Day 9 - Writing about writing about Bach

I wrote about Bach here

I’m not sure why I write about music - I always have and I have always struggled even to know who I am writing for.  So I concluded that Im writing for myself - an audience of one.  I’m easily pleased, not my own worst critic, or worst enemy. When I did venture to put a musing of mine on the internet I was content to see that no-one commented.  I remained my own audience and - in railway terms, continued to consume my own smoke.

Then something odd happened - I had a comment - SOMEONE ELSE had read it.  I was mortified.  But the comment was benign and slightly encouraging if you read it quickly, squinting, in poor light and whilst drunk.  So the tapping away continues - always about classical music and lately about the most modern of classical music.  I’m always amazed I have the gall - zero musical training as a performer or an analyst - but what I do do is listen, a lot.

So this week I have been listening to Bach’s Mass in B Minor.  A work I’ve known since I was 20 - over twenty years of acquaintance, study (I’ve read books about the work) and listened to recordings. I’ve not heard it in concert - but that applies to much of what I write about.

So I have listened to the way that different conductors have approached the work and tried to understand their historical context given 50+ years of recorded performance.  I’ve been enthralled, bow, contemplative, thrilled and provoked by their efforts.  I’ve also been turned off, angered and perplexed by some of their choices. Each has generally given me a different perspective even if I have hurled abuse at the radio I’m listening to or quickly retuned to the sport on the car radio.

I think the truth is that - in a family where this kind of music is eschewed, and in company of friends who generally are unfamiliar even antagonistic about classical music, I have no one with whom I can express these thoughts verbally, or through the medium of mime for that matter).  And when I do I find a musical friend with whom I share an interest, I seldom share a taste, or worse they are performers.  Radio 3 should take note of this next bit: performers of music especially classical music bring many insights, they bring a fantastic understanding of tunes, the structure of music and its particular qualities.  BUT they are not listeners in the sense most of us are.  And they are rather like mechanics swooning over the engine of a Ferrari - they appreciate its grace, but they will also pick up its faults, they will marvel at the workmanship but they won’t get the same visceral thrill from the noise it makes.

I felt a create thrill the day I looked at the score of Brahms First symphony and figured out how fragments of themes drove the heart stopping transition from the development to the recapitulation in the first movement. BUT as soon as I know more about what was happening the emotional impact was dulled, and suddenly no version was adequate for my new vision of how the piece should go.  Years of frustration have followed that moment of very minor music education.

So yes, I study works, follow scores to see what conductors are doing but I run the risk of falling out of love with them.

So when I write its about trying to capture the love and reveal it without dwelling too much on technical detail.  Each of us will hear music differently - the trick to reading about music and about the men and women who create and recreate it is, I think, to offer more choices for the listener.  My aim is to give the new listener a toe hold, a insubstantial structure on which they can get through to the end and perhaps realise that there’s merit in listening again.  Eight auditions is all it takes, according to Sir Thomas Beecham, before we can start to begin to understand a piece.

In the case of Bach’s B Minor Mass it has taken me many more to get over a really stupid hurdle.  I liked the first half of the Mass but was less interested in the second, which I now - after 20+ years - hear in different terms thanks to a conductor who brings out that second half anew for me.  I feel ashamed for 20 years of indifference to the last 40 odd minutes of the work, perplexed at why I didn’t twig earlier and grateful that I have now.

A work I thought was flawed is no such thing - and my penance is to write about it and my relationship and that moment of revelation yesterday morning when Bach pulled all these stops out and I heard them for the first time.

The creativity here is written: its not worth a lot except in giving people hope who struggle with this or that work - but it is an act of faith.  The inspiration yesterday was revelatory - who knows what links were made in my mind’s eye or ear about the work for the veils to fall.  But writing must come after these events - I don’t manufacture my response to music.  I can’t sit down to write about a piece as a means of getting to like it better.

I will of course now approach the B Minor Mass in a different way - that’s a given in the temporally challenged world of music where even if the music is the same the listener’s state is always altered by experience.

In terms of creativity a thousand words in 40 minutes about a few words and many thoughts, 20 - odd years of listening to 20 odd recordings.  Well that can’t be bad.  The recovery into the pantheon of Bach’s great works of his last choral masterpiece is perhaps much more important for me and my credibility or peace of mind.

SN