(Cover photo of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig by Thom Quine.) 

I am happy to announce the release of my new album Bach Keyboard Works Arranged for Virtual Orchestra, available now at Apple Music, Amazon and Spotify. Along with the album I’m releasing videos of the songs on YouTube. New pieces on Sundays and Thursdays.

When I returned to music five years ago after a long break, all I wanted to do was play J.S. Bach on the grand piano my wife found me. My old hands, neck and back had other ideas – variations on “Ouch!” I was halfway through learning the long, difficult G Major Fugue from book one of the Well Tempered Clavier when I came to the terrible realization that I wasn’t going to make it to the end of the piece without my hands falling off. Part of the problem was poor technique but it didn’t help that I have relatively small hands. Bach wrote for the keyboards of his day, whose keys were narrower than today’s. 

I’d been toying with the notion of returning to composing using the recently impressive digital tools of the Virtual Orchestra. If I couldn’t finish playing the G Major Fugue, I could arrange it for my glorified “band in a box.” When I started inputting the piece to my computer, the results sucked. I’d made my own music with a computer in the past…I started on an album and gradually discovered why the fugue sounded wrong. My new digital tools were shiny and sharp but required new skills on my part to make decent music with them. The reasons are too technical to detail – (starting with  knowing how to selectively apply “negative pre-delay.”)

Composing an album of my music was great fun. So I did another. At that point, I felt I’d said what I needed to for the moment. Now that I’d mastered my new tools, what about that Bach fugue? I’d originally wanted to orchestrate it because I hate not finishing things I start. I had another reason — orchestrating this piece might reveal aspects to me and a listener that weren’t apparent when played on a keyboard. 

People often believe that Bach intended his masterwork The Well Tempered Clavier to be played on the clavichord. In fact,  it was to be played on any keyboard – organ, harpsichord or even piano (though it had not been invented yet in his time.) Common to all keyboard instruments is a limit on the number of timbres, or “colors” you can produce. For an organ with two manuals, that’s two; for a piano you’re limited to one. 

The essence of the fugue – and what I love about the form – is counterpoint, what Wikipedia calls “the relationship of two or more simultaneous musical lines (also called voices) that are harmonically dependent on each other, yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour.”

In Bach fugues as many as six separate lines (or “voices”) sound simultaneously. The fugue subject will appear in one voice, then later be answered in a second while the first voice does something else, and so on.

It’s nice to be able to perceive the subject as it winds its way through a fugue. On piano you can enhance that by making the subject louder than the surrounding material. But the voices still have the same timbre. Not so with an orchestra. A fugue subject can sound in the oboes and be answered in the violins, then appear in a trombone. The separate lines which make counterpoint so pleasing can all have their own distinct timbre. Timbres are often referred to as “tone colors.”  An orchestra can turn a black-and-white piano rendition  into the sound of a rainbow.

I’ve tried to illustrate this in the YouTube videos of this Bach album. As a piece plays, the written score of the music scrolls by with the notes of subjects and countersubjects appearing in different colors.

Aside from my own compositions, I only perform Bach. And I listen to a lot of it, mostly his vocal music. It does something for me that no other music does. It arouses the deepest feelings. The majority of his music is devoutly Christian, which might be enough to convert me if I didn’t know better.

Bach’s music can reach beyond emotional – to the experience of being embraced by the multiple arms of some benevolent god to the exclusion of all the worries and pains this mind is subject to. It’s an experience a Buddhist teacher has likened to Samadhi – one pointedness, or absorption. 

That absorption occurs when I listen to Bach. It becomes deeper as I play it. And even deeper as I immerse myself in orchestrating it. A part of that experience is the sense that I’m gradually coming to understand this profound music. It’s a quaint notion in our social media world of instant digital gratification. “Acquired taste” is a pejorative term. The most sublime tastes – great music, great relationships – acquire us, revealing their wonders a bit at a time. In the case of Bach for me, a lifetime.