It amazes me that seven notes of music can create such diversity and allow for any musical talent to compose new tunes, new melodies, new themes, concertos, fugues, symphonies and rarely find a similitude between two compositions.
Seven notes with five variables and the mind of a composer can bring joy or tears, energy or meditation. Potentially twelve notes, with different intervals, scales, values and keys have been charming our ears for hundreds of years.
Early music had such a wide range of structures and of different modes. In our contemporary era, Schoenberg created the dodecaphony, a constant twelve note structure appropriate to the last evolution of classical music, avoiding the use of keys. Still only twelve notes…
The compositions as we hear daily and based on the known and defined keys, gave from the early Baroque composers a structure in which infinitely variable, yet recognizable sounds could be appreciated with the full range of feelings. From religious to secular, from formal to wild, orchestral to song, classical to jazz, we are still discovering daily new deviations as music continue to charm us with countless distinctions.
Of the tens of thousands of composers that have written music, J S Bach is the favorite to many people. Countless interpretations have been played, slower, faster, creating different tempo, rediscovering early versions, transposed for different instruments or using new electronic voices, these are rediscoveries of the same JS Bach compositions, breathing, animated and flowing to our senses the extraordinary beauty of the music of a higher power.
From Glenn Gould, Isaac Stern, Neville Marriner, Angela Hewitt, Vladimir Horowitz, Jean Louis Steuerman, Yehudi Menuhin to Jacques Loussier, Swingle Singers, Walter and Wendy Carlos and many, many, many more who expressed their personal understandings of JS Bach compositions, I believe he would enjoy them all, smiling at the suspicion of a secret code justifying his timeless, structured and spatial compositions.
I believe any beautiful creation can be mentally projected in a box, even butterflies, although I do not believe we can justify, rationalize and codify the immense beauty of the mind’s creation, as it is the product of the mystery of our universal power and collective intelligence that some of us were giving a better access in specific aspects, although with life counterpoints.
Peter Wollny, a music critic wrote: “The carefully worked-out counterpoint of a piece serves, according to Birnbaum (Johann Abraham Birnbaum, a contemporary of Bach, was a professor of rhetoric in Leipzig who wrote a famous apologia on J S Bach’s technique of composition), to correct the imperfections of nature; consequently the complexity of the elaborate intertwining presented in a work determines the measure of its beauty. This concept of musical perfection is probably best documented as far as Bach’s orchestral music is concerned in the concertos for several keyboard instruments. The unprecedented contrapuntal richness of these works is hardly comprehensible in all its dimensions, even after one has heard them frequently; however, the innumerable contrapuntal ramifications and details which constitute the individual movements, fuse into an overall impression which is definitely comprehensible – and this is exactly what shows Bach’s greatness, in that he does not build esoteric castles in the air, but creates expressive and committed master works.”
Johann Sebastian Bach is certainly at the helm of the specially talented human beings who gave us an enduring deep sense of beauty made of seven notes and variations.
Thank you master!
