 1-57

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

5

I

29 ./\

Solo

jj

--

t.J /I

- -

t.J

1

:

rn.n;

lJ

119.n=; j

jj

!

-J j 1.

..h

'-