THE MUSIC OF GOD AND THE DEVIL

Transcription

1 THE MUSIC OF GOD AND THE DEVIL Part One Equal Temperament Back in 1995, publicizing the novel R L s Dream, American writer Walter Mosley claimed that Robert Johnson was the most influential musician we ve seen since J. S. Bach. Now, Poor Bob and Johann Sebastian don t often get mentioned in the same sentence. At first glance, any comparison between them seems ridiculous. But both men actually did something very similar - somehow assimilating centuries of culture, they each promoted musical systems which went on to sweep the world. And this is how it happened. J.S. Bach was a deeply religious man. His original manuscripts were peppered with inscriptions like: In the name of Jesus, and Jesus, help. His great contribution to western music (along with all those beautiful compositions) was the equally tempered twelve tone scale, which we now take so much for granted it s almost a commandment. Once though, things were very different - very confusing. And the root of this confusion lay in the way instruments are tuned. In today s tuning system there are 12 notes to an octave, the tones between them are regular, and a semi-tone is always a semi-tone. So the distance between A and A is the same as between E and F. But if you take a swanee whistle and slide up from a low to a high C, there are clearly many more than 12 stopping points along the way. 1

2 In classical Indian music there are 22 Shruti, or notes, in an octave. Some of these correspond to the notes we use, but others are separated from their neighbours by just quarter or even micro-tones (so small it s difficult for us to hear them). Meanwhile, musicians across the Arab world use seven note maqam, or melody types, specific to their regions, so it s hard to tell exactly how many notes exist in their octave. But it s thought that at least all 24 notes of a quarter tone scale are in use somewhere between Iran and Western Sahara. These differences make music from India and Arabia sound exotic to us; sometimes out of tune. But neither is wrong. They just have different ways of structuring the octave. And if we went back to Bach s time we d find a lot of European music from that period exotic too. Back then, musicians didn t just use one, but three different tuning systems. The first two were Pythagorean Tuning and Quarter-Comma Meantone. Pythagorean Tuning was developed by the ancient Greeks. Built around the interval of the perfect fifth it was, mathematically, very precise. But over several octaves it went out of tune, causing much frustration (click here to find out more about Pythagorean Tuning). Quarter-Comma Meantone was first described by Pietro Aron in Based on the Pythagorean system, it s fifths were slightly flattened to help along the major thirds. Again, it was very exact, but in certain keys (notably C) the flattened fifths produced dissonant wolf tones, making them, effectively, useless. A major problem for both these systems was changing key. Their slight inaccuracies meant that shifting from, say, C to F, meant musicians had to retune. For many this was no great hardship, but for instruments like organs and clavichords it was a real nuisance. And as for composition - it seriously limited things. So, in 1558 French composer Guillaume de Costeley tried a radical new system - 19 Equal Temperament. This divided a nineteen note octave with tones of exactly the same size. These were the notes it used: 2

3 A A B B B C C C D D D E E E F F F G G G A For violin players, cellists and singers, 19 ET caused no problem. They liked having extra notes, which voices and unfretted finger boards could easily manage. And this system didn t fall into dissonance like the others. But for some it caused problems: tuning a fretted lute or gittern to de Costeley s new sharps and flats made it difficult to play chords, and building a keyboard for them proved impossible. A compromise was needed, and so proposed in 1584 by the Florentine lutenist, Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo Galilei - he of the telescope). Going back to the 12 note scale musicians had been working with for centuries, Galilei chose to ignore the old Pythagorean ratios and split his octave into a dozen even steps. Now, he wasn t the first to think about doing this, the Greek philosopher Aristoxenus wrote about something similar way back in the 4 th century BC. But as far as we know, Galilei was the first person to actually use it, and compose with it. Devoid of wolf tones and with thirds and fifths all in tune, he called this new arrangement Twelve-Tone Equal Temperament. (Strangely, in the same year, exactly the same system was discovered in China by a Ming dynasty prince called Zhu Zaiyu). But anyway, getting back to Bach, this was the world he worked in a world of 12 tones, 19 tones, wolf and mean tones. And as if tuning wasn t enough, this was also the period when music was gradually shifting from the ecclesiastic system of plainchant into the modern tonal system of major and minor keys there was a lot going on. And was Bach up to speed with it all? He certainly was. Born in 1685 into an extended family of professional musicians, he was taught first by his father, then an older brother and various uncles, before enrolling at the prestigious St. Michael s School in Luneburg as a choral singer and organist. He was, unquestionably, very well grounded. 3

4 On leaving school, Bach was employed first as a court, then as a church musician, before landing the post of konzertmeister at the ducal court in Weimar, central Germany. Working with a well-funded team of musicians he stuck at this job for fourteen years, until 1717, when a series of disagreements with the authorities led to a month s imprisonment and summary dismissal. He wasn t idle for long though. Almost immediately, he was offered the role of kappelmeister (director of music) by Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Kothen, some 80 miles away. Bach was 32 years old, and already well known. But something changed for him in Kothen. Where, up to this point, much of his time had been taken up with church cantatas and hymn tunes, his new employer was a Calvinist. He didn t use elaborate music in his worship. So here, there was a great deal of freedom when it came to composition and performance. Bach used this freedom well. Though he only stayed with Leopold for six years, it was here that he wrote his four Orchestral Suites, the Cello Suites, the Sonatas and Partitas for Violin, the Brandenburg Concertos, and a little book For the Use and Profit of the Musical Youth which went on to change the world of music forever. The book was called The Well Tempered Clavier. Written as a teaching aid for solo keyboard it presented players with a collection of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. Some of its pieces went on to become quite popular, but most importantly, it demanded a keyboard tuned in Twelve- Tone Equal Temperament. Working through it, musicians of the period were delighted by the ability of a single instrument to play in all keys without retuning. And that was the revolutionary thing playing in all keys and staying in tune. Bach eventually produced two volumes of The Well Tempered Clavier; the first in 1720, the second in and they really have changed the world. Though to the composer himself, they don t seem to have been particularly important. Bach said that he wrote the compositions when he had nothing else to do, and he never had them properly published. He used to get his students to make copies, and it was these hand-written manuscripts that began circulating 4

5 around Europe through the latter half of the seventeenth century. Amazingly, The Well Tempered Clavier didn t appear in print until years after Bach s death. Bach moved to Leipzig in 1723, taking on the job of cantor at St. Thomas s Church. He spent the rest of his life teaching, conducting and composing; developing music s tonal system with pioneering four part harmony and key changes that were unheard of (nigh-on impossible) in earlier periods. But as he worked, his little book reached out to more and more people. And this was just the time when keyboards were becoming increasingly fashionable in Europe. Some time around 1700, Florentine harpsichord maker Bartolomeo Cristofori presented the world with the gravicembalo col piano e forte - an instrument which soon became known as the fortepiano or pianoforte, and finally the piano. Of course, the piano wasn t the first keyboard instrument in Europe. Air driven organs were invented by the ancient Greeks (them again), and harpsichords had been around since the 14 th century. But there was no volume control on an organ, and in harpsichords and clavichords, where the strings are plucked, volume also stays the same. The strings of a piano, however, are struck by a little hammer, and the harder you hit a key the harder the hammer falls. So, in contrast to the instruments that came before it, the piano had dynamics. As well as a wide tonal range on which you could play both chords and melodies, you could use it to express all kinds of moods and emotions, just like a violin, or even a voice. Nevertheless, in the country of its creation, it didn t catch on. The great Italian composers of the early 18 th century (like Antonio Vivaldi) wrote mainly string concertos and operas. The piano didn t grab their imaginations. But across the Alps in Germany, another instrument maker, Gottfried Silbermann, saw potential, and started building pianos in his workshop in Freiberg in a year after Cristofori s death. 5

6 On completing two of his new instruments, Silbermann showed them to Bach, who was very critical, saying they lacked treble and the keys were hard to play. Silbermann was stung and angered, but ultimately took Bach s comments on board and somehow improved his pianos until they met with the composer s complete approval. A sales voucher from 1749 even shows that Bach acted as an intermediary for him. And that was that. Over the following decades, pianos became the central instruments for teachers, composers and theorists all across Europe. And the owner s manual that went along with each piano was Bach s little book For the Use and Profit of the Musical Youth. The Well Tempered Clavier is now regarded as the single most important theoretical work in the history of European music; something that influences the way we play and listen to every piece we come across. From the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven, through to Strauss and Gershwin, even to the functional extensions of jazz harmony, it s all built on the foundation that spread across Europe with the preludes and fugues of J.S. Bach. He was the genius who showed us all just how useful the equally tempered system could be. And nowadays, playing in all keys; transposing and changing key whenever we like; building chords from any point of any scale we re so accustomed to Twelve-Tone Equal Temperament, it s hard to imagine music any other way. Which is quite an achievement, even for a talented gent like J. S. Bach. Makes you wonder exactly what Walter Mosley was thinking when he suggested a wandering bluesman like Robert Johnson could have done anything that could possibly compare. But he did. And to find out what it was, you ll have to read the Music of God and the Devil Part Two, which will be out soon. Copyright Phil Busby 2016 philbusbyblues@gmail.com 6