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Matthew C. Saunders Review of
Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint by
David Yearsley As appeared in Music
Educators Journal 90 (March 2004) All Rights Resevered No
study of eighteenth-century music can ignore the contributions of Johann
Sebastian Bach, and no study of Bach or his contemporaries can ignore the use
of counterpoint in works intended for performance and in “learned” works –
musical riddles passed among musicians to demonstrate or test contrapuntal
ingenuity. David Yearsley provides a
fascinating glimpse into the use of counterpoint in Bach’s music and the
implications that technique had in a time in which it was rapidly
disappearing in favor of newer styles. Yearsley’s ultimate purpose is
to expose the political, intellectual, social and spiritual connotations that
Bach’s counterpoint held in eighteenth-century Germany. Where the
twenty-first-century mind sees counterpoint mainly as a sign of compositional
mastery, the eighteenth-century mind saw a variety of meanings and
implications which are covered in this volume of six separate but related
essays. This work begins at the end,
with a discussion of Bach’s final hours, which were spent on revisions to a
chorale prelude, Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit. The second chapter, the longest, relates
the practice of “learned” counterpoint to the mysterious and
then-controversial beliefs and goals of alchemy. The Enlightenment mind saw a deep
connection between alchemy and counterpoint – and many great scientists and
musicians held that intense study of one or the other (or both) would yield
Nature’s secrets. Yearsley continues his
discussion with an essay on the vagaries of living in a time when one’s
newest music was already out of style.
Bach was equally comfortable in both the old and new styles, even to
the extent of being able to use one to lampoon the other, as Yearsley
demonstrates. Next follows a
re-examination of Bach’s famous encounter with Frederick the Great, which led
to the composition of A Musical Offering. Yearsley suggests that in the climate of
the Enlightenment, their meeting is best seen as a musical giant conferring
with a political giant in an atmosphere of relative equality that earlier
masters could not have imagined. In a
further journey into the Enlightenment mind, Yearsley points up attempts in
the eighteenth century to mechanize music, from automatons which played the
flute to tables for constructing canons algorithmically to early concepts of
the human body as a fantastically intricate machine. Yearsley’s final essay, after
five incisive, well-reasoned chapters seems to follow what may be an author’s
personal interest in a macabre subject – the fate of Bach’s earthly remains,
which were buried in Leipzig, subsequently disinterred and reburied there
after intense “scientific” scrutiny beginning in 1894. This practice, which was common during the
late nineteenth century, is related to both modern forensic science and the
discredited theory of phrenology. More
than anything else, this final essay displays the true nature of this book –
a collection of the author’s wide-ranging thoughts on one of history’s
greatest composers. |
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