Your Attention, Please

I did The Farmer in Vilnius last week. The concert was recorded, and I may have had a better flow than I had in Brno (in 2011 or so).

I think stuff and then I remember my father’s favorite bumpersticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Here I try to limit this to a few points—

—Why did I feel, in Leipzig a few summers ago, listening to some number from a Bach Cantata, at the Church where Bach’s music was done during his lifetime, that Bach’s music disappears at times?—

The Baroqueisms in Bach get into your face.

So the first 4-3 (the crazy chord before the fermata) is a Baroquism. It’s quite something.

The last 4-3 rhymes with the first, but it’s normal lovely. The music disappears into *normal loveley*. The G natural leading into the first bizarre Baroque 4-3 is arguably, on a certain times scale, an anticipation of the G natural in the last measure.

I connect this control of our attention—control of our flow of erotic energy— to something the brilliant and multifaceted cellist Dave Eggar recounted about rehearsing with Paul Simon. PS would ask for loose or tight, but he would use percentages, 60% here, 100% there.

This might be understood as a direction that would accompany his command of our attention through one of his poems.

“And a moon rose over an open field.”

He gives us time to recover from that.

So with my Scherzo (Counterpoint of Supertonics). When the last line of the folksong is sung, it resumes the common practice harmony after a last full throttle grind in the 0167 universe.

This Scherzo is the last piece of tonal music, the last Baroque piece. It is the Assumption of the All Trichord Hexachord into the heavenly spere of the common practice bubble. When the normal harmonic proceedings resume, the music disappears, much as I feel Bach's music can disappear.

The disappearance is an ability to revert to a norm, but when Bach resorts to the norm I find it surprising because I'm so used to the elaborate setups his extraordinary moments require. With Couperin and Rameau the norm is the norm is the norm.

The All Trichord Hexachord (I need a cautionary natural for the higer B on the (2) string)-->

Share Post
Subscribe Now!