There is something enduring about the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. By that I do not just mean that we are listening to his music over 250 years after his death, since we can say the same of several of Bach’s predecessors, the most notable of them probably being Claudio Monteverdi. Rather, I am thinking of how Bach’s music has managed to hold up to no end of arrangements, many of which amount to significant departures from anything that Bach himself might have conceived. For example the twentieth century began with a diversity of arrangements of Bach’s music for large orchestras, the most notable probably being those of Leopold Stokowski (one of which achieved particular recognition as the opening selection in Fantasia). Andrés Segovia brought the Bach canon into the guitar repertoire; but, considering that Bach, himself, wrote music for the lute (often involving arrangements of previous compositions), that adaptation cannot be viewed as particularly radical.
Things got a bit more provocative during the second half of the twentieth century. The relationship between modern jazz and Bach tended to involve more than casual flirtation, particularly after Ward Swingle prepared scat arrangements of Bach’s music for his a cappella group, The Swingle Singers, which resulted in two popular albums, Jazz Sebastian Bach and Bach’s Greatest Hits. Then, with the advent of the first generation of Moog synthesizers, Columbia Records produced the album Switched-On Bach, on which Wendy (then Walter) Carlos compiled a diversity of electronic realizations of Bach’s music, including a complete account of the BWV 1048 (third) “Brandenburg” concerto in G major.
Parker Ramsey performing in the King’s College Chapel (photograph by Benjamin Sheen, courtesy of PIAS
While it is hard to think of all of these many examples having anything in common, the fact is that, in each of the arrangements, the attentive listener could identify the “Bach substrate,” so to speak, even when the arrangement involved multiple layers of reconception. One week from today, on the other hand, the “house label” of King’s College Cambridge will release a recording of an arrangement that runs the risk of obscuring that substrate, rather than simply adding those layers of reconception. The object of that arrangement is the BWV 988 set of “Goldberg” variations. The arranger is Parker Ramsay, who held the post of Organ Scholar at King’s from 2010 to 2013; but Ramsay is as adept at both harpsichord and harp as he is behind an organ console. As a result, the arrangement he prepared was for the harp; and his new recording on the King’s label presents his own performance of that arrangement. As expected, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders for this release.
Those that consistently tend to seek out the substrate when listening to arrangements may come away dismissing this version by likening it to a dog walking on its hind legs. As the joke (attributed to Samuel Johnson) goes, the fact that it is done at all is more important than whether it has been done well. As an Organ Scholar, Ramsay was probably well aware that Bach took polyphony very seriously; and the seriousness of that attention probably motivated his including BWV 988 in his Clavier-Übung (keyboard practice) publications. Keyboard skill was not just a matter of accounting for all of the notes. It also entailed guiding the listener towards identifying how those notes sorted into elaborately ornate polyphonic voices, which often tended to cross over each other.
As a result, listening to polyphony entails recognizing where the voices are, even when they cross each other. Bach presents the keyboardist with a diversity of challenges to deal with the relationship between playing and listening. Those challenges were conceived with the keyboard instruments of his day, such as the harpsichord, the clavichord, and the organ, in mind. Each of these instruments has its own way of dealing with how a sound decays and how the speed of that decay can be moderated through control of individual keys on the keyboard.
The modern harp, on the other hand, does not lend itself to such control. The only way to hasten decay through damping is to stop it with the base of the palm. Furthermore, decay itself is variable across the entire instrument. As the pitches get lower, the decay time takes longer unless the string is stopped. Even then, however, decay can be problematic. Ramsay decided to record his performance of BWV 988 in the King’s College Chapel, which adds its own capacity for reverberation into the mix; and, once a reverberation begins, there is no way to damp it!
Taking all of these factors into account, it should not be a surprise that the many polyphonic inventions of the composer get lost in a thick fog of reverberating sonorities. To some extent the technology used to record Ramsay’s performance can aid the attentive listener in penetrating that fog. However, that technology can go only so far; and, more often than not, that listener will be spending more time recalling the polyphony from previous performances, rather than perceiving it in Ramsay’s interpretation.
In all fairness, I suspect that many listeners will be satisfied simply to enjoy listening to familiar music presented through radically different sonorities. (That was basically how many reacted to the Carlos Moog arrangements.) However, those that are drawn to BWV 988 for its “roots” in keyboard practice are likely to find themselves somewhere along the spectrum between disappointed and frustrated. I shall probably cast my lot among the frustrated; but that may be a “side-effect” of the many insights I recently encountered in the new recordings of Lang Lang playing this music.
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