Playing Bach's Bm violin Partita (courante and double) on bass guitar pt.1

My arrangement of this piece for electric bass is available through my website, www.countjockula.com

"Because it's there" is a great reason, we're told, to climb Mt. Everest (though it's not good enough for me).  It's a lousy reason to play "Flight of the Bumblebee," "Giant Steps" in all twelve keys, or a Bach fugue. Bach's music is sort of an Everest for players who get serious about some out-of-way instrument: ukulele, harmonica, whatever.  Indeed, some Bach transcribed for the (your out-of-the-way instrument here) is a way presenting it (and not incidentally, the performer) to "polite society."  But frequently the actual performances of these arrangements never get past being a cool musical parlor trick (Bach on the tuba!  Bach on the bagpipes!!), and in the end are crummy Bach, boring music.

So with a little hard work one can get to where they can give an accurate rendering of all the notes of a piece, in the right order, with no mistakes, on God-knows-what axe; and Bach's notes certainly are interesting in and of themselves, but they are only a means to an end.  I mean, look at the guy: he knew he was baaad and could carve anybody.  It's popularly said of him that he sired twenty children, but it seems even more significant that he saw ten of them die.  And speaking of "carving," he once pulled a knife on a bassoonist. 

So just playing the notes right is not enough. I'm going to try - probably over a few posts - to hash out some interpretive ideas for playing Bach, using my arrangement of the Courante and Double from the Bm violin partita as a point of focus.

'Spress Yourself

or: "It's not what ya look like when you're doin' what you're doin'

It's what you're DOIN' when you're doin' whatcha look like you're doin."

Music students sometimes get conflicting messages.  On one hand, there's the romantic notion that, through music, we are "expressing ourselves."  Whatever it means, I suppose it's probably generally true.  On the other hand, if you study classical music you get the equally vague admonishment that we are here to serve "the composer's intention."  As a matter of fact, my guitar teacher in college, the Cuban master Juan Mercadal, one time during a lesson held an imaginary knife to his groin and prescribed a particularly gruesome self-inflicted wound as penance should he fail to honor "the composer's intention."  As a composer myself, I have no idea what "my intention" is at any given point.  I suppose I could give some kind of broad philosophy that tends to govern my choices, but really, it's nothing I'd want someone to cut themselves over.  Particularly there.

Incidentally, I was in Havana once talking to a fellow guitar player and, trying for a little street-cred, I mentioned that "mi professor en la universidad" was Juan Mercadal.  "¿Quien?" "Hwann Mehrka-DAHL."  "¿?" "Huwaannnn…" Finally he got it.  "¡Ohhhh! ¡Wamercaw!"  The Cubans are very economical in their use of consonants.

I tend to see interpretation as: a little Bach, a little me… Maybe a lot of Bach, a little me would make more sense. Of course, if you have some way you like to play it that has nothing to do with your understanding of Bach or Baroque performance practice, why not go for it?  If Bach has anything to say about it, he knows where to find you.  Just watch out for that knife.

Da Form 

The form of the whole piece is pretty straightforward and classic: two sections, each one repeated.  The first one starts in the home key of B minor, and ends up in the dominant key, F#.  The second starts there, and gets us back home again to Bm.  This is the central drama of hundreds of years of European music: start at the tonic, go to the dominant, and get yourself back home by curfew (sometime before the last bar).  Now a little after Bach's time, when this two-part journey is overlaid on the three-part sonata-allegro form - exposition, development, recapitulation - you have inexhaustible possibilities for variation.  But we have this relatively simple AA BB form for both movements.  And in Bach's hands, inexhaustible possibilities.

Taking the Repeats

 "Sounds so nice, play it twice"

To me, the repeats here pose an interesting set of questions. Now very often in Bach's world, the repeat was a chance to embellish the material, to "solo" on it.  But this is what the Double is: a big, embellished repeat of the Courante. What I find myself fascinated with is the repeats of the A's and B's within the movements. On one hand, they're absolutely necessary, since a lot of times in music, something played just once results in a "structural dissonance."  That is, after once through an A or B section, even though you've brought things to a close with a nice big fat cadence, the music is still in a state of tension just the way it is when a dissonant interval is sounded, and is brought to "rest" (resolved) when the section is played again. 

This sounds awful to say, but in a lot of the performances I listened to - some by players with whom I would never presume to argue about Bach - I got a disquieting feeling of there being a Sisyphean aspect to the repeats, where we're going all the way back to the beginning and craaaanking the whole thing up again… I may have missed what was going on in these performances, but I think in my own it's important to have a definite idea, a shape, then restate it and maybe even juice it up a little on the repeat. So whatever impression the audience is getting the first time around can be reinforced during the repeat, leaving listeners with a clear sense of the piece (whatever it came to mean to them), and even a soupçon of self-satisfaction for being able to come away from the performance with some coherent sense of the whole. A tangible thing to take home, as it were.