BY BENJAMIN MARTIN
Guest writer Benjamin Martin is an award winning Australian pianist and composer.
Somehow, despite all the efforts of research intent upon revealing his true character, a certain remoteness is retained by that astonishing individual known as J.S. Bach. Much less is known about Handel, yet he strikes us as a known quantity. But Bach remains elusive, open to interpretation, and it seems no surprise that many of his scores were left without tempo and dynamic markings. To borrow from Ortega y Gasset, there’s no protagonist, only the chorus.
We actually know very little about Bach’s musical intentions. Many performers specialise in researching the style and techniques utilised in Bach’s time, thereby adopting their findings as a means of interpreting his music. Yet, who’s to say that Bach himself felt so attached to the practices of his contemporaries? He may, lacking alternatives, have contented himself with them, but that is something different.
With Bach’s scores, not everything is quite as it would appear. For instance, we generally take it as a given that the second volume of his Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC), like the first, shares the same title. But the titling was an assumption made by his pupil Johann Christoph Altnickol, on his 1744 copy. Bach himself certainly used the title for the first volume, but it is entirely possible that he didn’t intend the second to be titled similarly.
Worse still, no one is sure what Bach actually meant by WTC, even when taking any potential mistranslation of the German Das Wohltemperierte Klavier into account. This poses a huge problem. Over the last three centuries, perspectives of Western music have been fundamentally influenced by various scholars claiming to have uncovered its ‘true’ meaning; as ‘equal’ temperament, ‘meantone’ temperament, ‘just intonation’, and so on. Of particular interest are the eleven loops or scrolls of three different types inscribed by Bach on the title-page above the title itself:
They certainly provoke curiosity. Mere squiggles, perhaps? It would seem an odd place, prior to telephones, to doodle away meaninglessly atop the title-page itself. Still, the scrolls are interwoven in a rather conspicuous fashion, not to mention that they consist of different types. They have almost invariably been interpreted as a set of instructions dictating a precise form of tuning, whereby each scroll is designated to one of the twelve pitches most often according to a circle-of-fifths pattern. But there’s a problem: there are only eleven scrolls which must somehow be made to fit with the 12 tones. More glaringly, Bach was nothing if not practical: why would he encode something intended purely for practical purposes? I doubt that he did. I believe it to be a puzzle of a different sort.
If you think about it, there’s something causative about the so-called canon of art, or for that matter recorded history in general. For better or worse, historicising is largely an interpretative art in itself, with each supposed fact linked together by assumptions. History can often become a distortion of truth since certain unrecorded intentions and actions may not always suit a particular criteria. Hence on occasion, certain events which, if known, would contradict smooth transitions, get misinterpreted. In such instances, our levelling of history stands to get completely turned on its head – it’s only a matter of time before the chorus wakes up.
And so, after almost 300 years of smoothed-out, agreeable confusion on the topic, it’s probably time to throw caution to the wind and take another look at the WTC.
Bach’s contemporary Gottfried Leibniz, the great mathematician/theologian who lived much of his life in close proximity to Bach, dedicated himself to contriving mathematical principles in order to arrive at an all-incorporating theory – Characteristica Universalis. I contend that Bach intended something similar by bridging universal considerations together with music in his WTC. The resultant theory – featured on my website – played itself out in such a way that I really had only to connect the dots.
Regarding Altnickol’s assumption that the second volume ought, like the first, be titled ‘Well-Tempered’, the dots simply don’t connect, hence it is possible that he made an error of judgement.
The argument, or evaluation, is without footnotes and sustains a self-referential logic. In technical terms, you might say it’s based upon the principle of economy. For now, I’d just like to introduce a couple of the main points. Take another look at the scrolls. Notice that there are 11 of them in total, divided into three different sets of three, three, and five loops. All prime numbers. Correspondingly, Leibniz sought to establish a universal language whereby primes stood for simple concepts, for since a prime can be divided evenly only by one or itself, it in effect cannot be broken down and so may be said to represent things in their essence. Similarly, it seems most likely that Bach adopted the use of primes as an organising principle for his WTC.
As I mentioned earlier, we may be sure that Bach, like Leibniz, took nothing for granted. Not even tonality. As presumptuous as it may sound, it is probable that Bach regarded tonality as a derivation or translation of a higher order, and that perfection – or, for Bach, compatibility with God – was musically best represented via symmetrical scales (which are fundamentally atonal) and related figurations (including his chromatic signature ‘BACH’, which he respectfully resisted notating up until his final, unfinished work, The Art of Fugue). This is logical, since symmetry is often regarded as a correlative of perfection. As symbols of a universal order – or universal laws – they were to be respected as such, and so without necessarily being notated, they could schematically govern certain musical structures. Note, for example, the ordering of the WTC. It is chromatic, and the chromatic scale, although conventional in Bach’s time, is nonetheless a symmetrical scale and likewise atonal. In fact, chromatic scales (i.e. encompassing at least an octave) rarely feature in unadulterated form in Bach’s music, a conspicuous exception being a passage in And Behold the Veil of the Temple from the St Matthew Passion, with all of its symbolic overtones.
So, my take on the meaning of Well Tempered Clavier? The tempering of universal laws via tonality – hence, well-tempered – through the instrument of Bach’s imagination.
I want to thank Andreas Giger, Professor of Musicology at Louisiana State University, and Daniel Ogburn, PHD in theoretical physics, for lending their expertise. For further information on the subject, visit the Bach-Leibniz page at my website: www.benjamindmartin.com
To learn more about Benjamin, visit his website and read our interview here.
Image supplied.
