Baroque music (or Barock, which is how it’s been thrust in front of my eyes recently, during the reading of the Baroque Cycle books — yes yes, the title and interior spellings don’t match) has way less dynamic range and change than Classical, Romantic, etc. It doesn’t have strain-your-ear solos cascading into destroy-your-ear total orchestra devastation. It’s mostly all at the same volume. Also, the tempo doesn’t change very much.

It’s not the kind of music where you are hanging on the edge of your seat waiting for the story to unfold. There isn’t as much of a story to hear.

Or is there? Does anyone fancy arguing this one? I’m not tremendously experienced with the Baroque genre, but from what I’ve experienced it seems less like a narrative and more like word games: puns, acronyms, anagrams, palindromes. This can be beautiful, but in a more abstract, clever way. It doesn’t drag me in and tie me up like my favorite, later pieces do.

HOWEVER: I know that a lot of people totally cream their pants over Bach. What I don’t know is if they feel the same way about him as… say… Beethoven or Brahms (the stereotypical 3Bs favorites list).

The problem occurs when you are lying atop your bed like a delightful angel (this always describes me perfectly) and something totally awesome comes on. And then you fall asleep before they tell you what it is. A variation on that theme is when you do manage to hold out until the announcer announces it, but find on waking that you’ve forgotten the composer, or the piece, or the whole thing. Kind of like all those other stupendous money-making/world-saving ideas you have in bed but can’t be arsed to get up and write down.

Like, the other night there was some Classical piece (capital C Classical, like, Mozart or someone) which had a theme really similar to a bit of the Shosty Invasion theme from the 7th symphony. I wanted to do a not-in-bed comparison, but can’t bloody remember either the composer or the piece. I think it had a clarinet in it, so that narrows it down to about 13,576 pieces.

Sometimes this saves me, which is yet another reason NPR rocks my socks. It has complete listings for Classical Music Through the Night, so if I can remember about what time the radio was on, or maybe the previous item on the playlist, the anonymous performance can be fingered.

That’s what just happened with the fifth one of these bad boys. I’m listening to C.P.E. Bach. Bet you weren’t expecting that. I wasn’t. But last night the last movement surprised the hell out of me. I seem to remember it sounding weirdly modern… almost like a 20th century composer playing the Baroque card. But that may have just been the bedtime talking.

And here’s a non-acappella version of BWV 847 (the soundtrack to the above PSA):

The main meat of the performance was the Goldberg Variations. This is one of those must-love/must-know-really-well pieces for all serious classical music people. But I don’t know it. Well, I’ve maybe heard it through once before when a friend lent me his Glenn Gould CD, but that’s about it. In general I think theme and variations form is awesome (it can beat up rondo form any day of the week), but it’s often well hard the first times through to put it together. In order to actually hear the variations you kind of need to know the unvaried theme enough to hum it (and mentally fill in the harmonics), or you tend to lose track of things in the variations.

This was definitely in effect yesterday. It wasn’t aided at all by the descriptions of the variations, which are not very descriptive. Take a peak over the extensive list of them on wikipedia. Instead of (relatively) easy to pick up on describers like “presto” they are instead mostly labeled with either “a 1 Clav” or “a 2 Clav”. This only served to confuse me more, as I knew enough score-Italian to suspect that Clav means keyboard. Are some of the variations meant to be played on two pianos?

Well, it turns out that is actually sort of correct, but in this case it’s 2 “manuals” on a harpsichord which as my limited understanding of harpsichord design tells me are multiple keyboards on the same instrument. This means that your hands are less likely to collide. However, on a piano you of course don’t have this luxury and it becomes extra-hard to perform, but he did a totally awesome job of it.

The other descriptive element which became a lot more descriptive after the fact are the labels Canone alla Seconda, alla Terza, etc. which I did manage to deduce were numbers, but did not manage to deduce meant that these were variations based on the major second interval, the interval of a third, and so on. In fact they are specifically in the form of a Canon, which is a form in which there is leading melody that gets followed by various imitating melodies.

If I had known all that I might have had a chance at spotting them as they came at me, but as it was I just basked in the music. Next time I shall be better mentally equipped to parse them all out. The concert still rocked though, despite my ignorance. He is truly an amazing pianist.

(Oh, by the way, if anyone is looking for parking recommendations to get into Manhattan with minimum fuss I can heartily recommend taking the ferry from Port Imperial at Weehawken. It’s $10 a day to park, and there are ferries to Midtown minimally every 20 minutes which take only about 5 minutes to cross. Then there are free buses when you get to 38th street.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

I kept leaving it behind in England whenever I went back because it would sneak out of the way until everything was all packed up and my suitcases were already twenty pounds too heavy. Then it would leap out, waving it’s inlay and demand to be remembered and loved and transported. Up until the last expedition I had not yet caved into it’s demands.

But now, the little guy is sprawled eagerly over my desk. We’re (it’s a joint venture between me and him) up to CD number 7 in the MP3 conversion extravaganza.

I guess I never quite made it into Bach. Every time his music is on it feels so overwhelmingly ornate and difficult. You might even call it baroque (sigh). And 17 CD’s is a lot of organ music. Sometimes I listen to it while mentally changing the instrument from an organ to an electric guitar – it switches over very nicely, I think modern heavy-metalists owe a big debt to mister Bach.

I’m being a bit contradictory, clearly, since my dissatisfaction would seem to very much not imply perfection. It does make sense though, honest! (I’m actually trying to convince you as much as me right now). It’s similar to how when seeing a painting by da Vinci I can feel and see the perfection, but it’s in a cool, detached kind of way. His rough sketches are far more attractive and satisfying to my aesthetics, but even more appealing are the stylized explorations by people like, say, Klimt (on the right). It’s the roughness which is grabbing, which really touches me and me brings me into the music and gives electric on my vertebrae.

I would never make the claim that Klimt was the better painter… but why not? Is it just because I have been conditioned by culture to think of da Vinci as the more exemplary artist? I don’t think so. Not completely. I can sense the cleverness in his work, sense some underlying mastery above and beyond others who I actually prefer. the mastery doesn’t mean I enjoy it more. Then, what value am I ascribing to him? I just don’t know… I need an aesthetics philosopher to help me out, pronto!

“A classic is a book everyone wants to have read and no-one wants to read”

- Samuel Clemens