A little over a week ago I learned that Stephen Malinowski had completed his project to create animated visualizations of all of the preludes and fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Malinowski had been at this project for considerable time. Indeed, the effort took so long that, when I received his announcement, I had forgotten that I had written an account of his approach to the first of the two books (which has its own YouTube playlist) in July of 2016! Those that have read this site for some time know that my efforts to document listening experience serve as a “laboratory notebook” for a broader inquiry into the nature (some might call it phenomenology) of listening to music. As a result, I have been interested in Malinowski’s work, which I view as his approach to addressing that same inquiry.
The Well-Tempered Clavier has played a major role in my listening experiences for some time, not only through a variety of different recordings I have of the complete collection but also through performances of the entire cycle. Then, of course, there have been additional recordings and performances of selected excerpts, making this collection one of the fundamental “bread-and-butter sources” for any serious keyboardist. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Bach ever considered this as “music for listening.”
As I have observed frequently, much of the music that Bach composed was created for pedagogical purposes. This is explicitly evident in the four published books entitled Clavier-Übung (keyboard practice), as well as the lengthy text introduction that precedes his Inventions and Sinfonias (BWV 772–801) collection. Similarly, the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier has a title page asserting that the music was composed “for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.”
Malinowski’s project suggests a way in which those pedagogical purposes may be pursed towards listening, rather than execution. In other words, while I have been filling my laboratory notebook with words (hopefully coherent ones), he has used animated images to compile his laboratory notebook for The Well-Tempered Clavier. In the case of the first book, he even tips his hand in hypothesis exploration. The C minor prelude (BWV 847) is given two visualizations. One represents the notes as circles of different sizes with connecting lines, while the other partitions the entire screen into regions of a Voronoi diagram, each of which is highlighted as its corresponding note sounds.
I have to say, personally, that my own approaches to “reading” Malinowski’s videos tend to prefer the “point-like” approach to that of partitioned areas. The former tends to offer better affordances when it comes to perceiving how notes conjoin into lines, while the highlighting technique then identifies the simultaneities that emerge as a result of the counterpoint of multiple lines. I would go so far to say that the interplay of sequence and simultaneity is one of the key pedagogical features of all of the compositions on both of Bach’s books for this collection. In other words mastering that interplay is a primary objective in “keyboard practice;” but it is also a skill that needs to be honed for attentive listening.
This then brings us to the issue of whether this music should be experienced as a collection or if the individual selections were intended for individual performance. Yesterday I decided to view collectively the first twelve preludes and fugues from the first book. At the very least, I was definitely aware of a “learning curve” when it came to sorting out the “syntax” and “semantics” of Malinowski’s visualizations. Indeed, while it may be valid to question whether there is a semantic level in Bach’s music, Malinowski’s approach to interpretation is decidedly semantic. From this I would be willing to conclude that his videos are just as pedagogical as Bach’s compositions; and learning is more likely to emerge from a sequence of these visual experiences, rather than by viewing any single visualization in isolation.
Mind you, all I can do with any musical experience, auditory or visual, amounts to hypothesizing-in-progress. Very rarely does one arrive any even a hint of hard-and-fast conclusions. Indeed, it is the malleability of listening, even when one listens to a recording multiple times, that makes experiencing music so vivid. Thus, there is a richness of content, even in Malinowski’s visuals, that similarly brings freshness to every viewing, even when one is familiar with both the music and the techniques behind those visuals.
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