It is a tradition in India to perform music of spiritual depth only if one is a spiritual master. The purpose of music not being for the development of ego of the performer, but rather for the enlightenment and spiritual edification of the listener. In other words, music’s goal is connection with the Divine.
In the world of music, discernment of music’s specific role increases our enjoyment. Is the piece meant to entertain us? Make us feel something in particular? Challenge us? Teach us? Relax us? Bring us a glimpse of heaven? Glorify God? These were some of the questions that musicians of Bach’s day might have asked. Bach, himself, often gave inscriptions of his music that tell us he was thinking these exact questions.
Today, with nearly every piece of music recorded and available at the speed of a download, the way music informs life has changed radically. Unless we hear a live performance, it is rare that we sit and listen to music. We no longer “go” to music, music comes to us. It surrounds us as we shop and dine in order to create the optimal ambience for the occasion. Mostly we create a personal soundscape through our playlists on our phone or what we choose to play in our car or while eating dinner. By surrounding ourselves with music all day long, we can easily forget music’s intended impact, intended lofty purpose.
This brings me back to Bach, and back to India. Although Bach’s name is known throughout the world and across centuries, you won’t likely find much of his music on easy-listening playlists. And the reason is simple: Bach’s music requires something of the listener. Like Indian music, which is performed so that the listener might change, might come closer to enlightenment, Bach’s music seems to have been created with the same intent.
There are, and have been, countless great Bach interpreters who have delighted billions of people with his music. The ability to bring Bach’s notes to life is a thrill unmatched by any other music I’ve made. Musically speaking, Bach was my first love. As a church organist, conductor, and performer, I’ve patterned my life after Bach – and that includes his spiritual and theological bent. But I’ve only just discovered an interesting truth: Music, and Bach’s music in particular, is a stream of understanding transmitted from one person to another person through the centuries. It’s not just interesting, beautiful, engaging or even meaningful; it mystically contains an inner truth to be discovered.
Neuroscience has started down this path, finding unique ways that Bach’s music seems to stimulate the brain. The ineffable nature of communication through soundwaves begins in the cosmos. The Divine nudges the heart. The heart in turn speaks to the mind. The mind responds by stimulating the breath. The entire body then engages in subtle motion, most especially the hands (or, for an organist, hands and feet). Simple, right? You might think so until you realize that we teach music exactly the opposite way I’ve just described. We concentrate on the hands, then the breath (and only that if we are singers or instrumentalists that require breath to make sound), then the brain, and there’s where it usually stops.
Ah! The heart and the Divine inspiration! The two things most impressive about Bach’s music are those.
I’m especially taken by the piece of music that was likely Bach’s first spiritual masterpiece, his Passacaglia. Volumes have been written about the ingenuity of this piece (mind) and its complexity (body). Likely written when he was 21 years old, few have considered that the piece may hold a key to mysticism (heart). If he did write it at age 21, being a person fascinated by numerology, it would not have escaped him that his age could only be divided by two holy numbers, three (Trinity) and seven (God’s number). The Passacaglia, itself, echoes this number. It has 21 iterations of the ground bass theme. The 21 variations are easily divided into seven groups of three. The fugue has 12 statements of the subject (21 backwards). The final chord of the piece has seven notes (the only Bach fugue ever to be written so).
There are more fascinating things about the work, including the quoting of numerous chorale melodies (craftily hidden), but virtually all of this is intellectual fodder and largely inaudible to the listener and performer alike. Instead, I want to address the way the piece makes me feel when I play it, why I return to it over and over again, and what I hope it conveys to the listener.
I first learned the Passacaglia when I was 21 and played it on my senior recital while at Oberlin Conservatory. Every day as I practiced it, I couldn’t resist focusing repeatedly on the opening 15 notes in the pedal – the actual passacaglia theme (ground bass). These are merely notes on a page, not remotely difficult, but something opens up inside me when I play them. I believe that there must be a whole unknown vocabulary for emotions stirred by music – for I cannot name what this makes me feel. The simplicity of what follows in the next two variations is somewhere between charming, melancholy, and serene. Each subsequent variation carries us along (Bach has hooked us within these first 45 seconds) like we are on a pilgrimage. Not coincidentally, Bach, himself, had just returned from a pilgrimage to Lübeck to apprentice briefly with Buxtehude – some 400 miles on foot.
When you look at his manuscript of this piece, the five and a half pages that precede the fugue become increasingly dense with ink. It’s an alchemical irony that these increasingly darker pages create the effect of greater luminosity and brilliance! The performer moves almost into a frenzy of energy; but whose? I don’t feel exhausted after a performance of the piece, nor after practicing it for an hour. Is Bach transmitting his own energy, mystically, through the page? I sincerely doubt that he, a staunch Lutheran, would subscribe to that theory. Bach would have pointed to the inscription that he often closed his pieces with: Soli Deo Gloria (although missing from this piece!). Bach was a humble man and did not need congratulations as motivation. And herein lies the key: It’s in the absence of ego that we find the purest channel for expression of Divine love. Bach was able to “get out of the way” of the music that needed his hand to be expressed. It’s as if God was waiting for precisely the right moment, and the right person, to gift humanity with a secret that would make life richer, more light.
This is why I never tire of performing this piece. It’s also what I hope the piece conveys to people listening to it: a window through which we can glimpse the love of God – endlessly energetic yet serene, deep beyond description.
When I recorded the piece at the Bavokerk in Haarlem, Holland, recording on an organ that was built only a couple decades after Bach wrote his Passacaglia, and played on by Handel, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and countless other greats, I felt that I needed to bow before and after recording (and I did). Bow to the instrument that brings beauty to a new level of brilliance, bow to the composer that I have spent my life emulating, but also bow to the piece of music, to the Passacaglia, itself. It is a transmission of understanding that Bach, and by extension, God, shares with all who have ears to hear.
©jedimmock, 2020