Back in September, bored at work and looking for a little inspiration, I started listening to some of Bach's cantatas.  I'd had some minimal exposure to them in the past, but largely they were pretty new to me.  The first one I played was "Nun Komm der Heider Heiland" (Come, Redeemer of the Gentiles), BWV 61.  The whole cantata is immensely enjoyable, but it was a short arioso passage (the fourth movement) which captivated me, and which really got me thinking,

       Often, the pleasure (at least on a purely sensual level) Bach's music gives is similar to that of being in a Jacuzzi. He sprays forth jets of musical ideas which come so fast and are so effortlessly intertwined that we as listeners perceive them as a never-ending stream. The impact of any one statement of a motive is often numbed, but the pleasure derives from the way they mingle and dance with each other between harmonies and among registers. The music's effect can sweep you off your feet and carry you along in its wake. Even the solo string music is full of this kind of writing. But this movement is one of those types of things that you sort of forget that Bach is just as great at. He doesn't need his gifts for burbling, everywhere-at-once polyphony. He doesn't need his cathedralesque large-scale structures, or the incredible verve his rhythmic drive can muster. You can dismantle the hall of mirrors that spin out his motives and melodies into the forms they occupy, and guess what? Like an action hero who when stripped of his guns, grabs a hammer or reaches for the rusty chainsaw, limitations only enhance Bach's creativity.

        The preceding movement (Komm Jesu, komm) is full of the classic Bach tricks I just mentioned, with the floridly expressed intention of inviting Jesus down from heaven. And hey, they're good tricks for the purpose. Why wouldn't Jesus want to mosey on down to the earthly plane, when you're asking him in a skippy, carefree 9/8 rhythm? It almost sounds like Bach's asking him to come jump rope and eat peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

       So now that Jesus has been asked to come, we as audience members can lean back and wait for the the logical next step in the narrative arc of the cantata: the clouds parting and Jesus coming forth to redeem the Gentiles with a knowing grin and a high-five. Maybe we'll get some trumpets, some kettle drums, a nice aria, you know, something with some real pomp and flash. After all, we've been waiting for the guy for a long time.

So of course, Bach starts it like this:

       A quiet, dissonant plink. That's the whole idea, this one discrete particle of information, this little singularity. Then there's another. And another. Quickly, the plinks begin adding up, but they don't bear the collective weight that the individual notes of a motive or counter-subject might. Instead, they interact with the surrounding silence in a way that is difficult to explain, but easy to feel. As each one vanishes, you are left hearing the silence where it had been. The next plink disturbs the silence and catches the ear, and so on. With all this silence you can hear the echo in the hall, the physicality of the space. We have attained an intimacy the previous movements didn't have.

        Of course, the rhetorical implication of the plinks is evident once Jesus begins to sing. See, see, he tells us. I've been knocking at your door, over and over. The plinks are as close to a literal depiction of knocking as you can get; on the surface, it's Text Painting 101. But the way they're executed is a brilliantly subtle stroke of characterization. Imagine if you had to knock on someone's door till they opened it. You might start with a more assertive, loud burst of knocks (the beginnings of Beethoven's 5^th and Mahler's 2^nd symphonies know something about this). But after a while, you'd get tired and frustrated. The knocking would become an empty gesture, it would slow down. If out of sheer dogged love or stubbornness you were really determined to not leave, you might settle on something like the knock in this movement: audible but not forceful, with a determinedly consistent rhythm.

Now imagine you are the person in the house, and there is someone at the door you would really rather not deal with right now. Your attention is drawn to the space between the knocks, just like the listener's ear. Did they leave? Can you hear them out there, awkwardly shuffling around on your porch? The knocks themselves are quiet enough to ignore, but they remind you that in between the last knock and the current one, the presence of this person at the door has continued unabated. Each time you hear a knock, you're going to feel a little weirder about not answering. The way this one little idea puts you so deeply into the music's world both pictorially and psychologically makes one think of Schubert's piano accompaniments for his lieder, of all things. That's certainly not something that can be often said of Bach's music.

        The slow arch that this movement takes is also pretty remarkable, for Bach or any other composer for that matter. The overall harmonic plan is a movement from e to G, minor to relative major. There are no internal perfect authentic cadences* in this movement, so the whole movement scans as one long phrase. But what's especially cool to me is since this whole shape leads inexorably to the moment of cadence in the new key, Bach manages to use that moment as the dramatic crux of the movement. The wind-up to it takes quite a long time. First, the second two lines of the text move from e minor imperfectly to G major, whose attainment coincides with the word “auftung”, or open. This seems like a happy development in the narrative, but the phrase doesn't feel over yet. What follows is an expansion of G major, a sort of running through of a quick-hit list of all the key's most typical chords in an order that leads back to the dominant. Meanwhile, Jesus seems to be making a lot of progress in the text. First, he's going in the house, then having supper with the person who let him in. The speed of declamation and the harmonic rhythm are at their fastest at this point in the recit, which builds drama for the last moment.

        For the last few words, the speed of declamation slows down again, as if for emphasis. They are being sung over what our ears are telling us is going to finally be that perfect, finalizing cadence we have been waiting for. But this is Bach's last and best trick. At this moment when we are expecting a textbook cadence and an end to the movement, Bach pulls out the rug from under us and gives us a deceptive cadence, all of a sudden taking us back to e minor! What seemed like it was going to be a moment of triumph instead takes on an unexpectedly poignant cast. Of course, any music student knows that this surprise is one of the most basic tricks a composer can play on a listener. A beginning theory student can sit down and play keep-away using the exact same method (“my kid could've done that!” says the pedantic parent). But like so many things in life, music isn't about knowing how, it's about knowing when.

        First, consider the words. Strictly speaking, the last four words are redundant. We already know that Jesus sat down with the door-opener. So we have to wonder, what is the special meaning of reversing “I ate with him” to “he ate with me”? Bach has placed this line at such an important moment in the movement that he must attach special significance to it. The magical part is it's hard to know for sure what the significance is. You can sense it and taste it better than you can frame it with language. But since this is my blog, I'm going to try anyway.

        Until this moment, the movement seems be moving inexorably towards the cadence point. Then it stumbles. The knees of the man lifting a heavy load tremble for a moment. A quiver passes through the lips of the victor as he realizes what he has accomplished. In this way, Bach's one wayward harmony hints at a whole world of pain, struggle and uncertainty which the resolve and inevitability of the rest of the movement doesn't quite allow for, or otherwise masks. It's like Jesus's happiness at being united with the door-opener is tinged and made meaningful by his own human sufferings. He's not a detached, imperial , let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may god; in fact Bach seems to be concerned with making you feel how badly Jesus wants you. Suddenly, he becomes comprehensible, accessible through the prism of our earthly concerns. With this sudden pulse of emotion, we learn that Jesus, like Daft Punk, is only human after all.

        I realize that as an avowed atheist, it's a bit odd for me to be so strongly moved by this or really any vision of Jesus. But this is music. It speaks to the heart first and lets the mind comprehend the message as best it can. You don't have to believe in God because the lessons are universal. Sometimes in life, we're the person waiting forever at the door, and sometimes we're the person who just can't open it. Bach knows deeply what both positions are about, and he's not going to let us forget. If you're waiting, just stay strong and hold on. If you're hearing that knock, you have to swallow hard and face whatever's out there.

*For anyone less theoretically inclined out there, a perfect authentic cadence (PAC) is the most effective means we have of establishing a key in tonal music. The melody, harmony and the bassline move directly from the dominant chord (V) to the tonic chord (I). Prior to the 20^th century, composers almost always used them to delineate sections in a composition since they impart such a sense of finality. Conversely, their absence at what sounds like an ending usually tells us the phrase is going to continue or repeat.

James Blake and the universality of fucking up

     Just three short months after creating this blog, I've finally summoned the wherewithal to start posting stuff in it. On the one hand, this seems to show an embarrassingly transparent lack of commitment on my part. On the other hand, hey, it was summer!

     Well at any rate, all that's over. And if you're wondering what it is I was doing all summer instead of putting fingers to keyboard, the (or really, an) answer is: listening to James Blake. Rarely since high school have I been interested in listening to an album so obsessively as his self-titled release from this past winter. And it's not as if an album of sparse, icy electronic music by a young British man is the logical counterpoint to a summer idyll at the Chautauqua Institution (but if you could somehow mix Beethoven and Jimmy Buffett, you'd be right on the money). Yet there I was, sneaking off between bouts with Debussy and Puccini to slap on headphones and bump this incredible set of, dare I say, pieces.

      For those of you who have never heard his music, you might just now be questioning my choice of words. I admit that drawing a distinction between a “song” and a “piece” is like arguing over what breed a dog is. No matter what you decide, it'll still wag its tail, get its paws all over your furniture, and lick your hand when you feel sad, and isn't that what dogs are for? Well, I only indulge in this distinction because I think that the absence of anything like a pop song structure (i.e. nothing that functions like a verse or chorus) and the strongly instrumental character common to most of the songs on this album demand a different kind of thinking.

      For the uninitiated, Blake's music consists of shards of pop and R&B melodies that serve as a center to and a foil for the primal dance-floor debris of his native dubstep sound, which comprises most of the backing. From what I've heard of his earlier work, vocals and piano have gone from the role of just another sample to being prominently foregrounded. His having arrived at this balance is what makes his music original. The vocals and piano lend a sweetness and humanity to the dubstep, and the intensity of the dubstep gives the vocals a darker, more intense edge. Lyrically, he leans toward a minimal, abstract approach. This amalgamation of styles puts him at an isolated stylistic intersection, one whose novelty mates very well with his artistic concerns.

      And what are these concerns? His music is fatalistic in matters of personal relationships, shows them not so much out of control as out of understanding. It's music of the murky subconscious, where fear and desire are wordlessly sublimated, which in turn pushes the conscious mind in directions it doesn't understand, toward and away from people in turn. It shows us a world where words can't capture the same meaning as a look or an inflection; where emotions are mutable, contradictory creatures, liable to scuttle away if you get too close. This is a world of crossroads in which everyone has lived at some point, and for those who are willing to examine it, Blake is willing and able to show it to us.

      Above, I've posted the song that strikes me as the best summation of what Blake's music is about: “I Never Learnt to Share”. Interestingly, it's both the album's longest song while having the fewest amount of words. The whole text is comprised of just a single lyric:

“My brother and my sister don't speak to me / but I don't blame them”.

It's a pretty common musical rule of thumb that a song's lyrics need a certain amount of holes in the story they tell and the details they offer, so that the imagination of the listener can fill in the rest. Too much detail can destroy the universality of a song, but too little can leave a listener nothing to identify with. Blake ballsily takes a stand at the extreme shallow end of the lyrical pool, trusting that the paucity of lyrics will play into his approach. And he's right, for two reasons.

      One is that this line, by itself, conveys every salient aspect of the story. We can infer that the singer did something to anger his brother and sister (he could also be poetically referring to a lover, e.g. someone who is like a brother and a sister in terms of offering male and female forms of companionship) so deeply that their relationship is permanently altered. It must have been long enough ago that things have permanently settled down (since he says “don't speak” instead of “won't speak”). We don't know why, or under what circumstances, or anything else. But we don't need to know. The cooling of a relationship with someone you're close to is so archetypically human yet so intimately personal that Blake knows that this is all the information listeners need to be able to fill in the blanks and relate personally. It also has a more general resonance; like the singer, we sometimes find ourselves in a situation whose rules are clear, seemingly in contrast to how we got there in the first place.

      The other reason is that the emotional ambiguity of the line (i.e. the information it doesn't contain) allows for a number of different specific ways the singer could be feeling. This gives Blake the freedom to let the music constantly redefine the exact meaning of the words. The way in which he does so is what gives the piece its forward momentum and its sense of lived-in personal truth.

Right off the bat, this occurs in microcosm. The line is sung three times with no accompaniment. With each iteration, a voice is added. Simple enough concept, but the game is afoot. The intimacy of the first line immediately commands our attention, as if Blake is somewhere in the next room, singing to himself as washed the dishes. The laying bare, both in the lyrics and in the voice, of such a hurt is arresting. The entrance of the second voice, impossibly identical in timbre, is shocking. It becomes clear that Blake is not in your kitchen; you are in his head. The incredible counterpoint the second voice is weaving around the first voice alters its affect, complicates the original feeling through the introduction of non-bluesy harmonic practices, namely leading tones. By the entrance of the third voice, you have some idea of what to expect. The harmony is filled out in more detail, adding a chilling deceptive cadence on “...speak to me”. Each voice is moving semi-independently, so the end result is a thickly textured harmonic web which sounds as much like a murmuring crowd as like any kind of “normal” polyphony. It's like Blake is showing us how the more he thinks about this idea, the more complicated it gets.

      At this point the camera pulls back, in a sense, and we get sonic scenery for the melody. Thrumming, throbbing, windswept arpeggios over pedal points create a sense of motion inside a larger stillness, like standing outside on a January night and watching the endless pattern of falling snow. Narratively, this motion within stillness seems to imply one moving along one's fixed destiny, or guided by forces out of his control. I realize I'm taking some pretty generous liberties here, but this seems like a plausible attitude for the singer to have in order to accept his situation the way the lyric implies he is. Eventually, smoothly, the instrumental texture warms up and transitions into a fuzzed-out keyboard sound. The nostalgic warmth of this sound, accompanied by chords which are finally not tied down by some kind of pedal point, is as if the singer is saying to himself “but we had some good times, though” and cracking open the door to his emotions just a bit. This section terminates in a cadence, the only one (besides the end) that happens in a song that otherwise smoothly segues between its many sections.

      The brief moment of repose attained by this cadence point is summarily shattered by the return to the snowy arpeggios. This time they come back armed with a deep, marchlike kick drum thudding away like a migraine. When the vocals come back in, Blake takes us through a three-time repetition and building process similar to the one at the beginning of the song. What's different this time is that as many things are falling apart as are being built up; it feels as if the kick drum is urging this process onward. The first time through, we have the original solo vocal, the keyboard chords, and the drum. As we press on, the melody is joined by a firm, active bass line, then a double time kick drum and more voices. This all has a role in the increasing intensity, but what is more important is what changes under duress. The vocal line's emphasis begins to shift onto increasing repetitions of “but I don't blame them”. At the same time the warm keyboard sound grows increasingly harsh and brittle; as its chords coalesce into a single, laserlike pitch, the piece's climax is attained. The note takes unyielding hold of all registers, and the first clause of lyrics is finally eliminated. We're left with obsession over a note and over a few words. One says “I don't blame them”. The other says “I blame myself”.

      Yet somehow, the piano chords return at the end, awkwardly superimposed over the writhing synthesizer line which it had earlier evolved into. Maybe this implies a cycle, a wound that that is by turns old and new, accepted and strained against, peacefully buried and unearthed, still bleeding. Such things are certainly real. But by no means are they always permanent. Maybe someday the singer will make the changes he needs to make, forgive himself, and thus stop the cycle. But that may be a phase of the story best left to another artist.

allow me to reintroduce myself

...and so it begins, my first attempt at blogging in five years  Far from my rusty old Xanga's blog's role as chronicler of my high school doings and primary vehicle for keeping tabs on pretty girls (pre-Facebook! we were all so young), this blog is hopefully going to be one that the reader might actually derive some pleasure from.  I want to try my hand at the sort of writing that Alex Ross and Jeremy Denk do: write in an engaging way about the interrelationship among classical music, other kinds of music, and the events of my own life.  What especially inspires me about Denk's writing (his blog is called Think Denk, well worth a read) is his ability to marry a writer's imagination to an astute theorist's conception of (and reaction to) musical structures in the pieces he writes about.  His best writing in this style has fundamentally changed how I think about music.  Of course, Jeremy Denk is a fabulously talented and intelligent pianist,  whereas I, sitting in my mom's house, am enjoying what might kindly be called the "pre-success" (or less kindly, the "migrant laborer") phase of my career.*  But I know I have something to say regardless, and the purpose of this blog is to help me figure out how to say it.  I look forward to hearing from you all about how well (or badly) this is all going.


*or even less kindly yet more truthfully, the "poor as shit" phase