Just before seeing this on HN I was listening to Buxtehude's organ works on my way home. Buxtehude was one of the main inspirations for Bach as a composer¹, and I always find it interesting to go back and forth. But there's a reason Bach is the one that has come to be a superstar - there's the huge number of surviving works, of course, and in many ways how "the student surpassed the master", not least in contrapunctal complexity and fugal techniques, but also in the incredible fluidity he could achieve with a seemingly arbitrary number of voices.
Still one can listen to Buxtehude and get taken in the beauty and playfulness of his works, and we instantly imagine how young Bach was equally mesmerized by the same music, and in a way, how it kindled a passion and Bach continued to dig into the same musical goldmine that Buxtehude had been excavating - sometimes even the same tunnels, to my ears.
Some of my faves in the Buxtehude collection, mostly dramatic stuff (no links because I'm on crappy 3G):
Toccata In D Minor (Bux 155)
Toccata in G Major (Manualiter) (Bux 164)
Passacaglia in D minor (Bux 161)
Prelude in G minor (Bux 149)
[1]: I won't say "the main inspiration" because this is going a bit far into opinion-land, and it doesn't even make sense to single out a single composer as "main influence", but either way, Buxtehude is definitely up there with Bach's mentor Georg Böhm.
> [...] not least in contrapunctal complexity and fugal techniques, but also in the incredible fluidity he could achieve with a seemingly arbitrary number of voices.
Just to give a striking example of one of Bach's novel fugal techniques:
Bach's St. Matthew Passion starts out with an instrumental fugue with three voices. The first voice does introduces a little fugue subject, then the second voice imitates a fifth above, and finally the third voices enters above that one. Then there's a short episode where the voices trade licks and end on a half cadence. So far a fairly typical beginning for a three-voice fugue.
Then something strange happens-- the baseline moves up a fifth from where it started, and Bach repeats almost everything I just described up a fifth. In other words he takes all three entrances of the fugal subject together, treats them as if they were a single fugal subject, and builds an outer fugue out of that. So we've got a kind of fugue within a fugue. Sure enough, after this second outer entrance finishes the choir enters with the third outer subject. And to the casual listener this all just sounds like a Baroque-era instrumental beginning to a choral piece.
But it's important to point out that the complexity of the counterpoint doesn't truly match the structural complexity. There isn't an additional set of instruments playing the outer fugue-- it's just that Bach organized the music in such a way that we can hear these relationships.
In this case there's a pedal point in the bass-- that is, it just keeps repeating the same note as the harmonies above it change. So when that bass finally begins to move and then anchors a fifth above for the next phrase of music, it's about as aurally striking as music can get.
> In other words he takes all three entrances of the fugal subject together, treats them as if they were a single fugal subject, and builds an outer fugue out of that.
It's not a fugue-within-a-fugue texture. But it is a fugal exposition within a larger fugal exposition, both in terms of harmony and phrasing. That's important because it is the larger exposition which sets the pacing for the following sections of that opening movement.
It's also important from the standpoint of musical drama. Imagine someone tells you a story and gives you the essential setting in the first 17 seconds. Then over the next 10 seconds they begin to describe what sounds like the story's rising drama. Now you have an expectation for the form of this short story, and you start to listen more intently.
However, they then begin laying out another, closely related setting followed by its own little internal conflict. Finally this leads to a description of a setting that sounds like an intensified and more detailed version of the original setting. Only then do they finish the actual exposition of their story and move into the rising action.
At some point in all of that you're going to get the sense that this is a much more involved story than you had initially anticipated. You're also going to anticipate that the rising action itself is going to last a lot longer than 17 seconds.
That's a fitting dramatic arc for introducing the listener to the subject matter of St. Matthew Passion.
Also, to better answer the question about listening vs. analyzing notes: I just sang the opening melodies to myself to get the durations for the analogy above. I originally got the idea about the exposition-of-expositions walking somewhere and being struck by the relative brevity of the fugue subject compared to the gravity of that movement. (As well as the fact that the entire inner exposition reappears twice later in the piece, which AFAICT never happens in any of the other music Bach's wrote.)
There is of course a long-standing debate over music for the ears vs. music for the eyes. But I don't think this falls into that at all-- everything I'm describing can be heard and weighed with a musician's ear in the same way an experienced coder can make an assessment that some code "smells", etc.
It would be more accurate to say that you find it reminiscent of a fugual answer, or something along those lines. Which would be fair enough as an observation.
It would be less accurate to say that. It's a subject-answer-subject fugal exposition which itself consists of three smaller subject-answer-subject fugal expositions. Both are fugal expositions in terms of the harmonic progression and the melodic repetitions.
If Bach just repeated the fugal exposition again on the dominant, it would be a different piece.
People who know me say I'm a super music fan. Yup. I liked it well enough to get a violin and dig in, especially to Bach. For violin I have low talent, started too late, and didn't practice enough, but, still I made it through the Preludio of the E Major Partita and the D Major center section of the Chaconne.
From all the possible analyses I've seen of Bach, finally I come down on just one core point: He was one heck of a good musician, that is, in the basic art of the music, that is, "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion". I listen to Bach for the MUSIC, that is, for the art, the communication.
While later composers used style and means Bach didn't use or didn't have, to me as an avid listener Bach is in places as passionate, romantic, dramatic as anything in Mozart, Beethoven, Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, Tchaikowski, etc. E.g.,
Generally he very much gets it about the sense or meaning of the music, at least as I understand it.
I wondered what he was going to do for the last parts of the first D Minor section, and he was really good! There he made good use of some of the advantages of a guitar to make the notes sharp (with correct intonation! -- easier on guitar than violin!) and distinct in a musically appropriate way.
For the first parts of the central D Major section, he got the slow, delicate, maybe even pleading sweetness very nicely. As that section grew in passion, there are many triplets; these can be made to sound more passionate by being insistent, and he did well with that.
There are places in the music where the music jumps quickly down an octave or two, and, really, usually there needs to be some connection or legato between the two -- sometimes he does this and sometimes not. An interpretation of the jump is that the lower notes are a fast answer or response to the upper ones; then it's good to have the two sound connected. Or, the music is a diagram of someone in doubt and considering something; the upper notes are the current guesses, and the lower notes are a fast return to thinking the person is more confident about.
Maybe that music is like a guy trying to woo a girl and thinking (A) I really want to take her to that five star French restaurant BUT (B) I might look like irresponsible with money; (A) I really want to show her I care BUT (B) it's important to be careful with money; etc.
To me the climax of the piece is at the end of the central D Major section; have to play on all four strings of the violin, and the highest notes on the E string can result in a soaring impression, rising to something glorious -- Bach was not short on passion. There is a lot to interpret in those last few bars of that section. There the guitar might have tried again.
Just after the end of the D Major section is the final section, in D Minor, and the beginning of that section is confused as a catharsis or release from the soaring passion just before (Bach was something of an applied human emotional psychologist, that is, a good artist!). Well, for that catharsis, the guitarist might have tried again.
At the beginning, with just the D Minor tonic chord, he could have used more legato, made the sounds last a little longer, still within what a guitar can do. That is, clearly indicate for the listener that chord because it is central to the whole piece.
There's a story of a guitarist in the audience of a concert. He happened to be sitting next to composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco, known to be a man of few words. Before the concert, the guitarist said to the composer "The Bach Chaconne sure is difficult to play." The composer said nothing but when the concert was over said "The Bach Chaconne is the greatest piece of music ever written". I wouldn't argue with that. Playing it, even while learning to play it and playing it badly, is fun beyond belief -- get to replace own commonly limited voice with that of a violin, piano, guitar, or even a full orchestra (e.g., Stokowski) and Bach's music to scream out to the heavens the passion of the human spirit -- great fun!
Hi -- unrelated to your comment, but I saw this thread and was curious about the work you mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14135353. Since that thread is archived I couldn't reply, so I'm replying here instead. My email is in my profile -- please send me the paper(s) as well if you're so inclined.
One of the great stories about Bach is when he requested leave from his church position in Arnstadt to see Buxtehude in Lübeck, "to comprehend one thing and another about his art" (Bach's words). He walked 250 miles in 10 days to get there. Then he overstayed the one month of leave he had been given, arriving back home months late.
The surrounding region of the city Buxtehude, called the 'Altes Land', has a lot of old instruments and one can hear the music of the composer Buxtehude on old organs from his time... The organ in a neighbour town, where I grew up, was completed in 1675. It has been preserved in as much original state as possible. The works of Buxtehude may sound today on that organ like 300+ years ago, when he lived...
I'm not really a religious music person, but the vocal harmonies are not quite the Bach fugue levels of mathematical (I think?), but really just stunning. Especially the female vocal together with the organ and cello? after 3:00ish. So minimal, but so many details.
Well, if you're a fan of Buxtehude, have you listened to any music by Franz Tunder (Buxtehude's predecessor in Lubek)? My knowledge is mainly of their choral music, not organ music. So, might not have useful recommendations for you.
Still one can listen to Buxtehude and get taken in the beauty and playfulness of his works, and we instantly imagine how young Bach was equally mesmerized by the same music, and in a way, how it kindled a passion and Bach continued to dig into the same musical goldmine that Buxtehude had been excavating - sometimes even the same tunnels, to my ears.
Some of my faves in the Buxtehude collection, mostly dramatic stuff (no links because I'm on crappy 3G):
[1]: I won't say "the main inspiration" because this is going a bit far into opinion-land, and it doesn't even make sense to single out a single composer as "main influence", but either way, Buxtehude is definitely up there with Bach's mentor Georg Böhm.