"that's what Handel would've done, but not Bach"
April 23, 2020 6:00 AM   Subscribe

J.S. Bach’s “Twisted Hacker Mind” is a lecture by violinist Kathleen Kajioka about the strangeness of Bach's music. She plays two of his pieces and explains what is so odd about them.
posted by Kattullus (18 comments total) 61 users marked this as a favorite
 
Listening to Bach is like listening to math, in the best possible way.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:24 AM on April 23, 2020 [6 favorites]


Ahhhh, Bach.
posted by terrapin at 6:45 AM on April 23, 2020 [5 favorites]


Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter was an almost mandatory mind trip back in the day.
posted by fairmettle at 8:01 AM on April 23, 2020 [8 favorites]


Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter was an almost mandatory mind trip back in the day.

OK, I'm officially old. I have the twentieth-anniversary edition of this book, which had just come out when I got it... twenty years ago.
posted by madcaptenor at 8:17 AM on April 23, 2020 [10 favorites]


Naah. Just a youngster, I've got the original.
posted by aleph at 8:54 AM on April 23, 2020 [7 favorites]


Since she mentioned the echo template, here's PDQ Bach's Echo Sonata (for two unfriendly groups of instruments).
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:10 AM on April 23, 2020 [6 favorites]


Very nice music, interesting points about his composition (I'm not well acquainted at all with his violin work, so I found the examples insightful). But I didn't quite get sold on the thesis of Bach-as-hacker here. The first example highlighted a neat experimentation with the an interval, the second seemed to touch on a bold progression... but it felt like less a hacking than a nice exposition of Bach's genius.

I'd agree with others that G.E.B. makes the Bach-as-hacker case pretty darn well -- the voices in his fugues showing the form-and-ground duality (if I'm properly remembering my 20-yrs old GEB mind trip, ha). But, that's a dense ~600 pages. I think this video does very well putting the case out there in 20 minutes.

For my money, a more succinct video exposition of this is from possibly my favorite pianist of Bach's works: Rosalyn Tureck. She leans into the thesis with several examples: for Bach, it's about organization, not 'sonority'. She makes her case by playing some of his works on the moog -- his works translate across 300 years of technology! -- and shows how his compositions anticipate some of the works of Debussy or Schoenberg. "You see, this is impossible." is a pretty wonderfully understated mic drop! Also worth noting that the backdrop has less TED-talk vibe and more of a Sunday-morning-with-Charles-Kuralt ambiance, ha.

And if you need an even more succinct version of Bach hacking composition with his genius organization/structure/mathematics, watch Bach's Crab Canon embedded on a mobius strip.

Bach + the moog, previously.
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 11:19 AM on April 23, 2020 [16 favorites]


Is that actually a Moog in the Rosalyn Tureck video? It's definitely a synthesizer, but it's multiphonic, which Moogs typically are not. It also doesn't look like Moog design. (I recently learned that the original Prophet synth was a Moog that had been hacked for multiple voices...)
posted by kaibutsu at 12:07 PM on April 23, 2020


I love the crab canon on a Moebius strip. But on thinking about it, there's nothing really "moebius" about the canon. It's composed to be played simultaneously backwards and forwards while still sounding good, which is the genius part of it.
posted by storybored at 12:25 PM on April 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


Did anyone catch the names of the pieces she plays, or know them?

I amlooking for a new easy(-er) Bach sonata to learn in quarantine to amuse myself, and the sonata she plays is lovely. The echo piece was great, too.
posted by cnidaria at 1:45 PM on April 23, 2020


storybored -- whoa! That definitely slid by me within this video. I thought in the reverse the sheet music was played upside down. I remember seeing -- or am I imaging? -- something from Bach that was Mobius: forwards-and-backwards with the backwards version upside down. Was that in GEB? Am I imagining it?

kaibutsu -- about 8 minutes in she calls it a poly-moog. But, for sure, I wouldn't be able to distinguish by sight. I guess I just slap the 'moog' label on classical music + electronic keyboard. Both because of the Switched on Bach album but also the great book Analog Days.
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 1:56 PM on April 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


There's a visible "Polymoog" label on the keyboard in the Rosalyn Tureck video, but the resolution is atrocious so I can't make out the second word.
posted by stopgap at 2:05 PM on April 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


Listening to Bach is like listening to math

I think of it more like listening to God invent math.
posted by gwint at 3:35 PM on April 23, 2020 [6 favorites]


Indeed! It is a polymoog. Thanks, team!
posted by kaibutsu at 5:56 PM on April 23, 2020


Listening to Bach is like listening to math, in the best possible way.

I don't doubt the earnestness of this sentiment, but I have to confess that in having heard it uttered so many times I've never really understood it. I mean, I understand the intellectual correspondences: absolute music and mathematics have in common that the structures they treat refer only to themselves, but then, that's kind of a fiction on the part of musicians, isn't it? Even Bach, that most notoriously mathematical of composers, still composed his music for physical instruments and not for the spheres, and so composed for specific timbres, specific registers, specific sonic qualia. It is for sure a perverse externality of Western thought that such a divorce between Content and its realization could ever be conceived of in the first place, but I think even Bach would have found our intensification of that divide to be absurd.
posted by invitapriore at 8:34 PM on April 23, 2020 [5 favorites]




In other words, what invitapriore said.
posted by y2karl at 11:02 AM on April 24, 2020


Listening to Bach is like listening to math, in the best possible way.

I don't doubt the earnestness of this sentiment, but I have to confess that in having heard it uttered so many times I've never really understood it. I mean, I understand the intellectual correspondences: absolute music and mathematics have in common that the structures they treat refer only to themselves, but then, that's kind of a fiction on the part of musicians, isn't it?

I understand the phrase differently. Mathematics has a certain elegance about it, which Bach also shares. It's not so much the abstraction of mathematics that Bach is a great reminder of (arguably Schoenberg or Webern are much better at this), although abstraction it does have helps but it's the sparing elegance, the feeling that there it uses exactly the right number of notes, in the right timbre to express the idea. The best of Bach is like the best of mathematics, profoundly simple, rather than trivially so. One of the great examples for me is the use of a single melody line to create the feel of polyphony in the Cello Suites.

Mozart at least an equal genius but applied it differently in (what I consider to be) his best works like the Requiem, and was operating in a style otherwise that didn't lend itself to the kind of profound simplicity that Bach could create in the forms of late Baroque music.
posted by plonkee at 4:02 PM on April 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


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