Bach?
So my concert reactions have gotten un-chronological and incomplete recently, but here's a thought I don't want to forget entirely. Back in March for that Tetzlaff/Ligeti concert at the NY Philharmonic I'd attended the preconcert lecture, mostly to see what was up with it. I won't be doing that again, since it costs five bucks and all you get is the fussbuckety lecturer-in-residence telling you why both Bach arrangements on the program aren't true to their originals, though for opposite reasons. Also he copped out of saying anything about the Ligeti concerto, since he knew nothing about it. Which was fair, given that there would have been no possible way for him to get familiar with this music, nor a compelling reason to do so. But he did do a fine job describing the relationship between Bach and the Cathedral movement of the Schumann's Rhenish Symphony (and I like that he illustrated his examples the old-fashioned way, playing parts of the score at the piano).
One of the lecture attendees (there were maybe 40? mostly old) asked an interesting question during the Q&A: are any contemporary composers trying to evoke Bach the way that Schumann did? I've been trying to think of something ever since.
(The lecturer responded by lauding Arnold Schoenberg's arrangement of the St. Anne Prelude and Fugue. Note to classical people of a certain temperament: Arnold Schoenberg died during the Truman administration. He is no longer contemporary.)
But seriously, are there any contemporary composers doing the Bach thing? There are a zillion examples up through the mid-twentieth century: Honegger, Villa-Lobos, Stravinsky, Shostakovich in his piano preludes & fugues, even Arvo Pärt with a couple of his early collage pieces. Of course the neo-Baroque thing came and went; it's no surprise that there aren't but I'm still surprised I can't come up with examples of composers even trying to achieve the same atmosphere or temperament of Bach.
My answer for now is Sofia Gubaidulina, who used Bach's Ricercare theme in her violin concerto Offertorium and who writes in general with attention towards both the awe-inspiring spiritual experience and the careful working out of small musical materials, both of which also characterize Bach. Similarly, Messiaen (not, of course, contemporary any more) achieved the same thing in yet another unique language.
Pärt's recent music gets at a lot of it, I guess, though texturally it's so stripped down that I don't pick up Bach from it. And it occurs to me that I haven't listened to Penderecki's choral works, which seem like they might have something to do with all of this.
Who else is there? All the other contemporary headliners I can think of are going for muscular, secular, Sibelius-inspired post-romanticism (John Adams) or else some kind of evasive, aesthetically cool modernism (Thomas Adès, Kaija Saariaho).
Maybe I'm just thinking about this the wrong way.
One of the lecture attendees (there were maybe 40? mostly old) asked an interesting question during the Q&A: are any contemporary composers trying to evoke Bach the way that Schumann did? I've been trying to think of something ever since.
(The lecturer responded by lauding Arnold Schoenberg's arrangement of the St. Anne Prelude and Fugue. Note to classical people of a certain temperament: Arnold Schoenberg died during the Truman administration. He is no longer contemporary.)
But seriously, are there any contemporary composers doing the Bach thing? There are a zillion examples up through the mid-twentieth century: Honegger, Villa-Lobos, Stravinsky, Shostakovich in his piano preludes & fugues, even Arvo Pärt with a couple of his early collage pieces. Of course the neo-Baroque thing came and went; it's no surprise that there aren't but I'm still surprised I can't come up with examples of composers even trying to achieve the same atmosphere or temperament of Bach.
My answer for now is Sofia Gubaidulina, who used Bach's Ricercare theme in her violin concerto Offertorium and who writes in general with attention towards both the awe-inspiring spiritual experience and the careful working out of small musical materials, both of which also characterize Bach. Similarly, Messiaen (not, of course, contemporary any more) achieved the same thing in yet another unique language.
Pärt's recent music gets at a lot of it, I guess, though texturally it's so stripped down that I don't pick up Bach from it. And it occurs to me that I haven't listened to Penderecki's choral works, which seem like they might have something to do with all of this.
Who else is there? All the other contemporary headliners I can think of are going for muscular, secular, Sibelius-inspired post-romanticism (John Adams) or else some kind of evasive, aesthetically cool modernism (Thomas Adès, Kaija Saariaho).
Maybe I'm just thinking about this the wrong way.
2 Comments:
Aha. Always remember to mouse over for those hyperlink jokes, folks.
If you want to fan the criterion all the way out to "atmosphere or temperament" you can probably add Henryk Gorecki to the list, at least on the basis of the soaring, layered construction of his 3rd symphony's first movement. Not particularly Bach-like, but then neither was Messiaen. Schnittke also had some generally Baroque sensibilities in his postmodern mix.
For that matter I think "secular, Sibelius-inspired post-romanticism" doesn't adequately summarize a lot of Adams' recent stuff (I'm thinking here of portions of "El Nino" and the "Batter my heart" aria from "Doctor Atomic", though those may be kind of superficial examples). Though I think you're right about the headliners right now; I think there's still a pretty strong tendency to keep a kind of removed stance -- cool or ironic -- that isn't very Bach, and the unabashed earnestness you sometimes get in response to that isn't very Bach either. I'm tempted to characterize a lot of that Bach-like attitude as pursuing musical structure as a spiritual end, in which case you might want to consider Steve Reich too.
You've got a good point about Steve Reich. All those "Counterpoint" pieces should have tipped me off.
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