Talk:Johann Sebastian Bach/Style

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Bach’s musical style arose from several factors, including his native compositional skills and his religious beliefs. The most important stylistic factor was Bach's extraordinary fluency in contrapuntal invention and a flare for improvisation at the keyboard. Initially, he came into contact with the music of German-speaking. He came into contact with a wider pallete of European culture and intellectual discourse, including the French and Italian languages. These experiences, combined with his emerging talent for writing intensely woven music of powerful sonority, appear to have set him on a course to develop an eclectic, energetic musical style in which foreign influences were injected into an intensified version of the pre-existing German music language. Throughout his teens and twenties, his output showed increasing skill in the large-scale organisation of musical ideas, and a refinement of the Buxtehudian model of improvisatory preludes and counterpoint of limited complexity. The period 1713–14, when a large repertoire of Italian music became available to the Weimer court orchestra, was a turning point. From this time onwards, he appears to have absorbed into his style the Italians’ dramatic openings, clear melodic contours, the sharp outlines of their bass lines, greater motoric and rhythmic conciseness, more unified motivic treatment, and more clearly articulated schemes for modulation.

Bach’s devout, personal relationship with the Lutheran God inevitably placed sacred music at the centre of his repertory; more specifically, the Lutheran chorale (hymn tune), the principal musical aspect of the Lutheran service, was the basis of much of his output. He invested the chorale prelude, already a standard set of Lutheran forms, with a more cogent, tightly integrated architecture, in which the intervallic patterns and melodic contours of the tune were typically treated in a dense, contrapuntal latticework against relatively slow-moving, overarching statements of the tune.

His deep knowledge of and interest in the liturgy led to his development of intricate relationships between music and linguistic text. This was evident from the smallest to the largest levels of his compositional technique. On the smallest level, many of his sacred works contain short motifs that, by recurrent association, can be regarded as pictorial symbolism and articulations of liturgical concepts. For example, the octave leap, usually in a bass line, represents the relationship between heaven and earth (e.g., the sound clip from Singet dem Herrn, above); the slow, repeated notes of the bass line in the opening movement of Cantata 106 (Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit) depict the laboured trudging of Jesus as he was forced to drag the cross from the city to the crucifixion site.

Sound clip: the opening of the first movement of Cantata 106

On the largest level, the overall form of some of his sacred vocal works is evidence of subtle, elaborate planning: for example, the overall structure of the St Matthew Passion illustrates the liturgical and dramatic flow of the Easter story on a number levels simultaneously;[ref] the text, keys and variations of instrumental and vocal forces used in the movements of Cantata 11 (Lobet Gott in alle Landen) may form a structure that resembles the cross.[ref]

Beyond these specific musical features arising from Bach’s religious affiliation is the fact that he was able to produce music for an audience that was committed to serious, regular worship, for which a concentrated density and complexity was accepted. His natural inclination was to reinvigorate existing forms, rather than to discard them and pursue more dramatic musical innovations. Thus, Bach’s inventive genius was almost entirely directed towards working within the structures he inherited.

Bach’s inner personal drive to display his musical achievements was evidenced in a number of ways. At the time, the most obvious way was his successful striving to become the leading virtuoso and improviser of the day on the organ. Keyboard music occupied a central position in his repertory throughout his life, and he pioneered the elevation of the keyboard from continuo to solo instrument in his numerous harpsichord concertos and chamber movements with keyboard obbligato, in which he himself probably played the solo part. Many of his keyboard preludes are vehicles for a free improvisatory virtuosity in the German tradition, although their internal organisation became increasingly more cogent as he matured. Virtuosity is a key element in other forms, such as the fugal movement from Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 (the opening of which is captured in an audio clip above), in which Bach himself probably first played the jaw-droppingly rapid solo violin passages. Another example is in the organ fugue from BWV547, a late work from Leipzig, in which virtuosic passages are mapped onto Italian solo-tutti alternation within the fugal development.

Related to his role as teacher was his drive to encompass whole genres by producing collections of movements that thoroughly explore the range of artistic and technical possibilities inherent in those genres. The most famous examples are the two books of the Well tempered keyboard, each of which presents a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key, in which all conceivable contrapuntal technique is displayed. The English and French Suites, and the Partitas, all keyboard works from the Cöthen period, systematically explore a range of metres and of sharp and flat keys. This urge to be encyclopedic, as it were, is evident throughout his life: the Goldberg Variations (1746?), present a sequence of canons that work through each available interval and distance, as though items on a list were being ticked off one by one. Similarly, the Art of Fugue (1749) is a manifesto of fugal techniques.

A more subtle manifestation of Bach’s personal identity lies in simple arithmetic: by assigning a cardinal number to each letter of the alphabet, he derived the number 14 for his surname (B = 2, A = 1, C = 3, and H = 8) and 41 for his full name. These numbers occur time and again in his output, whether in the number of notes in a fugal subject or the number of bars in an episode.

His letter to the Leipzig Council in 1732 asking for increased funding for instrumentalists; and his gift to the Saxon monarch of part of what is now known as the Mass in B minor, in an attempt to raise his status in dealing with the Leipzig Council.[ref] Bach took pride in being a great teacher and mentor, and his Leipzig apartment was often host to visiting students. The importance to him of this aspect of being a musician was born out in the number of didactic works he wrote, including the Anna Magdalena Book, which was mostly compiled at Cöthen for the training of his eldest son, Friedemann.[ref] He may also have written the organ Trio Sonatas for teaching purposes.[ref] A para or two on remaining stylistic features, still to write.