On the Bach Chaconne (Variations 0-2)
In this series of posts I'm publishing the non-academic-journal-bound version of my paper, which takes the form of meandering reflections on Bach's Chaconne, its performance and reception history, and the generic history of the chacona. I've written these reflections in "variation form" - with variations corresponding to the 32 variations of the Chaconne. Technically, Bach's Chaconne bass line repeats every four measures, which would bump up the number of variations to 64. I've found some scholars count the piece this way, but I've chosen to think of it in 32 variations, because it's really every 8 measures or so that Bach generally presents a new rhythmic, harmonic, or melodic idea.
Looking back now on this draft, I don't think I was trying to argue a defensible thesis, so much as illustrate the increasingly distributed, hyper-cultural and hyper-textual nature of this iconic piece. Maybe because of this, I use our inherited, 19th-century concept of Bach's Chaconne within the guise of German idealism and authenticity as something of a foil (maybe unfairly at times), against which I highlight the improvisatory, meandering, and global elements of this musical movement.
I also, unsurprisingly, get stuck into interpretation and violin technique in a very nerdy way which might alienate some non-violinist readers. But as always my interest in writing about music is really grounded in thinking about the instrument-playing body as a conduit for historical experience and sensation - which I think is a relatable idea for most musicians.
One great resource that was pointed out to me by David Milsom is this collection of 19th/20th-century editions of Bach's violin partitas, first put together by Clive Brown: https://mhm.hud.ac.uk/chase/view/work/88
Variation 0
The chaconne as a genre has no obvious origin or end point. As Susan McClary points out, Bach’s exalted Chaconne is several degrees removed from the fast, sensual chaconas imported to Europe by 16th-century conquistadors in Central and South America, and yet traces of the relentless, triple meter dance remain in the Chaconne’s churning variations. Ned Sublette further fleshes out the American origins of the chacona, quoting the Spanish poet Lope de Vega’s reference to the dance: “(From the Indies to Sevilla / it has come by post).” David Ledbetter locates the Chaconne more immediately alongside the chaconnes and passacaglias of Lully, Frescobaldi, Purcell, and Buxtehude, pointing out that this genre ambiguity allows Bach to employ the developing variation in an early form. That is, by transforming the ground bass fluidly between the chromatic stepping of the passacaglia and the zig-zagging of the chaconne bass line, Bach is able to create a sense of emotional variance and dramatic development. In both of these stories, the bodily movement and groove of the Chaconne is traded and transformed between dancing bodies, singing voices, and abstracted, ornamenting hands.
That the chacona’s syncopated dance came from the Americas has implications for how one views the Chaconne’s return to this hemisphere, as for example in Heifetz’s Carnegie Hall performance, described in heroic terms by a NYT critic: “an exaltation that was something neither of tone nor of technique.” The work certainly brought back with it the Germanic penchant for idealism so cultivated by Joachim and others—a reputation for transcendentalism which came to overshadow the experience of the work itself. Recordings of the Chaconne, along with its multiple editions, however, begin to take apart the work’s monolithic appearance. Deviations in timing, emphasis, phrasing, and pacing make audible the layering of musical and corporeal practices from different centuries. It is not a stretch to say that the technologies that transmit the Chaconne—the dance from South America/New Spain, the concerto form from Italy, bel canto vocal ideals, French pedagogies for bodily virtuosity, the American culture industry, the movable type printing press, the phonograph record, the radio, Youtube, etc.—are, or have become, constitutive of the Chaconne’s identity.
As with the generic dance, it is hard to pinpoint an original line or theme in Bach’s Chaconne. The first bass line is a likely candidate, but even this is hard to definitively identify, given that it resembles a minor passacaglia, that it switches for a section to the parallel major, that it appears sometimes as a chromatic lament, or else completely disappears in the movement’s passagework. The quest for a definitive bass line is further foiled when listening to some of the earliest recordings of the piece. In records put out by violinists including Adolf Busch, Jascha Heifetz, Henryk Szeryng, Yehudi Menuhin, George Enescu, and Arthur Grumiaux, to name a few, the opening three and four-part chords are often broken such that the emphasis lands on the treble notes. In Heifetz’s 1952 RCA recording of the piece, for example, he opens by breaking the three and four-part chords in two parts, deliberately accenting the top of the chord—a tradition of bravura playing explicitly notated by his teacher, Leopold Auer:
In a way it is unsurprising that violinistic conventions in this time predominated over theoretical considerations of voice-leading. European violin pedagogy has a recorded disciplinary history about as old as Bach’s solo violin works—a history that has developed through the medium of bodily practice in addition to text and musical notation. In his 1808 treatise, the violinist and concertmaster of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Bartolomeo Campagnoli, discusses different kinds of chords. The “prepared chord,” example 111 in his encyclopedic collection describes an early version of Heifetz’s chord-breaking technique, in which “The bow must be placed firmly on the lower string, and be rapidly drawn on to the upper one, in a vibratory and detached manner.” Campagnoli’s detailed attention to bodily technics correlated to his diminished compositional fluency, characteristic of many (though not all) virtuosic performers in his time. In his fugues for solo violin, for example, he substitutes the exposition of isolated bravura techniques for the fluid development of fugal subjects.
The breaking of these opening chords indexes another historical break: between Bach’s musical identities (the searching, varying bass line) and his performers’ (the singing melodic tone, the impressively resonant chord). When the chords are broken in virtuosic fashion, the upper line predominates: this line which is barely a melody, and certainly more a corporeal identity than a melodic one. The breaking of the chord, or the historical cleaving of melody from counterpoint, are links in a series of breaks between the chaconne, the ciaccona, the chacona, and the endlessly deferred arrival at their origin.
Variations 1 & 2
In the first variation, Bach takes the opening dotted quarter to eighth note rhythm in variation 0 and writes it twice as fast. This diminution—a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth, or by two thirty-second notes—binds the first two variations.
This rhythm is as insistent as it is ambiguous, and its many recordings and editions do little to clear this up. David Ledbetter asserts that these dotted rhythms reference the Lully style chaconne, and so the “dotted rhythms […] are probably written-out notes inégales,” referring to the French baroque tradition of playing equally notated values unequally. Ledbetter suggests something closer to a triplet feel for the passage, but editions of the Chaconne hint at even more varied soundings of this rhythm. Joachim’s edition (1908) is in this passage almost identical to Ferdinand David’s (1889); they insert a sixteenth note rest between the dotted eighth and sixteenth notes:
This notated separation—a significant addition to Bach’s manuscript—asks for space within the gesture, tying the pace of the rhythm to the movement and stopping of the bow. Further markings create a detailed sense of phrasing. Both the four-bar phrases of variation one have identical articulation markings, consisting of intricate variations of staccato markings, slurs, and the additional sixteenth-note rest. In Joseph Szigeti’s 1955 recording, the Hungarian violinist interprets these markings almost exactly. In his rendition, Szigeti especially emphasizes the staccato notes, including the chords in the last two measures of variation one, whose three voices sound all at the same time through his percussive attack. Szigeti uses the separation between the dotted eighth and sixteenth to lift the bow well off the string, creating a sense of space and pace, as well as the resonant, energetic release resulting from the bow then re-approaching and hitting the violin. What stands out in Szigeti’s rendition is the sense of space in his phrases, and the vertical, architectural sonorities that are placed in Campagnoli’s “vibratory and detached manner.” It is possible that Ferdinand David—who first introduces the sixteenth note rest in his edition—drew from a similar style of playing as Campagnoli, given their common position at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, albeit several decades apart.
Micro-variations of this rhythm abound, and both the notated score and recordings continue rendering details each time one looks or listens. The infinitude of possible and actual reproductions of this rhythm explode the notes inégales signifier. If Bach indeed writes out equal notes unequally, these subsequent editions continue the practice of writing out performing bodies’ endless transformations of written material.
In observation of this tradition, Cassandra Miller’s string quartet, About Bach (2015), is premised on the transcription of micro-rhythms from a recording of Pemi Paull playing the Chaconne.
The intricate rhythms played by the three lower voices, in a constantly changing meter, require their own subtle negotiations in pacing. Rather than the grand, vertical architecture of Szigeti’s Chaconne, these lower three voices opt for a more horizontal, searching, and softly dancing texture. The entire piece proceeds through the subtle variation of this dance about phrasing.
Comments
Post a Comment