Page 200 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

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The Music at Tippet Rise
ABOUT THE PROGRAMBENJAMIN PESETSKY
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750)
trans. NICHOLAS KITCHEN
from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One
In January 2015 in Beijing, 300 years and 4,600 miles removed from Johann Sebastian Bach, Nicholas Kitchen
set to work transcribing the Well-Tempered Clavier for string quartet. He was on tour with the Borromeo and spending an inordinate amount of time stuck in the gridlock of the Chinese capital. “Every time we moved anywhere in the city to rehearse or play, we spent nearly an hour in traffic,” Kitchen said in an interview with 99.5 WCRB. “Not having to drive myself, I decided to dive into the project that had been waiting so long—arranging Book One for string quartet. And indeed, after a few more traffic jams, I had a good start.”
You could say a different kind of traffic jam inspired Bach to write the Well-Tempered Clavier in the first place:
the traffic jam of arranging twelve pitches into an octave while preventing them from sideswiping, colliding, or careening off the road. Though musical pitch is based in mathematics, it isn’t a smooth transition from theory to
a practical tonal system. Purely tuned intervals, based on simple ratios between two pitches, sound beautiful alone, but often don’t work in combination. Three major thirds, for example, should add up to an octave (in an enharmonic system), but they actually fall short when purely tuned, the last note missing the exit off the freeway. A circle of perfect fifths should eventually come back around to the starting note (hence the circle), but when purely tuned, the last fifth overshoots the octave, skidding off into the outer shoulder of the rotary.
Musical tuning, therefore, is an engineering problem more than a discovery of natural science. It is especially a chal- lenge for harpsichords, organs, and pianos, which cannot be adjusted for intonation during a performance. The tuning setup of these instruments is called temperament, and all
temperaments have advantages and drawbacks. Up until Bach’s time, meantone temperament was the most common. This system slightly compresses the fifths, and sounds good in several—but not all—keys. Well-tempered systems, meanwhile, were new developments of the early 18th century that allowed a keyboard to play pleasingly in all 24 major and minor keys without retuning in-between. (Each key still kept a somewhat distinct color, different from modern equal temperament, which has smoothed out all the differences.)
This is all to say that Bach was the first composer to write a single collection of pieces in all 24 keys. The Well-Tempered Clavier was a celebration of this new possibility, a mission of discovery into unknown musical territory, and a demon- stration of Bach’s mastery of the freedom of the prelude and the tight construction of the fugue. Unlike many Baroque musicians who wrote treatises, Bach folded his theoretical interests into artistic projects: he demonstrated rather than explained. His primary motivation was never academic, but rather “to make a well-sounding harmony to the honor of God and the permissible delectation of the spirit.”
Bach completed Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier
in 1722, toward the end of his time working for the princely court in Köthen. Some of the preludes were also included in the earlier Klavierbüchlein Bach compiled for his son, Wilhelm Friedemann. Twenty years later, he added Book Two of the Well-Tempered Clavier while working in Leipzig.
On today’s concert, we hear the first four preludes and fugues from Book One. Bach begins in C major, the simplest key with no sharps or flats. He builds the Prelude from the undulating harmonies of the key’s most basic chords. The four-voice Fugue is like an awakening, springing to life.
The C-minor Prelude and Fugue simmers with nervous anticipation. Its three-voice Fugue instills each part with its own character, like many people talking about the same thing at once.
On the keyboard, the key of C-sharp major has a very different color than C major, though it lies only a half-step