The Well-Tempered (and not-so-well-tempered) Clavier

Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier as a showcase for a new tuning system that could play in all twelve major and all twelve minor keys. Up until that point, the various European tuning systems only worked for some keys, not all of them. If you were in or near the key of C, you were usually okay, but as you moved further out on the circle of fifths, things got ugly fast. So this new tuning system that actually sounded good in all the keys was an exciting development.

However… no one knows what tuning system Bach used. All we know is that it wasn’t twelve-tone equal temperament, the one we all use now. There were many systems in circulation at the time that people called “well temperament.” Was Bach using Werckmeister? Kirnberger? Kellner? Some idiosyncratic system of his own invention? No one knows. This video sums up the situation well:

Until this gets resolved, at least technology makes it easy to hear these different systems for yourself. I used Oddsound MTS-ESP to run some of the Well-Tempered Clavier preludes through various historical tuning systems. Here’s what I got:

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Party like it’s 1624

In trying to learn (and learn about) the Bach Chaconne, I’m facing a struggle that’s familiar from trying to learn about jazz. The chaconne is a dance form originating in the Americas, or among African people who were brought to the Americas. Spanish and Portuguese colonists brought the chaconne to Europe in the early 1600s, where it became a wildly popular dance. Over time, composers of “art” music got interested in it too, and they used it as the basis for an entire genre of increasingly abstracted compositions. By the time Bach wrote the chaconne in his Partita for Violin No. 2, he was referring to an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, something like a John Coltrane arrangement of a pop standard. It makes me wonder what a chaconne might have sounded like in its original context. Bach’s (and Coltrane’s) abstractions are wonderful in and of themselves, but you can’t fully appreciate them without understanding what they’re referring back to.

It’s easy to listen to Coltrane’s source material. If you try to do the same with for Bach, however, you have a harder time. When you do a Google search for chaconnes, you mostly find performances of Bach, or similarly abstracted works by other canonical composers. Thanks to Wikipedia, though, I did find a chaconne of the kind that a person might have actually danced to back in 17th century Spain. It’s a tune by Juan Arañés called “A La Vida Bona.” Here’s a performance by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band.

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Music in a capitalist culture

Midterm paper for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg

Max Weber locates the roots of capitalism in vestigial puritanical Protestantism. Émile Durkheim, in turn, gives a theory of how that Protestantism arose in the first place. In this paper, I ask two questions. First: can Weber’s and Durkheim’s theories of religion be extended to explain culture generally? Second, and more specifically: can their theories explain music?

Music is a valuable lens for examining cultures, because while every world culture includes it, the particular form and function varies considerably from one culture to another. Contemporary America contains a variety of musical subcultures and countercultures that overlap and conflict with one another. We might follow Weber’s example and say that America’s culture has capitalism as its single defining feature. And we might say that America’s commercial pop mainstream defines our musical culture. But those two generalizations conceal roiling masses of unresolved conflict.

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Prepping my rap and rock class at Montclair State

This summer, I’m teaching Cultural Significance of Rap and Rock at Montclair State University. It’s my first time teaching it, and it’s also the first time anyone has taught it completely online. The course is cross-listed under music and African-American studies. Here’s a draft of my syllabus, omitting details of the grading and such. I welcome your questions, comments and criticism.

Rap and Rock

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The harmonica explains all of Western music

If you want to understand the vast cultural struggle taking place in the study of Western harmony, you could do worse than to start with the harmonica. This unassuming little instrument was designed in central Europe in the 19th century to play the popular music of that time and place: waltzes, oom-pah music, and light classical. All of this music is “diatonic,” meaning that it’s based around the major scale, the do-re-mi you learned in elementary school. It’s also the harmony that you learn if you take a typical formal music theory class.

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