Struggling to comprehend Bach has been a reliable treatment for my quarantine blues. I’m guiding my listening with scholarly articles about his use of rhythm. Joseph Brumbeloe wrote a good one: “Patterns and Performance Choices in Selected Perpetual-Motion Movements by J. S. Bach.” By “perpetual motion,” Brumbeloe means unbroken streams of uniform note values. In another post, I talk about the Prelude from the Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major. This post deals with a similarly delightful and challenging piece, the Presto from the Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor. Here’s a performance by Viktoria Mullova:
I also like this lute transcription by Hopkinson Smith.
If you’re going to write something with a continual “meedly meedly meedly” rhythm like this, the big challenge is how to create a sense of structure without the natural scaffolding of contrasting rhythmic values and rests. Joseph Brumbeloe says that you “must rely on the accents or stresses arising through metric placement, tessitura and the grouping which is suggested in more subtle ways by various tonal patterns.” In other words, since the rhythm is uniform and boring by design, you have to get very creative with patterns of pitch and contour. That is exactly what Bach does in the Presto.
Here’s my MIDI visualization, showing key centers and melodic motifs:
And here’s the score, with my chord symbols.
In his book, Bach’s Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, Performance, Joel Lester devotes a chapter to the Presto. He compares it to Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo, which he finds to be comparatively empty.
[T]he sixteenths are merely filler in a leisurely bel canto melody with clearly marked phrase subdivisions… No significant level of rhythmic activity exists between this melody and the running sixteenths that fill in the melodic gaps.
Bach, on the other hand, is not just filling space with all those sixteenth notes. He’s doing something more subtle and ambitious.
Bach’s continuous sixteenth-note textures almost invariably project a metric hierarchy in which all levels project significant activity and in which a range of accentuations occur on metrically weak points, often boldly conflicting with one another and creating metric ambiguities. By deploying these interacting levels of significant rhythmic activity creatively Bach was able to create his characteristic increase in overall activity even in movements where the surface rhythm seems to be merely a continuous stream of sixteenths.
For example, Bach is constantly exploring the tension between duple and triple patternings, and he does so at several different time-scale durations simultaneously.
Instead of Paganini’s fast surface flashily elaborating a much slower simple melody, Bach’s metric hierarchy offers musical interest at every level: in the prominent sixteenths contesting the meter, in 3/8 versus 6/16, or in the alternation of different patterns in mm. 5–8.
The larger structure of the piece is interesting too. It’s divided into two movements, each of which has two sections. Each pair of sections begins identically before diverging. There’s a steady build in complexity from one section and movement to the next.
Every musical element that appears in the first half of the movement recurs in the second half, recomposed to heighten the level of activity. And within each half, each new element is more active than its predecessors, right up to the final cadence. As a result, both on the local level (the succession of ideas within each half) and on the larger level (the way the second half intensifies recurring elements from the first half) the levels of intensity are heightened.
Here’s a closer look at some particularly interesting passages. First, there’s the opening eleven measures:
Bach plunges right in with a three-note rise-and-fall arpeggio on G minor that he moves down in a meta-arpeggio for three straight bars. Finally, in measure four, he breaks the pattern and introduces a new one: an arpeggio going up, a scale pattern going down. In measure nine, Bach introduces yet another pattern: a three-note arpeggio going down, then a three-note arpeggio going up but starting lower. Bach then walks that pattern down by scale steps for three bars. That is a lot of excitement in just ten seconds of music!
There’s another cool pattern in measures 12-16:
Each bar starts with a chord root followed by a little middle-low-middle-high figure. This pattern walks around the circle of fifths.
In measures 17-24 you hear the opening arpeggio figure but upside down.
The arpeggios rise while the chord roots fall by thirds. Contrast!
Measures 25-28 contain a hook strong enough to build a whole modern pop song around:
In each little phrase, there’s a run up the first, second and third degrees of the scale implied by the underlying chord, followed by the notes Bb-A-Bb. These three notes function differently depending on the underlying chord: 1-7-1 over Bb, 7-6-7 over Cm, and 5-#4-5 over Eb.
In measures 30-39, Bach starts phrasing across the bar lines.
The pink sections have a nice bariolage-like pattern of diverging lines. The first, third and fifth notes in the pattern make a little rising scale, while the second, fourth and sixth notes stay flat and then descend. That pattern happens again two more times in this passage, and several more times later in the piece. The climbing figure starting in bar 33 is pretty wild. The accented note lands on beat three of measure 33, then on beat two of measure 34, and finally on beat one of measure 35. This is more like something you hear in a bebop tune than a Baroque one.
In measures 89-100, the bariolage pattern is back, connected by scales.
There are some strange chords in here. You’re probably supposed to think of measures 93-100 as a long A7 chord with some suspensions or chromatic alterations, but it’s more fun to think of Bach faking you out by “resolving” the A7 in unexpected ways before finally landing on Dm in measure 101.
Each section begins with long arpeggio figures across a single unchanging chord. In measures 143-165, the arpeggios are uneven, and they spell out complex changing chords.
It’s especially nice in measures 149-154 how the “polarity” of the arpeggio pattern alternates every bar. You could spend weeks unpacking these five bars. I especially like how it’s a five-bar pattern too, not a four-bar pattern like a normal person would use.
Aesthetically, this piece is beautiful, but it’s also tiring. You can’t possibly absorb all this musical information in real time. No one knows exactly why Bach wrote the violin partitas and sonatas, but they were probably not meant for entertainment, or for functional purposes like his church music. Instead, Bach probably intended them to be pedagogical exercises. They may also have been purely theoretical; it’s not clear whether any of the solo violin works were even performed in Bach’s lifetime, or that anyone at the time would have been capable of performing them. To be able to experience all there is to experience in the Presto, you need to be able to move through it slowly, and to hear parts repeatedly. You can do that by playing it on an instrument, or by reading the score if you can do that (I can’t.) Fortunately, the DAW gives you some other ways to get inside the music.
For the remix, I warped out both Mullova’s and Smith’s performances over some beats sampled from Duke Ellington, McCoy Tyner, and Lyn Collins.
I’m not the first person who heard this and wanted to remix it. Johannes Brahms, perhaps feeling that this music is not exhausting enough, added a second part that layers additional counterpoint, first underneath every single sixteenth note, then on top of it. Thanks, but no thanks. I like Bach’s solo instrument music exactly because of the one-note-at-a-time constraint. It’s a (barely) manageable amount of information, and I enjoy the participatory aspect of mentally filling in the implied counterpoint.