Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Bach swatch of the 6th violin & harpsichord sonata (a capella violin)




 

Every relation that matters – that is, every relation in which your heart has an investment – is peculiar: peculiar to you. Not that other people may not really like the brand of Romanian kumquat jam you love, but constitutionally they won’t/can’t bring the same constellation of responses you bring to it. Their taste buds aren’t the same; their references to Romania aren’t the same; the way grandma dropped a dollop of it on their cream-of-alfalfa wasn't the same; the whole monumentally complex inimitable thing you are instantly makes any response you have to anything as inimitable as it is. This can be exasperating when – or if – what you want to do is to share the exact same love of something with somebody else. I’ve become more circumspect about revealing what amount, I suppose, to fixations on Henry James and Judy Garland because I’ve yet to meet even anyone who admits to being similarly powerfully drawn to them (and their numbers are legion) who sees, thinks, hears, feels what I do about them. When I am (as I always am) in Garland’s or James’ company immersively as who- or whatever “Guy Kettelhack” is, especially in full-tilt reaction, I am there alone.
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Hardly news, I guess, that love can’t be explained: its effects may be sensed and shared, but not the love itself. Why would we want it to be? Well, there’s a question. Perhaps because the love can seem so consuming as to frighten us? That we feel somehow we need ‘help’ with it? Or is it just the sheer dumb (not stupid but inexpressible) hunger we have as social beings to feel united under the flag or umbrella or sky of something ecstatic? (Think of 13 year-old-girls in 1964 & the Beatles.) I hasten joyfully to add how wonderful it is to listen, say, to the Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto, as I’m doing right now (Sviatoslav Richter the wonderful soloist), with other people who love that concerto or who love Brahms and feel for great long moments that we are all in exactly the same ocean: there’s a huge commonality to be enjoyed here. But my private experience ends up being the one I’m most vitally and movingly left with. Movingly perhaps not least because I must contain it: only I can know it. There’s poignancy in that.
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Latest reminder of this was coming upon this ‘swatch of Bach’ as I call it which I recorded and posted last June, a bit of a Bach violin & harpsichord sonata more of my love for which I think I may have conveyed here, listening to it again, than I realized. But that’s of course for your inimitable eye and ear to decide. Part of what entrances has to do with stuff I’ve suggested about Bach in these videos before, and tried in fact to demonstrate playing him and then reading Henry James aloud: James' subordinate clauses especially in his late writing have often seemed to me like Bach’s pulses in his own “subordinate” musical phrases – turning the prism to reveal yet another angle, yet another angle of an argument, somehow with a comparable weight of cadence. 
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But Bach can probe so tenderly, too, arguably more directly – as in this swatch from his 6th sonata. Reed confesses to an impatience (here I go trying to paraphrase Reed again, always a mistake) with the perpetual motion effects of his uninterrupted keyboard etudes or movements of the Cello or Violin unaccompanied sonatas, suites, partitas which in form never deviate from 16th notes, beginning to end: a rush that can feel automated, almost soulless, at least in insensitive hands. However I so love getting on the rapids of one of these 16th note rides, trying, although never anywhere near achieving the goal, to reveal their constant emotional evolution and surprise – but I also love, oh how I love, the different intimacy of what he manages here.
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Perhaps you’ll hear it, too. Though who knows what (or what else) you may think of it!



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