A Flat Fuga in C Major

The second movement of this sonata feels like much ado about little or about something I don't understand. It's six pages long, lasts ten or eleven minutes, and is the second-longest movement of all the sonatas and partitas, shorter only than the ciaccona. But it has no heart! I think it's the ciaccona's alter ego. Like the ciaccona, the fugue is also a repetition of a theme.

Unlike the ciaccona, which runs the gamut of emotions, this fugue hardly has a development, the minor section where everything seems to get complicated. I think that's part of the "problem." Every once in a while, there's a minor phrase, but then it goes back to major again, the music punctuated chords on every downbeat.

I just don't understand how something that seems rather harmless and nice but not meaningful would go on for so long. The ciaccona changes with each repetition of the theme. This is more like a happy dirge.


Overall, this sonata doesn't have much melancholy to it. I just wonder what Bach was thinking when he wrote that fugue. Did he like it? How could he be moved to write something so flat? I've got an idea: blame the king.  Bach was a court composer. Maybe the king said, upon hearing the ciaccona,  "God, can't we have a little something cheerful for a change?" and Bach decided that if he were going to write something just to please the king, he might as well make it ten minutes long.

On the other hand, the first and third movements, the slow ones, are beautiful to me. The first movement of this same sonata is also a repetition of a theme with chords on the downbeats, but it has much more emotional range than the fugue that follows it.

The unaccompanied Bach was long viewed not as real music but as a set of violin studies. I'd believe it with this fugue, which seems to say little using lots of difficult chords. Each chord, each downbeat, is a pitfall for an amateur violinist seeking passage from beginning to end. I will enjoy struggling to play it.   

If any can give the piece soul, it's Hilary Hahn!

Bach comes close as I get to something I don't believe in.

I'm not religious, but I do believe that music means something important even if though I don't know what. I might follow a pied piper off a bridge.

 So I couldn't help thinking of music when I read the work of a philosopher who believed that his ability to imagine something more perfect than anything he'd ever seen proved the existence of a god. When I play the violin, I always have an idea of the way the music should sound, though I can't play it that way. The music exists abstractly, more perfect than anyone can actually play it. This music god, if there is one, shows itself in the major section of the Ciaccona from the D-minor partita.

Bach added the Ciaccona as an extra movement to the D-minor partita after his wife died. It's 64 variations on a four-bar phrase. Can you imagine Bach playing, maybe pacing up and down, saying to myself, "I'm just going to keep playing these same four bars until something happens." Then the major section happens.

It doesn't sound like Bach planned it. It sounds like he just opened the door and there it was, like a beautiful woman to cheer him up when he was grieving. I don't expect a happy section in this piece the way I might expect a sad one in piece written in a major key. And I definitely don't expect a section of beautiful chords that are swelling, as if the violinist can't put enough love into them.

Afterward, the music resumes its minor walk. Vision over. He goes on for another page or two, wistfully at first, sorry for the beautiful part to be over, but then he rebounds in some fast flourishes.
And the last note is an open D string played along with the same note fingered on the opposite string. I love that it's neither a minor chord nor a major chord. Bach left it ambiguous. I like to imagine it's a happy ending.

Week of June 13

C#-minor scale
Kreutzer Number 24
Ciaccona

My approach to Ciaccona week began with the "afraid to play it, so just won't practice at all" strategy.  Now that the week is half over, I've decided to just enjoy playing the Ciaccona and being able to scratch out the notes, even if they aren't all played the same tempo and without stopping and scratching my head and being annoyed that my old teacher changed the bowings and fingerings, which just makes things more ambiguous. 

I was amazed when I learned that there wasn't anything magical about playing the notes to an amazing piece of music, like the Ciaccona or the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto.  You don't have to be a perfect violinist to play those pieces and get a kick out of hearing the music you love coming out of your violin.  It's a long stretch from playing them well, but there's something cool about it.  I think it's better to experience them as an amateur than to say, "Oh, I can't play that," and never try.  One can also argue that it's sacrilegious to play such special pieces badly or without putting in enough sweat.  To each his own. 

Week of May 30 2010

G-sharp Minor Scale
Kreutzer No. 22
D-minor partita: Sarabande

The Sarabande could be played on an accordion. The chords sound like they are breathing in and out. In the first measure, I can imagine the accordion pressing in one beat one and pulling out on beats two and three, or vice versa. Also, "wake up" quality of rolling of the bow from the G and D strings to the A and E strings on the first chord reminds me of the way accordions get suddenly loud when the player moves the bellows quickly.

The movement also sounds like something that would be played in a church, particularly at the end of the first section. The violinist holds out and open E and plays underneath it, ending on the five chord.  It sounds like the happily ever after with God end of an organ piece. 

I love Bach!

This is a corny post if I ever write one. I love playing the Bach Double along with my recording. The iPod makes it even easier to do.

I love how the cellos have an important part in the fugues of the Bach Double. I love that, listening to it, I pay just as much attention to the cellos in the orchestra as I do to the solo violins. That's probably comforting to a solo violinist!

I did some sit-ups to Bach just now. It floored me, but I was already on the floor. Hahahah.

Playing the violin is good for me. But so are many different things. There are so many things I think it would be good to do regularly. I've always had trouble deciding what to do. But I really could play violin regularly if I just picked it up. Once I start, it's great! I think back on days I've spent in a bad mood and imagine that violin would have helped. Or ballet class...Or...

Week of 05/23/10

B-major scale
Kreutzer 21
Bach D-minor Partita: Corrente

Why 64 Variations?

What’s So Significant About 64 Variations?

The Ciaccona has 64 variations, and I immediately called that evidence of Bach’s larger, impressive structure for the Ciaccona. What’s so important about the number 64?

Musical phrases usually come in groups of four or eight measures, and they certainly did so in 1720’s German music. The Ciaccona is based on both threes and fours. Each measure of the Ciaccona has three beats, and each has four measures. That’s common for pieces in three (think of your favorite waltz). And though each measure has three beats, each quarter-note beat is evenly divided into eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and thirty-second notes, in all but two variations – not divided into triplets, as it could be.

The fact that beats are evenly divided into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, and thirty-seconds means that those powers of two are particularly relevant numbers. They are more relevant than just any multiple of two, such as 60, or even just any multiple of 16, like 96.


Bach could have just aspired to write a large number of variations and stopped anywhere after fifty. 51. 52. 60. Why 64 variations? To start, it’s an even number. There’s nothing significant about the number of variations being even. Of course, there’s a fifty-percent chance of that. But there is something significant about the number of variations being 64. Having the number of variations be a power of two, in this case, two to the sixth power, would allow the entire piece to be evenly subdivided six times (32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1). That’s not true for other numbers. Take the number 60. 60 is a multiple of 4. Do I think that would be amazing, too? 60 variations could only be evenly divided twice (30, 15). Sets of 15 variations, or musical units, would be unusual for traditional, European music, because this piece is based on threes and fours, not fives.

Though having 64 variations would allow the piece to be neatly subdivided multiple times, it isn’t. The piece has three sections, each one shorter than the previous, and that don’t have tidy numbers of variations. The first section, in D-minor, is 33 variations long. It’s followed by an 19-variation major section, then by a 12-variation minor section.

Analyzing the larger structure of the Ciaccona is a large task that others have tried to tackle. I think that they mostly end up speculating about why Bach organized it the way he did. Here’s my speculation.

The opening theme recurs more and more frequently throughout the Ciaccona. I may be influenced by Arnold Steinhardt (whose book, Violin Dreams, I just finished) when I say that the opening theme reminds me of the call of death, the call for the end of the partita. The Ciaccona begins by saying, “It’s time to end the partita,” then, its whole life flashes before its eyes, but in the end, the Ciaccona theme keeps coming back more and more frequently until the end of the movement. It’s like in stories where death is a shrouded figure you sometimes see and worry about, then say, “Oh, it’s nothing.” Then the figure comes back. In the middle section, in D major, you think that you’ve escaped the end of the Ciaccona and that it’s going to keep going forever. Then the opening theme comes back, and the last section is the shortest of them all. I think it’s the way childhood seems to last forever, but then life speeds up during middle age, and before you know it, it’s gone.