8:11 AM
@Robusto no wonder he'd be the one who started writing down all them mordents and trills. Because his were not arbitrary, but as you say intrinsic. He was standing at the apex of a style and could place everything in exactly the right place. And he could codify that style, that had long begun to go out of style. And that nobody else had bothered writing down. So much of what we know would have been lost without him.
I could write a treatise on the intrinsicality just from my experience in the last three weeks alone. Just from the one week of copying the score.
There was that one time our choirmaster stopped us and said, oh I see what effect you're going for there. That's very good. That's precisely the right effect. But you don't need to go for it at all. It's already encoded in the music. Which is how I am able to tell you that it's the right effect in the first place. Because Bach already did the job for you. So do nothing. Just sing.
That stuck with me and I started paying (even) more attention from that point on.
And then I transcribed this score here and the whole extent of what he said really hit me, like a two by four, and not once but every other bar like.
For example, there are very very few dynamics markings. And the ones that are there are very vague. Just forte or piano. Some pp in a couple places. That's it.
That's because if Bach wants some notes to be sung louder, what he does is he just gives them to more than one voice. There's very noticeable in that one place where four voices sing in unison, but it's actually all over the score.
If he wants to place an accent on a word, he doesn't say marcato or tenuto or what have you. He just gives the three or four notes to more than one voice, and they immediately stick out.
What's more, because this is Baroque counterpoint, with all the lines intricately crossing going in different directions, and you're not allowed to just have two voices move in parallel, what he actually does is, he lets two voices cross on just one note, but then on the next note he lets a different pair of voices cross.
Nothing moves in parallel at all, but three or four notes in a row that he wants to stick out, do stick out.
And you don't really notice that from listening, and often not even from reading along in the score. You only start noticing all the occurrences when transcribing every single note by hand.
And then of course there's the tempi. Adagio here, allegro there, and so on. But no metronome markings anywhere. And if you start to put those on, you notice that it's for the most part, almost throughout, it's actually just one marking.
Instead what he does to change the tempo is just change the time signature. From 4/4 to 3/2 to 12/8 to 4/4 again and so on. But the underlying click track if there were one would be the same.
It is exceptionally fascinating.
It really is all in the music already. He really did all the work for you. So do nothing. Just sing.
Interestingly enough, I'm typing all this while listening to something else entirely.
It's a Saturday morning, after all.
I've been a part of the discussion on whether it's acceptable to ask someone "You ate?" when meaning to ask "Did you eat?" or "Have you eaten?" and we can't find a definitive answer. We've found some examples of similar ellipses omitting "to do/to have", but they all use present tense, not past t...
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
