On the Bach Chaconne, Part 4 (Variations 22-32)
Variations 22-25
The Chaconne’s harmonic consistency—its repeated rhythms and bass lines in the same key—bears a resemblance to the blues form, in which the storytelling potential of the music rests on the composer and performer’s ability to vary a cyclical rhythmic-harmonic scheme in personal and imaginative ways. The historical connection between the baroque dance and African American music is not entirely unfounded—as Ned Sublette writes, “The basic constructive device of the chacona, the thing that characterizes it musically, is also the basic constructive device of African music: the repletion ad infinitum of a cell.” Sublette suggests that the chacona, like the zarabanda, likely traces back to music from the Congo, brought by the Congolese slaves who comprised the majority of slave labor in Cuba (and elsewhere in Latin and South America). The zarabanda traces its name back to the Bantu word, “nsala-banda,” roughly translated in English as “let the spirit rip.”
The Chaconne derives much of its formal power from its relentless repetition. In the spirit of tracing some of the uncanny material adjacencies and overlapping of seemingly disparate musical practices, I want to bring the piece’s 20th century interpretations in relation to a blues solo by the jazz violinist Stuff Smith. Oral histories assert that Heifetz and the Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler played piano to accompany Smith’s New York City sessions in the 1920s, suggesting that they saw (or made) musical connections amongst themselves. Given both Heifetz and Kreisler’s interest in jazz and the spontaneous potentials of violin-playing even in the interpretation of fully notated works, one can imagine their fascination with Smith’s playing, which synthesized the full gamut of virtuoso play with dynamic range, distinctive articulations, arpeggios, chords, and double-stops; altogether forming an unmistakable idiom.
In 1965, Stuff Smith—then 56, only two years before he passed away—performed with Kenny Drew’s trio in Copenhagen. The last piece of the set was his take on the “Bugle Call Blues.” Smith plays the head each time it appears; the first solos are given to Kenny Drew on the piano; Niels-Henning Ørsted Pederson on bass; and then Alex Riel on drums. Smith adds a Bb pedal point to the head, playing it as a subdivided four-against-three pattern. (This rhythmic push and pull crops up all over his playing; for example, in a 1958 recording of “It Don’t Mean a Thing” with Ella Fitzgerald and the Oscar Peterson trio, Smith’s solo adds a syncopated, dotted-eight note figure, which allows him to riff on a four against three pattern. In another instance, his solo in “Crescendo in Drums” (performed by Stuff Smith and his Orchestra, released in 1999), he plays a three against five pattern, in which, following a long descending trill he fits six discrete trilled notes in the space of ten beats. Perhaps he was not consciously thinking about creating polyrhythms; this listener gets the sense that the inspiration for these patterns comes out of violinistic techniques—like a trill, or a fast, articulated bow stroke—which momentarily takes on its own, de-territorializing impulse, while somehow still staying in the pocket.
After the fourth iteration of the “Bugle Call Blues” head, Smith solos over the form. In contrast to the opening phrases of the Chaconne (or the opening phrases of the second D minor section), Smith doesn’t need to play an expository bass line (the rhythm section takes on that role). At the same time, his playing is richly polyphonic, continually creating pedal points which artfully change in their scope and function. Beyond the low Bb pedal point he adds to the head, Smith introduces a left hand pluck of the open A and E strings—a figure which he returns at least a dozen times, demarcating breaks between phrases, always in un-obvious parts of the beat. For example, the first pizzicato anticipates a downbeat by a sixteenth, setting up a syncopated opening of the first phrase—a high C# that feels ripped out of the violin. Following this, each of the next several phrases sets up a recurring pivot note around which the motivic play revolves. That is, different pivot notes or pedal points bound a repeating motif, controlling for their melodic and rhetorical transformation. His changes between pivot notes create a more general rhetorical structure for the solo. These procedures are cut with more spontaneous sequences, or bits that fixate on a particular chord or melodic fragment.
Smith’s ability to create variation has a lot to do with his ingenuity on the instrument. He pioneered electronic amplification of the instrument, and his distinctive bow strokes came out of his desire to create a varied palette of instrumental timbres: “Smith later claimed that he approached the violin as though ‘the E and the A [strings] were the brass and the D and the G the reeds.’…In his own solos, Smith often used only ‘the last six or eight inches of his bow’ to achieve what he called ‘my equivalent of a horn player’s breath control.’” Beyond this, what carries his playing is his ability to place his gestures, notes, and phrases in and across unexpected parts of the beat, the measure, or the 12-bar blues form.
In her monograph, Jazz as Critique, Fumi Okiji refers to syncopation “[not] as an opposing pole to the main beat but as a shaking of that beat, a loosening of the soil around its roots, preparing the ground for its displacement.” Okiji is revising Adorno’s critique of syncopation as characteristic of what he saw as the superficial, regressive, and pandering nature of jazz. Okiji’s close-reading of Adorno points to the many ways in which the theorist fixates on one mode of subjectivity—that of the European bourgeois—and on extremely narrow aesthetic categories such as musical form. When Okiji writes that “The doubleness of swing […] convulses the structure,” she is attending to the ways in which jazz slips through the rubric of Adorno’s structural listening—a Euro-modernist mode of hearing attuned to the development and breaking of sonata form, to the developing variations latent in Bach and idealized in absolute music.
By bringing Smith’s variation-playing in comparison with Bach’s developing variations, I want to suggest that we might similarly shift our understanding of what musical structure really means for the continuing life of the Chaconne. The idea that Heifetz, or Kreisler, or any number of critics, pedagogues, theorists, professors, could hear Smith’s playing and not have it shake the idealist foundations of their inherited cultural assumptions is hard to imagine. I read Heifetz’s forays into jazz as an attempt to explore this syncopation between the freedom of Smith’s playing and the cinematic image of his own, austere impenetrability as an artist—an image bound up with Bach’s masterpiece, and the 20th-century idealization and commercialization of the European art music tradition writ large.
Variation 26
In context, the Chaconne’s return to D minor can feel inevitable, following the dream-like and eventually triumphant trajectory of the D major section. However, this recapitulation also presents a matrix of possible interpretive decisions about what the return means. Does the momentum of the D major climax continue through to the opening chords of the D minor return? Does the musical/narrative voice, or subject, register the modulation immediately, or only a few measures in? Or is it the interpreter who remains in control of the material (rather than a voice that emerges from the material), anticipating the D minor return, and imbuing it with the full, structural significance of a piece composed to a plan, rather than following improvisatory strategies variation by variation? This moment asks the interpreter to make decisions about whether the Chaconne is a preordained, formal entity, a schematic process of improvisatory layering, or something in between.
One might also frame this hermeneutic quandary in terms of how willing the interpreter is to indulge the fantasy of the Chaconne’s transcendental offerings. There is, again, a spectrum on which to view this possible transcendentalism, the poles of which are marked in reactions to Joachim’s playing, described by Bernard Shaw uncharitably as the grating of a nutmeg on a boot sole, and by Andreas Moser as “in the service of an ideal,” “lifted up [...] from the rank of mere mechanical skill to an intellectual level.” Moser’s description employs a particularly vulgar brand of Hegelianism, comparing Joachim’s elevation of violin-playing to great German composers “who borrowed beautiful musical form from Italy and imbued it with German spirit.”
Entertaining for a moment this ideological claim to a unique German spirit infusing older French and Italian forms, we might ask the following: given that violin-playing at least always begins in inescapably corporeal and tonal terms, what does it actually mean to play the violin “in the service of an ideal”? What are the audible cues distinguishing mechanical skill and lofty intellectualism? How does a performing body produce a transcendental idea?
Few recordings of Joachim playing Bach exist, but they contain fragmentary answers to these questions. However, rather than simply presenting (or presence-ing) the intangible essence of the famous violinist’s spirit, sound recordings of him playing Bach vivify the anachronistic collision of cultural practices in one bodily performance. There is unfortunately no recording of Joachim playing the Chaconne, but his recording of the Tempo di Borea from the B minor Partita evinces the superimposition of 19th-century violin French and Italian techniques on Bach’s music. For example, Joachim adds bariolage textures over passagework in measures 48-50, and up-bow staccato passages, as in measure 64.
[Tempo di Borea, Joachim edition]
Moreover, in his recording of Bach’s G minor Adagio, Joachim plays with a highly sustained, bel canto singing style. This singing style and the aforementioned virtuosic bowing techniques evince the influence of the French and Italian pedagogies, codified in method books and caprices by Paris Conservatoire teachers including Baillot, Rode, and Kreutzer. One hears these exercises as an operative armature underlying Joachim’s interpretations of Bach’s music. To modern ears, their employment seems jarring and anachronistic; the superimposition of bowing patterns on the Tempo di Borea can sound more like a difficult étude than a transcendental masterwork.
Returning to the question of what performance conveying transcendental ideas sounds like, I venture the answer could be this: that it sounds like the messiness of a body containing many layers of historical, cultural practices (often at odds with each other), and imbued with the various ideological frameworks inherited in the passage of instrumental pedagogy. These ideologies, as I have endeavored to show, are heard in the material practice of violin-playing: in the use of the bow, in the choice of fingerings, and in the timing and inflection of a phrase. Rather than assert any one interpretation or idea about the Chaconne as being particularly correct, authentic, or even just more interesting, I find that the movement becomes most dynamic through an exposition of all the schisms, disagreements, and incongruences heard in its various interpretations.
Variations 27-31
While variation 26 evinces a structural logic of recapitulation, subsequent variations return to improvisatory techniques to create a sense of flow and accumulation. In variation 27, Bach uses a two-note oscillating figure (D and C#) to ground the upwards climb of upper and lower voices on the D and E string, much in the same way that Stuff Smith uses a series of pedal points to control the movement and pacing of his improvisations. In variations 28 and 29, Bach stays with one pedal point—the open A string. The simplicity of this section is striking; against the A he sets two downwards phrases in the chord of D minor, and then one longer phrase in the same chord that moves up and down. The next three-phrase sequence has a similar structure, but proceeds along a chromatic scale, as if measuring the notes against the open A string. I personally find this to be the most emotional part of the movement, for the simplicity of its measuring gestures, for the consistency of the pedal tone, for its deferral of the tonic resolution, and for the wrenching expressivity of the chromatic scale.
One of the things that sparked my interest in writing about this piece was the sheer number of times that I’ve ended up performing the Bach Chaconne. In particular I’ve performed the piece many times in the work of director/choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith. I’m grateful that the circumstances of our collaboration has repeatedly brought me back to this movement, allowing me to remain intimately acquainted with it as I’ve searched for the historical, musical, and cultural reasons for its dramatic power in this choreographic context.
In our piece, With Care, made together with dancer/choreographer Or Schraiber and violinist Miranda Cuckson, Bobbi performs a solo dance section alongside my performance of the Chaconne. The piece—an abstract narrative about relationships between twinned characters—is in many ways about emotional paralysis. Her character gets “stuck” in particular positions: in loops, in the neurotic retracing of pathways through her space, her memory, and her relationship with the character that Or plays. Her choreography of the Chaconne is not “with” the music, in the sense of being on the beat, or in lockstep with its emotional peaks and troughs. However, it is incredibly sensitive and responsive to the pacing and flow of the movement, often countering or parrying it, or making stillness to create space for listening.
Variations 28 and 29—when the Chaconne gets “stuck” against this A pedal point—is the moment in which every dance that Bobbi’s character has ever known somehow surfaces in an incredibly poignant (and controlled) outburst of pleasure, joy, and desire. The barefaced emotion of this moment stands in contrast to the austerity of the rest of the movement, and indeed the piece as a whole.
These variations (28 and 29) are also significant in that they are explicitly quoted in another substantial section of With Care: a solo dance by Or Schraiber, with violinist Miranda Cuckson. In this section, Miranda plays a piece by the German-American composer Reiko Fueting, tanz.tanz. This piece is comprised of various fleeting and fragmentary riffs, many of which employ quick string crossings, harmonics, and tremolos, which both reference violinistic techniques employed throughout the Chaconne, while also filtering them through a unique, modernist musical language. The piece gets stuck in its own kinds of loops—on the fifth system, for example, a one-measure figure is looped 4 times, with the character marking, “mechanisch starr/mechanically rigid.”
[Fueting, tanz.tanz 5th system]
Several of the “swinging, dancing” figures that Fueting marks fixate on a string crossing between two notes, which explore the space between a minor second and unison. This figure is related to the chromatic descent in variation 29, against the open A pedal point—Reiko’s gestures extrapolate upon this controlled, measuring figure, turning it into a compositional engine that generates both a sense of both fleeting movement and rigidity. In the 16th system, he introduces an “echo”—that is, a very fleeting but direct quote from the Chaconne: the 32nd-note passage preceding the first D minor arpeggio section.
These echoes are scattered throughout, until the last echo in system 39, which is a sped up version of variation 28 from the Chaconne, with its chromatic scales against the open A string. Reiko’s gesture eventually transforms into a string crossing on the unison A (the open A and A on the stopped D string), repeated in a way marked “sehr gleichmäßig, zeitlos/very evenly, timeless.” In Miranda’s performance of the piece, these gestures have an incredible range and precision throughout, evoking the improvisatory, spontaneous, and explosive elements of the Chaconne, and melding them with Reiko’s fragmented gestures. These gestures are embroidered with a carefully selected palette of timbres and colors afforded by different contact points on the violin strings. The generative, infinitely extensive potential of Bach’s materials form the musical centerpiece of With Care, gathering the many stories, voices, and characters heard in the movement’s variational unfolding.
Variation 32
Dominant 20th-century descriptions of the Chaconne’s performance practice frame it as a measure of the individual—the pedagogue Carl Flesch, for example, idealized the piece in terms of a liberal individualism: “Only a fool would maintain that the Chaconne, this cosmos in itself, could be visioned through a single prism. Its charm lies in the very fact that its picture, in the case of each person, is reflected in his own individuality.” Flesch’s description of the Chaconne—relatively flexible and nuanced in comparison to his contemporaries’—presents the Chaconne in vulgar, idealist terms, as a transcendental object that might harmonize individual genius and collective striving.
Interpretations of the Chaconne slip between the developing variations of Hegelian subjectivity and the transitory spiraling of the generic chacona. The improvisatory and digressive qualities of the piece resist familiar ideals of individual genius, transcendentalism, and structural autonomy. Seen in its cyclical, syncopated variations through history and geography, the Chaconne is much more than the measure of an individual. Like the chacona of its distant lineage, it is a generative object and practice which slips between continents and centuries, continually resisting attempts to arrest its movement.
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