Bach’s Duet in E minor BWV 802

I did a bunch of posts on here a while back about how I like it when Bach gets chromatic and weird, and ever since then, people have been recommending me more of his weird chromatic music. Somebody on Twitter recommended that I check out the Duet No. 1 in E minor from the third volume of the Clavier-Übung III (“keyboard-practice”). Whoever you are, you were right, I do like this!

The word “duet” here does not mean that it was written for two people, but rather, that it’s a fugue in two voices. (You could certainly play it on two instruments if you wanted, though.) I like Bach’s two-voice counterpoint pieces as listening experiences because they are easier to follow and understand than the ones with more voices. The very dense ones are fascinating, but they throw too much information at me for enjoyable real-time listening.

The Duet was probably written for organ:

Here’s my visual analysis of Angela Hewitt’s recording, made with Ableton Live:

I went through the MIDI and segmented it according to my intuition. Then I checked my ideas about the structure against two scholarly analyses: Sheryl Iott’s article “Untangling The Tangles: Making Musical Sense Of Bach’s First Duet (BWV 802)” and Peter Williams’ book The Organ Music of J. S. Bach. My sense of where the sections split up aligns with theirs, so that was gratifying. I didn’t know how to name the sections, so I used Iott’s labels.

I did a remix to help myself hear the rhythm and form more clearly:

I make these things in part because I like how they sound, and in part because I want to hear the pieces using their actual notated rhythms. I am interested in Angela Hewitt’s interpretation of the rhythms, but I also want to hear them without expressive tempo. I could achieve that by warping out the audio and just playing it back with quantized rhythms, but beats make metronomic time so much more enjoyable.

Adding beats is especially clarifying for Bach, because he writes such crafty and surprising rhythms. The very first thing you hear in the duet is a four-beat scalar phrase. You would have no way of knowing that this phrase doesn’t align with the meter unless you were looking at the score, but the beat makes it clearly audible. The same goes for the second subject that immediately follows the scale run. I would think from listening that each little phrase begins on a downbeat, but no, they all begin on beat two. In the continuation in measures 12-16, the phrases all begin on beat three. Again, it is very hard for me to hear what’s happening without a beat underneath.

Sheryl Iott begins her article by saying, “I love Bach’s music. I find myself turning to it whenever I need reassurance that the world makes sense.” Same here! Iott points out that when Bach wrote the Duet, composers were debating whether it was possible to write decent counterpoint for only two voices. Bach might have written this piece as a rebuttal. Iott made this cool bubble diagram with Audio Timeliner of the form, showing the various tonal centers.

The pink bubbles show the scale runs. Iott points out that these introduce new key areas when they appear. She also notes that the scale run subject is only ever accompanied by itself. This makes it stand out from the general contrapuntal flow, even on casual listening. Iott’s phrase for the weird rhythmic offsetting is “out-of-phase parallelism”. She doesn’t hear the scale runs as tonally destabilizing and weird the way Williams does; she describes them as “tonal pillars” that provide harmonic stability among all the chromaticism. 

Bach’s highly chromatic music is structured the way highly turbulent water moves between pillars of a bridge. The pillars here are represented both by the scalar passages, which establish our new tonal center almost as anchors, and by highly chromatic passages filling out tonal, discrete tetrachords. Understanding these pillars and recognizing the tonal tetrachords are crucial to being able to keep our place, both in terms of memory and musically (p. 9).

Tetrachords are groups of four notes within a scale. I think Iott is talking here about the distinct top halves of the melodic and natural minor scales – in C, that’s G/A/B/C versus G/A-flat/B-flat/C.

The Duet is a double fugue, meaning that it has two subjects that develop simultaneously. The first subject is the scale run at the very beginning of the piece. The second subject (Sheryl Iott calls it the “answer”) is the descending chromatic melody that follows. The subjects are invertible, meaning that they can appear in both the top and bottom voices. Let’s talk about the recurring harmonized versions of the first subject, the dual scale runs in measures 19-22, 29, 35, 47-50, 61, and 66. Here’s what Peter Williams has to say about them

The row of parallel major thirds produced by the stretto scales has an effect comparable to the ‘augmented triad’ in No. 2: the false relation between minor and major sixths comes from the two forms of the melodic minor scale. The strange, consonant harmonizing in two chromatic parts resembles that of the (contemporary?) A minor Prelude WTC2” (p. 532).

This needs some unpacking. “Stretto” is Italian for narrow, tight or close. In this context, it means that the scales are misaligned. A “false relation” is basically the sound of two notes a half step apart (adjacent piano keys.) The “two forms of the melodic minor scale” are what a jazz musician would call melodic minor and natural minor. In classical theory, the “descending” form of melodic minor is the same pitches as regular old natural minor, while the thing that jazz musicians call “melodic minor” is the “ascending” form. This is exceptionally annoying terminology, because Bach often uses the “ascending” form when descending and vice versa. The main point here is that by mixing melodic and natural minor, Bach gets all these intervals that are consonant in and of themselves, but that are quite weird in their broader context.

So here is a question: why am I doing all this analysis? There are plenty of people who are more qualified to analyze Bach than me, shouldn’t I leave it to the professionals? When I sit down to learn a Bach piece on guitar, I have to analyze it before I have any hope of being able to play it. That isn’t the motivation with the Duet, though, because it is very far out of my technical reach as a guitarist. (I guess I could learn the left and right hand parts separately and then overdub myself?) I talk about Bach in my classes sometimes, so there is that practical motivation too. Bach (probably) meant this music to be pedagogical, after all. Ultimately, though, my main motivation for analyzing Bach is that I find it soothing. I enjoy visiting a world where things are logical and make sense, unlike the actual world that I usually inhabit. After I have spent enough time immersed in the calm and orderly logic of this music, it starts to feel like the only music that makes sense. I can start to understand the totalizing tendencies of classical music partisans. 

What is it about visiting Bach’s imaginary world that is so soothing? I recognize that if I were to actually visit eighteenth-century Thuringia, I would hate it. In his book Bach Against Modernity, Michael Marissen argues that Bach had very little in common philosophically with most of his present-day admirers. (If you can’t or don’t want to read the whole book, Valerie Stivers hits the main points in this review.) Bach was a pre-modern person whose Lutheranism was extreme by current standards. He was aware of Enlightenment-style thinking that elevated reason, and he was emphatically not on board with it. As Marissen puts it, “a great many music lovers do not, strictly speaking, value Bach for the things he may, strictly speaking, be about.” In order for me to enjoy his music, I have to downplay or ignore major components of Bach’s worldview. 

Valerie Stivers says that when we listen to Bach without understanding his stern religious message, we miss the point.

Knowing what to look for, I can sometimes hear the relentlessness of the divine order in the music’s superstructure, and feel the tension between its power and the futile activities of the fallen humanity whose cares the composer illuminates. To know that the music takes a negative view of human activity explains the strains of bitter mockery one sometimes hears. Elsewhere, the essential futility of our endeavors deepens the music’s tragedy and enhances its compassion. To grasp the emotional subtleties without the religious framework seems more difficult at the very least. And to be unaware of the intricacy of the theology, and the impressiveness of its musical expression, also seems like a loss.

Aspects of the worldview revealed in Bach’s music are threatening to our way of life and worldview, and would be unpopular if audiences understood them, and they aren’t, in every circumstance, for everyone. An argument for continuing to listen to him that grounds his greatness in the particulars of his historical and cultural milieu would be more convincing, because it would open up genuine if difficult dialogue with alien values.

By this logic, Bach is your stern and merciless Lutheran dad, giving you big stacks of difficult music to practice so you don’t go to hell. When I play through something like the prelude from the G Minor Lute Suite, I feel a serenity that seems like the thing religious people feel when they pray. But there’s also a penitent aspect to it. I’ve been indulging myself in all that sinful pop music, and now it’s time for something rigorous. Bach looks at me disapprovingly and says, okay, you need to systematically work your way through every possible permutation of this musical idea. I don’t worry that I will literally go to hell. But I can feel the residual cultural guilt, along with the residual glow of approval when I work through Bach successfully.

Update: Wenatchee the Hatchet wrote a long response post giving lots of helpful context on Lutheranism, check it out!