I had originally intended to profile Bach's forebears in chronological order; however, I've altered my plans slightly. For previously-discussed reasons, Johann Paul Westhoff has recently been on my mind a lot. And, despite the fact that only 14 of his works survive, he seems to show up on my concert programs and talks with a greater consistency than most other composers. (If memory and forecasting are both accurate, he will have been on my music stand every month of 2014 except for April and December.)
My persistent interest in programming and talking about him comes not only from the high quality of his output, but from his formal, structural, and technical imagination. Looking back as we do with the privilege of our 21st-century vantage point, we've become inured to the rhetoric of "musical innovators", since most of the composers we play were "revolutionary" in some way or other. In Westhoff's case, however, the terms are justified. He was the first violinist-composer to write down multi-movement unaccompanied works; moreover, his approach to polyphony therein is uniquely rigorous, in that his voice-leading and chord-spacing make no concessions to the inherent limitations of four-strings-tuned-in-fifths. (As an aside: he also developed a logical but frustrating notation system for his unaccompanied works: on the plus side, two different clefs and an eight-line staff allow him to show the voice-leading as clearly as possible. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to read, especially under pressure. My colleague and "Bach Explored" partner Paul Cienniwa has written a blog entry on the virtues of performing from memory. Well, Paul, here's another point to support your argument!)
And many of his other works are equally innovative. At a time when music imitating nature was all the rage, Westhoff went a step farther, depicting a battle in one sonata and, in another, the overtones of pealing churchbells. Audience members who attended my May 2014 gallery talks will remember that his remarkable A-major Suite features a three-voice melody in which, through various special effects and distortions, Westhoff is able to blur the polyphonic texture and show us two vastly different ways of hearing musical foreground and background -- all in the space of 16 bars. (Fortunately, these contrapuntal and violinistic abilities did not die with Westhoff: it was his student, the young Johann Georg Pisendel, for whom Bach probably composed the Sonatas and Partitas.)
Our first "Bach Explored" concert features one of Westhoff's sonatas for violin with continuo. If his unaccompanied suites are a string of rustic, tuneful dances that happen to be technically complicated, his continuo sonatas are simultaneously more interesting and more challenging. Gone are the pretty tunes; gone are the major keys. Instead, performers and listeners are faced with unrelenting gravity, modal counterpoint, and endlessly repetitive fugues. Since my previous post on them, however, I've performed the D-minor Sonata, and the question, "is it good?", has received the unequivocal answer, "yes."
My persistent interest in programming and talking about him comes not only from the high quality of his output, but from his formal, structural, and technical imagination. Looking back as we do with the privilege of our 21st-century vantage point, we've become inured to the rhetoric of "musical innovators", since most of the composers we play were "revolutionary" in some way or other. In Westhoff's case, however, the terms are justified. He was the first violinist-composer to write down multi-movement unaccompanied works; moreover, his approach to polyphony therein is uniquely rigorous, in that his voice-leading and chord-spacing make no concessions to the inherent limitations of four-strings-tuned-in-fifths. (As an aside: he also developed a logical but frustrating notation system for his unaccompanied works: on the plus side, two different clefs and an eight-line staff allow him to show the voice-leading as clearly as possible. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to read, especially under pressure. My colleague and "Bach Explored" partner Paul Cienniwa has written a blog entry on the virtues of performing from memory. Well, Paul, here's another point to support your argument!)
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| (A page from the 3rd unaccompanied partita. The first note is B-flat) |
Our first "Bach Explored" concert features one of Westhoff's sonatas for violin with continuo. If his unaccompanied suites are a string of rustic, tuneful dances that happen to be technically complicated, his continuo sonatas are simultaneously more interesting and more challenging. Gone are the pretty tunes; gone are the major keys. Instead, performers and listeners are faced with unrelenting gravity, modal counterpoint, and endlessly repetitive fugues. Since my previous post on them, however, I've performed the D-minor Sonata, and the question, "is it good?", has received the unequivocal answer, "yes."
From "Is it good?" to "Is that a B-flat?"
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