Bach BWV 1031

One of the aspects that I love about playing Bach’s music is the way it expands your mind and the way you listen to musical structures. How the music sounds has an immediate emotional impact, and in most cases the  melodies are very catchy tunes — which is  more impressive if we consider that most of his music was not monophonic. One interesting aspect of his music is that after analyzing and practicing it, your ears open and you start to listening to things in the musical structure that most people could not consciously perceive listening to it for the first time. It’s amazing how his music can speak  in such a meaningful way on so many levels.

Examples are everywhere, but this one came up in the middle of a chamber music lesson a few days ago. Here is the third movement of the Bach sonata for flute and harpsichord, in E flat major:

Now go back and listen to the little episode right after the main theme, around ten seconds into the video. There’s a little eight measure bridge that starts to lead us away from E flat major. The harmonic writing and the texture are quite different, which is pretty usual in this kind of form. The passage repeats with both instruments switching places.

Here are the two melodic lines.

One of the melodic lines is in sixteenth notes, while the other one is in eights. The way it sounds is as if one is the main melody while the other is the accompaniment. This kind of passage presents a basic problem of interpretation: what is the correct phrasing? How should both voices be balanced? That is where musical analysis comes in; by observing the music and trying to understand it, we can come to meaningful conclusions about the way it is played (however different those conclusions are from one musician to the next.)

If we isolate the “real” notes from the passage in sixteenths, we realize that those sixteenths are actually ornamenting the same melody that is present in the passage in eights.

Here is the same passage without the scales and arpeggios connecting the melodic notes.

And if we substitute the sixteenth notes for longer values, we get this:

A unison canon, offset by an eighth.

Now, after listening to the examples, go back and listen to the original recording again, and pay attention to those same passages. Notice how your ear is now drawn to the way those two lines interact? It can’t be unheard once it’s been noticed because your knowledge of the piece just got a bit deeper.

You can choose to not bring it out in any way, or decide that it’s really something that isn’t important to show. You can go the opposite route and adjust your phrasing and balance in a way that will make both lines leap out a bit more at the listener. Regardless of the choices we make, by knowing that it’s there we are hearing the piece in a different way. That is a quality that is noticeable in a performance, and it is very good; it is an element that gives depth to a person’s playing.