Closing in on our performance

Confronted with the issues I have explored in the preceding weeks, plus a host of others, Chorale and I have made a lot of choices.

Chicago Chorale normally consists of sixty singers.  Though enormous choruses have sung the Mass in B minor, and still do, the general trend has been toward smaller forces-- on occasion, just one singer per part.  Frequently, even when larger groups sing it, a smaller group, termed concertists, will introduce many of the movements, will sing particularly difficult passages as solos, will even sing the more intimate movements entirely on their own. Sometimes, these concertists will be members of the choir; alternatively, they may be the soloists who also sing the aria and duet movements.   This trend toward ripienist/concertist texture is supported by the scholarly literature.

Chorale is by no means a symphony chorus, but we are larger than ensembles which present the most praised, modern versions of the work.  We could have chosen to bypass the work altogether, in honor of scholarship and in acknowledgment of the fact that we do not reflect cutting edge performance practice research-- but then we would be deprived of the glorious experience of learning and performing the work, and our audience would be deprived of the opportunity to hear it.  So we chose to sing it, and to devote tremendous effort toward lightening our sound and articulation, while making the most of our full sound where it is needed and welcome.

We also chose to forego the ripienist/concertist procedure—which could have been interesting and appropriate for our forces.  Such a procedure feels “professional” in the worst and most manipulative sense of the word;  and I want Chorale to experience all of the music, each note, as an amateur event—an act of love.  As Robert Shaw said—music, like sex, is too good to be left to the professionals. Again, this forces us to be more careful in our control of texture and dynamics than we would be if those issues were resolved through controlling the size of the forces.

Chorale has chosen to sing the Latin text with a German pronunciation.  Most ensembles use the more common Italianate pronunciation, and have good results; and recent research indicates that the German pronunciation Chorale uses, based on modern German, is not necessarily the pronunciation Bach used or intended. So we can’t defend our choice on a secure, scholarly basis.  But our choice does suggest the music’s German background.  And I agree with Helmuth Rilling’s point that German consonants articulate more clearly than Italian, while German vowels narrow and clarify the vocal line, even for an entire section of singers, lending greater definition to Bach’s remarkably complex counterpoint.  This is particularly necessary with a group of our size:  clarity of pitch and line is far more important, in this music, than the beautiful, Italianate production of individual voices in the ensemble, which can actually work against an accurate presentation of Bach’s musical ideas.

We chose to present the Mass at Rockefeller Chapel, on the campus of The University of Chicago, because the building’s size and grandeur reflect Bach’s music more accurately than other spaces available to us. The Hyde Park community, which surrounds the Chapel, represents, in a purer form than other Chicago neighborhoods, the combination of scholarship, idealism, and high culture which can support concerts like this.  A high percentage of Chorale’s regular audience are Hyde Park residents, and they often express appreciation for the level of Chorale’s striving and seriousness of intent.  And from a purely monetary point of view, Rockefeller Chapel seats a sufficient number of listeners that, if we sell tickets effectively, we can cover a significant proportion of our production costs (which are mind-boggling) with door receipts.

Our concert is in three weeks.  Sunday, April 3, 3 p.m.

We have rehearsed, and I have written about the experience, since the beginning of January.  The writing has focused my study, my reading, my thinking about the work; it has been a significant and helpful discipline for me.  I hope you will come to our performance; and I hope you will spread the word, and bring your friends.  I’m a believer; I am convinced that Bach’s Mass in B minor truly is “the greatest artwork of all times and all people,” and I’d like to show you why.

Compiling the Mass in B minor

Though the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass consists of only five movements—Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus/Benedictus/Osanna, and Agnus Dei—Bach divides the text and music of his B Minor setting into twenty-three separate movements, eighteen of which are for choir and orchestra alone.  That is quite a lot of music; and with the exception of the Gratias/Dona nobis movements, and the repeat of the Osanna, each movement has different music.  And all of it is great.  How does he do it?

First, it is important to realize that plagiarism was not a dirty word in Bach’s time; nor was parody.  Bach, and his colleagues, had immense responsibilities in the preparation and performance of music for the theater, the court, the church-- and their success depended on getting it all done, rather than on satisfying a theoretical mandate that they be original.  To use a restaurant metaphor:  Bach, the head chef of Leipzig or Weimar or Cöthen, was free, even expected, to build upon the successes of others, to shop for ingredients at the same markets, to use the recipes and menus that had worked well for other chefs and alter them to suit his own tastes and circumstances, even to change his own recipes over time as his needs and tastes changed.  Music was a living, volatile consumer product, constantly evolving to meet demand.  Creativity reflected one's ability to arrange the materials at hand, as well as to invent new materials.  In other words—Bach borrowed freely and happily from other composers, as well as from himself, both because this enriched his palette of possibility, and because it allowed him to keep up with his workload.  It is inconceivable that Bach could have accomplished all he did in his lifetime, were he under pressure to stay away from the intellectual property of others.

An extraordinary amount of Bach scholarship over the past century has focused on sleuthing out the sources behind Bach’s music, and in preparing new and better editions of his music, based on this detective work.  Prominent names in this work, currently, include Joshua Rifkin, Robert Marshall, John Butt, and Christoff Wolff; and while these scholars frequently disagree with one another, as a group they persistently push the envelope, and contribute to general knowledge of the composer and his work.  Between them, these men have determined that very little of what is now called the Mass in B minor was freshly composed for the work-- perhaps as few as four or five movements.  The remaining movements were selected by Bach from music for cantatas which he had composed throughout his career.  Scholars agree that he seems to have chosen music which he thought was his best work, as well as music which would suit the character of the Mass, and would reflect accurately the new, Latin texts.   He transposed some movements to new keys, in keeping with the overall key structure of the new work; he adapted phrase structure to fit the new texts; he eliminated instrumental introductions and interludes, to move the dramatic action forward more efficiently; and he composed new movements, as well as sections of movements, where he needed them to balance and complete the work.

Let’s consider movements 3-6 of the Credo portion:  Et in unum Dominum, Et incarnatus est, Crucifixus, and Et resurrexit.  Scholars agree, based on internal evidence, that Bach adapted the duet Et in unum from an earlier composition, though that earlier duet is lost.  The close imitation between the two voices is ideally suited to a love duet, probably from a secular work, and adapts easily to a text which expresses the oneness, the consubstantiality, of the Father and the Son.  In his original version of the Mass, Bach set the entire text of movements three and four within this one movement.  It was only in the final months of his life (determined, again, on the basis of internal evidence) that he decided he needed a separate movement to set the words “And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”  So he kept the music for movement 3 intact, had the soloists repeat earlier words, and composed a completely new movement -- one of the few freshly-composed movements in the Mass, and one of Bach’s final compositional efforts.  In so doing, he created a numerical symmetry which the Credo had previously lacked, placing the Crucifixus exactly at the center of this discrete section, as well as exactly at the center of all of the Mass movements which lie between the identical musics of the Gratias and the Dona nobis.  It is an amazing engineering feat, which adds internal structure for the connoisseur and first time listener alike.

Bach adapted the Crucifixus movement from his cantata BWV 12, where it has the words Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen.  Butt hypothesizes that Bach could have adapted even this early cantata movement (1714) from a similar movement by Vivaldi (Piango, gemo, sospiro e peno), but goes on to say that such laments were standard literary forms, and that, together with its descending bass line, is such a standard form that it would be stretching things to suggest that Bach did anything other than compose his own version of a common form.  More interesting are the final four bars of the Crucifixus;  Bach added these to the music he borrowed from himself, and with them modulates to G Major (thereby setting up the D Major of the following Et resurrexit) and brings the choral forces down to the lowest pitches they sing in the entire Mass, thereby representing the lowering of Christ’s body into the sepulchre.

The following movement, Et resurrexit, explodes out of this with no pause and no instrumental introduction—voices and instruments enter with a complete change of affect, in a fanfare-like, rising triad.  Scholars assume that this movement, as well, is adapted from an earlier, secular cantata—possibly the lost birthday cantata for August I, BWV Anh. 9.  In adapting it, Bach dropped the opening instrumental introduction, which would have slowed down the drama of Easter morning, but included other instrumental interludes, which have a euphorically dance-like character and seem to suggest heaven and earth rejoicing.

In his handbook for the study of the Mass in B minor, John Butt recounts the experience of one of the early Bach scholars, Julius Rietz, who wrote the first published study of the sources of the Mass in 1857: “Reitz shows himself to have been a meticulous scholar, who even made enquiries into the fate of Bach’s first set of parts of the Sanctus, copied in 1724 and loaned to Graf Sporck. The inheritors of the estate informed Rietz that many manuscripts had been given to the gardeners to wrap around trees.  One can barely dare to envisage what similar fates befell other manuscripts from Bach’s circle.”  I expect Bach would not have been surprised by this; the archives and libraries of our modern world would probably astound him.  Christoff Wolff suggests that one of the principle motivations behind Bach’s compilation of the Mass was his assumption that the thousands of pages of his cantatas cycles would not last—that they were too specific to their own time, location, and purpose to be of any use once he was gone, and that the only way he could preserve the best of his work was to use it for a Latin Mass, which would have a better chance of being saved and recognized in the future.  My many years of participation in the Oregon Bach Festival has given me the opportunity to sing and study many of Bach’s surviving cantatas, but I am unusual in this experience—most performers know only a handful of them, and most listeners don’t know them at all.  So from our viewpoint, Bach had it right—his Mass enables us to know not only what he was able to preserve, but also the dimensions of our loss.

Why did Bach, a Lutheran, compose a mass?

I attended a small Lutheran college.  My freshman choir sang 4-5 movements of the Mass in B Minor, and at some point during the rehearsal period this question occurred to me, and would not let go:  Masses are Catholic; why did Bach compose one?  Like many of my fellow college students, I grew up in a fairly segregated atmosphere;  most Catholics lived on one side of town and attended Catholic school.  The rest of us, primarily Lutherans, attended public school.  The two groups were not, strictly speaking, enemies, but on fundamental matters we did not have much to do with one another.  I never set foot in the Catholic church; we stayed clear of masses, along with priests and nuns and the Virgin Mary.  I assumed no kinship between what we Lutherans did on Sunday, and what the Catholics did.  Bach was a Lutheran—he was “ours,” and we claimed him, though we knew little about him beyond the chorale harmonizations we sang from the Lutheran hymnal.  College courses in religion and music history broadened my knowledge of the mass as a liturgical structure and as the basis for extended musical form, but my viewpoint remained pretty parochial.  Not until I moved to Chicago for graduate school did I begin to understand that the Lutheranism I knew bore only a faint resemblance to that practiced in Bach’s time.

Lutherans continue to claim Bach—some refer to him as the “fifth evangelist”— and others stress a symbolic father-son relationship between him and Martin Luther:  Luther clarified the faith, and Bach set it to music.  The Golomb dissertation to which I referred a few weeks ago even posits a “Lutheran” approach to the interpretation and performance of Bach’s music.

By all accounts, Bach was deeply religious.  Although his professional responsibilities throughout his life included obligations to secular as well as religious authorities, and his surviving compositions reflect this career duality, the evidence reflected in his letters, in his professional trajectory, and in the very nature of his activities in liturgical composition and performance leave little reason to doubt his fundamental piety and spirituality. There is little doubt, as well, that he was thoroughly Lutheran in his theology.  But Lutheranism as Bach experienced it was more than theology—it was the state church, a source of power and preferment, and it shared a good deal of space with secular authority.  When Bach compiled the first half of his mass—called the Missa, it consisted of the Kyrie and Gloria sections of the Ordinary— he was not only working comfortably within the traditions of the Lutheran Church (which continued, post-Reformation, to refer to the Eucharist as the “mass”), he was also seeking advancement from the court at Dresden, to whom he presented his Missa as a gift, in 1733.  This limited (but complete) work, approximately one-half as long as the completed Mass in B Minor, did indeed receive a liturgical performance by the Dresden kapelle, and ultimately won for Bach the worldly preferment and protection he was seeking.

The larger question about Bach’s purpose is reflected in his “completion” of the Mass in the last years of his life.  He in some respects pulled back from the day to day responsibilities of his position in Leipzig, and put his energy into the completion of major, somewhat theoretical works: Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, and Mass in B Minor. In these works, he seems intent not only on establishing his own legacy, but in creating a veritable encyclopedia of western European musical styles, forms, and procedures.

It seems clear that Bach never intended his Mass for liturgical use—clocking in at two hours without a break, it is simply too long.  Rather, it appears to be what Bach scholar Christoff Wolff calls the summa summarum of Bach’s artistry.  Wolff goes on to say, “We know of no occasion for which Bach could have written the B-minor Mass, nor any patron who might have commissioned it, nor any performance of the complete work before 1750.  Thus, Bach’s last choral composition is in many respects the vocal counterpart to The Art of Fugue, the other side of the composer’s musical legacy.  Like no other work of Bach’s, the B-minor Mass represents a summary of his writing for voice, not only in its variety of styles, compositional devices, and range of sonorities, but also in its high level of technical polish. “

Performances of the work reflect not only our perceptions of Bach’s beliefs and intentions, but our personal entry to the work.  The first complete productions of the Mass, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, stressed its magisterial qualities—depicting Bach as an extraordinary man who communed with God on a level beyond human emotion and expression.  Near-universal acceptance and practice of the Christian faith, which influenced all thought and politics of Bach’s time, still held a great deal of sway 100 years later.  Bach was seen as an almost sacred prototype for the heroic figure later realized in Beethoven— the first complete performance of the Mass, in 1859, was actually inspired by the success of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.  Many modern performances stress, instead, Bach’s humanity, his imperfection, his kinship with musical tastes and procedures of his own time.  This latter approach has invited participation by musicians who do not profess any religious creed, yet find the work to be universally compelling and uplifting. I suspect the Mass may be the most comprehensive, unifying work by any composer— Bach’s attempt to depict the universality behind both his private spirituality and the religious expression of his time.  Albert Schweitzer described the work as one in which the sublime and intimate co-exist side by side, as do the Catholic and Protestant elements, all being as enigmatic and unfathomable as the religious consciousness of the work’s creator.

Behind/beyond the B minor score

A first glance at a good Bach edition reveals time signatures, clefs, and a lot of notes—little else.  No color words; no tempo indications; no dynamic markings; no crescendos, decrescendos, ritardandos, accelerandos; very little to delineate phrase, articulation, emotional content; almost no ornamentation. Bach, like his contemporaries, depended upon training, convention, habit, shared tradition, to fill in these aspects of performance practice; he neither composed, nor copied out his scores, with the thought that musicians 250 years later would wonder about his intentions.  Modern musicians, if they wish to perform Bach’s music artfully and accurately, have to rely upon a kind of musical archaeology to build a backstory, upon which to base a convincing interpretation.

As a case in point, let us consider the Et resurrexit movement, #6 of the Symbolum Nicenum section of the Mass in B minor.  We see a ¾ time signature, which implies three quarter notes (six eighth notes) per bar [1 & 2 & 3 &]; we see tutti orchestra, including three trumpets and timpani, implying a forte dynamic; we see the “Et resurrexit” text, which in the context is likely to imply a brisk, upbeat tempo and mood; and the instruments have staccato marks in bar 2 (only), suggesting a light articulation (the singers have no marks). Beyond this, we make sense of Bach’s difficult, complicated music on our own.   And I have experienced, myself, performances in which players, singers, and conductors simply do their best to get through what they see on the page, heave a sigh of relief when they reach the end, and hope it is followed by something a little slower and simpler.

Singers have information instrumentalists don’t have:  they have words.  And it has been through my own attempt to sing these words with accurate accentuation, that I have come to question the interpretation, or non–interpretation, I describe above.   Two text phrases in particular have long intrigued me:  “Et resurrexit” itself, and “cujus regni non erit finis.”  Both first occur at identical, expository points in the music, with identical rhythmic placement , i.e. [1/&/2/cu/-u/jus // re/-e/gni/non/e/rit //fin/-i/ni/-is/3/&].  This always bothered me-- the natural word accents would fit much better if these identical 3-bar passages were performed in a 6/8 meter [1 & &/cu/-u/jus // re/-e/gni/non/e/rit // fi/-i/ni/-is/&/&].  Looks complicated here—sorry I don’t have the technology to diagram this more clearly; the patterns sound straightforward enough when spoken or sung.  A background in singing late renaissance and early baroque secular music leads me, through the inherent accentuation of the words, to expect, and look for, some alternation of the two meters, 3/4 and 6/8—and sure enough, the score abounds in instances of this.  One recognizes the characteristic rhythmic pattern of the Courante, a popular courtly dance of the period, and one which figures prominently in secular suites, by Bach and others.

An hour with Google yields the following:

“Courante was a court dance popular in Europe from about 1600 to 1800. In a stylized form, its music was usually the second movement of the Baroque suite. It was danced by couples using small springing or gliding steps. The musical form had two types: the Italian corrente was in fast triple metre, with quick running figures in a texture of accompanied melody; the slower French courante was conrtrapuntal in style, with shifts between 3|2 and 6|4 metre.”  (Word IQ.com)

“The “Et resurrexit” displays some of the characteristics of the Courante with its triple meter often bisected by a division of the bar into two groups of three quavers.  …probably began life in the context of secular cantatas, in which dance forms are particularly idiomatic.

“Bach used all the most basic devices of his age—the dance form, the ritornello form, tonal development, voice-leading—but combined them in such a fashion that it is often impossible to decide which has precedence at any one point.  There is clearly the overriding flavour of a dance, but at no point is a single dance form heard in its entirety. “  (John Butt, Bach: Mass in B Minor)

And much, much more.  Google is great.

These comments, and many more, reflect a constantly evolving tradition regarding the sources, and performance practice, of Bach’s works.   Performers, facing the score with which Bach himself provides us, cannot afford to neglect this tradition, and simply trust that the innate power of the music, as well as our own imagination and energy, will carry us along.  Countless listeners, musicians, scholars, hover about us, a cloud of witnesses to our particular attempts to bring this score to life.    We have to make choices, impose our own preferences, to produce coherent interpretations;  but we owe it to this tradition, to make informed choices.

What others do with the B Minor Mass

I spent much of the past week reading a dissertation related to Chorale’s current B minor Mass project: Expression and Meaning in Bach Performance and Reception--An Examination of the B minor Mass on Record, by Uri Golomb, King’s College, Cambridge, 2004. This has been an informative, entertaining read for me—I have sung Bach’s music under several of the conductors Golomb discusses, including Helmuth Rilling, August Wenzinger, Robert Shaw, Georg Solti, and Peter Schreier; and I have listened closely to recordings by several more of them, including Philippe Herreweghe, Nicholas Harnoncourt, Gustave Leonhardt, Joshua Rifkin, and John Eliot Gardiner. Golomb systematically categorizes these conductors, and many others, by date of performance (he covers recordings 1950-2000); by ensemble type and size (from the grand symphonic interpretations of Von Karajan, Solti, and Klemperer, to the one-on-a-part performances by Rifkin and Andrew Parrot); by historic vs. modern instruments; by interpretive style (romantic, “Lutheran,” Historically Informed [HIP], and a few others). He also compares the various conductors and ensembles in their versions of specific movements-- describes them according to chorus type (and under that heading, discusses the use of contrast between concertists and ripienists—soloists and tutti chortus—in choral movements), intensity, structure of dynamics, verbal and musical rhetoric, degree and type of articulation, tempo—you name it; this is an exhaustive document. One is amazed when, in his concluding chapter, he suggests that he has only scratched the surface, and identifies further areas of study.

Golomb does see a general trajectory—from a Romantic, 19th century approach, through the radically reduced textures and “lightweight,” human-scale procedures of the HIP movement, and into the recent return to a more personal, expressive, dramatic, even neo-romantic style, within the context of HIP techniques and timbres. So broad-based a study is able to include, and account for, many idiosyncrasies and disparities along the way; and, just as interesting, Golomb compares what the various conductors, themselves, write and say, with the often contradictory evidence presented on their recordings. I am particularly interested in what Helmuth Rilling has written, and said in interviews with the author: I have sung the Mass several times with Rilling in the past sixteen years, and have experienced firsthand the stylistic evolution Golomb describes in just this one conductor. I also sang a good deal under August Wenzinger, a pioneer in the HIP movement, at the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute in the seventies and eighties, when the “light-weight” HIP movement was at its zenith, and heard conversations and arguments among my fellow-participants about Wenzinger’s “old-fashioned,” Romantic approach.

An important question the author and his subjects deal with, is—what is Bach's intent in composing the B minor Mass? And what should be the intent of modern performances of it? Is it actually a single work, or is it four separate works, never intended to be performed as a unit? Is it, and should it be, music for Lutheran worship, which Lutherans will instinctively understand better than others-- or is it music with universal appeal and meaning? And another, important question Golomb only hints at, but which permeates his study-- how should performers themselves feel about this music? Do we approach it is an immense mathematical problem, as a collection of historical styles and procedures, or as an emotionally and spiritually compelling journey? Do we commune with God—or with a human and imperfect Bach? Is this a work of such scope that it should be undertaken only by skilled professionals, or does it lend itself to valid performance by amateur forces?

I find the content of this dissertation to be not only informative, but also liberating-- if the most thoughtful and skilled musicians of our time differ so in their approaches to this work, then Chicago Chorale and I, with study, respect, and hard work, can stake out our own territory, our own approach, and be in good company. When, as a singer, I first moved from the Wenzinger approach to the Shaw approach, and then to the Rilling approach, I thought my head would split in pieces—Who was right? Where did my loyalties lie? How could I reconcile the differences I perceived, and not be ridiculed by adherents to one approach or another? My goal, as singer and conductor, has always been to serve the music as best I could—but each of these conductors has claimed that same goal, while also claiming a superior personal position. I have never had the nerve, or the ego strength, to maintain, “This is the way it has to be. God or my superior instincts came to me in a dream and told me I was right.” I rely on tradition, the best teachers I can find—and then, finally, on whatever it is that made me choose to be a musician, and remain one. Bach is a good partner in this venture-- his music is so rich, so many-faceted, it has room for just about anyone. On April 3, you will hear what I—and Chorale—are able to do with this stupendous work, this time around.

Mass in B minor and Winterreise

Both ensembles I conduct are preparing major works: Chorale presents the Bach Mass in B minor April 3, while Chicago Men’s A Cappella is learning selections from Schubert’s Winterreise for a March 11 concert. The two works occupy similar positions in the canon of Western art music-- each at the pinnacle of its respective genre; and they occupy these positions because of the all-encompassing nature of each composer’s achievement. Though I have prepared and presented each work several times in the past, I have never prepared them simultaneously; and they compete constantly for my total involvement, heart and soul.

Bach effectively spent his entire career composing Mass in B minor-- it consists of complete movements, and fragments, from throughout his compositional life, recomposed, reworded, reconfigured, stitched together with newly composed music -- Bach scholar Christoph Wolff calls the mass a “specimen book,” a collection of examples of genres and techniques which covers not only Bach's personal history, but the history of Western music. In the process of compiling this music, Bach seems intent on summing up what he has learned, and what he believes his successors should learn. The Sanctus was first performed in 1724; movement 4 of the Credo, Et incarnatus est, is though to be the last music he composed, dictated to an assistant because Bach himself was blind, in 1750; the rest of the music reflects the experience of the intervening 26 years.

Winterreise occupies a similarly late position in Schubert’s tragically short career-- he corrected the proofs of Part II on his deathbed, in 1828. In all, Schubert composed over 600 songs; one presumes he had learned a great deal by the time he got to Winterreise, not only about composing single songs, but about planning and compiling cycles, and that Winterreise, like Bach’s Mass in B Minor, is a compendium of what the composer knew about his craft. Certainly, performers, composers, and critics since Schubert’s time have regarded this song cycle with the same sort of awe and reverence that Bach’s work inspires.

Performers and audiences alike are confronted with the daunting task of unpacking these works-- James Joyce said, “One needs my education to understand my books,” and a similar problem confronts the musician who dares approaches Bach and Schubert. But both works are so much more than the sum of their erudition, skill, and historical references. One sets aside a well-written textbook for another day; one lives and breathes Bach and Schubert—they take over, inside and out, waking and sleeping. Such is the creative, emotional, spiritual energy of these composers, I often feel like Jacob, wrestling all night with two angels—they don’t let go, and neither do I.

I read somewhere that Bach shows us what it means to be God, Mozart shows us what it means to be human, and Beethoven shows us what it means to be Beethoven; I agree with the Bach part, at least, and I put Schubert right there with him. Beyond the notes, the rhythms, the historically informed performance practices, one experiences these works as living beings, as manifestations of God in the world—and though they disturb me and rob me of my rest, they also demonstrate that we humans are better than we think we are, and convince me that it is always worth it to keep moving ahead, not just out of habit, but because we, like Bach and Schubert, are capable of holy things.

Kyrie eleison– Lord have mercy

A typical Bach score is black with notes. Harmonies outlined in the basso continuo rarely rest, and the pitches above them change constantly to keep up. Performers become accustomed to this-- one is always on the move, aiming for the next harmonic arrival point, then taking off again once it is reached. The overall effect is—page after page of notes, thousands of them; how does one organize them? Where does one begin in breaking them down into comprehensible groupings, in assigning emphasis, ebb and flow, in such a way that they all make sense, all get heard, all matter and contribute positively, without just canceling one another out in a cloud of sound? The first movement of the Mass in B Minor, Kyrie I, immediately plunges us into this “Bach problem.” After a 4-bar, homophonic introduction, the movement unfolds in thirteen independent musical lines, in addition to the continuo line. We singers aren’t accustomed to thinking much about instrumental lines-- we see five vocal lines, and figure our job is to make sense of those; it surprises us to learn that the instruments do more than just accompany us, and have their own, independent lines, weaving in and out of what we are doing. Fundamentally, there is no hierarchy; each line contributes equally to Bach’s structure and texture. We need to find hierarchy within our own lines—periods of higher energy, balanced with periods of relaxation; figures which require pointed, staccato or marcato emphasis, and figures with require legato; passages of a more soloistic character, and passages of background accompaniment. If we don’t find hierarchy within our own parts, relative to the rest of what is going on, we end up sound like a beehive on a warm day, lots and lots of buzzing.

A Chorale member mentioned that he had sung the B Minor with a college group, about sixteen years ago. Quoting him as nearly as I remember; “We just tried to sing the notes; we never did anything with all this articulation stuff.” I know what he is talking about: Chorale has worked through ten (out of sixteen) choral movements in the past two weeks, and even with a high percentage of singers who have previously performed the work, we struggle to find pitches and rhythms; vocal quality, articulation, phrasing, would be complete non-starters, were I not constantly stopping to point them out and work on them. It is not much help that our Bärenreiter piano-vocal scores are “clean”—they include very little that Bach himself did not notate in his own scores, and Bach did not customarily notate much in the vocal lines. The instrumental lines are fairly marked up, following Bach’s own score and parts, and many of these marks have been transferred to the piano reduction in the singers’ scores—but singers are not prone to look down to the piano line: following their own line is about all they accomplish at this point. So we transfer the markings to the vocal parts in rehearsal, and then rehearse characteristic phrase articulations, ornaments, etc.; we also listen to recorded examples, which I bring to rehearsal (we work with recordings by Gardiner, Herreweghe, and Rilling). In last week’s rehearsal we accidentally played the opening of Kyrie I excerpted from a recording by Robert Shaw—and it clearly was not what we were after; everyone in the choir immediately realized this. That in itself was a victory—we grasp the direction in which we are headed.

Taken by themselves, these articulations can seem pretty mechanical and not awfully graceful; they have to be performed with understanding and within the context of the vocal line, and this is extremely difficult-- Bach demands a great deal. I see and hear from the singers a certain satisfaction when they feel they have “got it down”—and at that point I realize how very far we have to go, to internalize these gestures and allow them to mean something, rather than just perform them mechanically. They have to flow; they have to alter in emphasis and adjust to the volume, the surrounding parts, the intensity of individual passages; and this requires far more than mechanical competence and repetition. But the mechanical accomplishment is a good first step; the rest will follow as the singers become more and more immersed in the music and it’s meaning, in the weeks to come.