J.S. Doodly
January 12th, 2010My New Favorite Composer
I used to catch a lot of flak for saying I thought Bach was boring. That hasn’t happened in a while, so I thought I’d stir up the fuss again.
I’m working on sight-reading now, and it’s hard to find good material. I need stuff that’s repetitious and not too imaginative.
Hmm. What composer fits that description? I wonder. I wonder.
Oh, come on. You know it’s Bach. I just got out a book of his inventions and sinfonias, and it’s MADE for sight-reading practice. He repeats patterns over and over and over and over and over with little bumps up and down in pitch. I love it. It’s ten times better than my sight-reading book.
I just don’t understand what people see in this guy. Okay, sure, he wrote pieces with five voices in them. So what? Isn’t that pretty much what any choir director does, when he tells people to sing harmony? “Here’s the main melody. Here’s a high harmony part. Here’s a low harmony part. Now sing while I go to the coffee machine.” I’ll bet I could compose a piece with four or five voices tomorrow, and I know virtually nothing about music.
Bach’s notes are perfect for note-reading practice because they’re predictable yet too boring to memorize. The timing is perfect for timing practice, because it’s simple. Sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, quarter note…just kidding; it’s a sixteenth note. Pretty wild stuff, J.S. Hey, they have a new thing called a DOTTED note. Some day you might want to try one. Maybe you can’t do them on the harpsichord.
My dad calls Bach “finger exercises.” I didn’t know how right he was.
I still maintain you can sing this to almost any Bach piece: “Doodly doodly, doodly doodly, doodly doodly, doodly doo. Doodly doodly, doodly doodly, doodly doodly, doodly DOO.” Try it. It works. You may have to change the number of doodlys, but that’s about it.
Give me Chopin or Debussy any day. You never know what those guys are going to do next.
January 12th, 2010 at 8:22 PM
I can’t help listening to Bach anymore without thinking of Die Hard, where the mini-orchestra is playing the 3rd Brandenburg Concerto at the Christmas party. John McClane’s sheer awesomeness gives Bach a positive rub on that, at the very least.
I still like listening to Bach, in part because his boringness is actually a bit comforting, and also because “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” is the first classical religious tune I remember hearing–they used to play it all the time as background and lead-in music on the local Christian radio station my Mom listened to when I was a kid.
January 12th, 2010 at 9:22 PM
Howzabout some Philip Glass? Right up your sight-reading alley.
January 13th, 2010 at 1:48 AM
Sight reading has always been difficult for me. I had sufficient proficiency on my instrument (saxophone) and an understanding of the musical mechanics and dynamics involved. Putting it altogether in real time – well, lets say the error rate was pretty high.
I never persisted to develop those connections in my brain to pull it off. I’m sure its a skill that develops very much like the first time a piano student is able to get his left hand to act separately from his right, or a drummer learning to pound independent rhythms from his hands and feet. In the beginning, every move is painfully deliberate and there is great gnashing of teeth. Then suddenly the light turns on and the connection is made – you wonder what all the fuss was about.
I had a nasty tendency to process each individual note as it came up and soon the notes would pile up as the tempo passed me by. That would be like reading text by vocalizing each individual letter or phoneme – a maddening prospect. When I started looking ahead at entire measures and phrases I had much better results.
I recently ran across a talk by Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. It’s about developing an appreciation for classical music, but along the way he illustrates the progression of learning to play from emphasis on each note to effortless expression of a phrase or passage.
I thought it was an excellent presentation. He even uses a little Chopin to prove that everyone loves classical music.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html
January 13th, 2010 at 8:07 AM
If you don’t like Cantata 208 Aria 5, then you certainly don’t have any use for Bach and can probably give him up.
Tocata and Fugue in D minor’s a good test too, but a bit too cliche.
January 13th, 2010 at 9:28 AM
Current pop music is utterly mundane and predictable too (and far less so than Bach) – and with rap (hip-hop, whatever you want to call it), it has dumbed down much further. Such is life.
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I enjoy Bach as background music (while reading of doing other things). I take some … comfort (?) in the patterned predictability.
January 13th, 2010 at 10:20 AM
Heh. I can’t hear Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” without thinking of “Raising Arizona.”
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I chuckle when we sing the hymn “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee” at church, in part because one of the guys in the choir looks like Glenn from “Raising Arizona.” I keep picturing him in a neck brace.
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“Mind you don’t cut yourself, Mordecai.”
January 13th, 2010 at 10:43 AM
Very funny, Elisson.
January 13th, 2010 at 12:50 PM
Bach is musical engineering akin to architecture. Love it as background for orderly thinking when I’m trying to get mental traction on problem solving. Inspired music requires more attention for which I really can’t afford the CPU cycles to multitask.
January 13th, 2010 at 1:18 PM
“I’ll bet I could compose a piece with four or five voices tomorrow, and I know virtually nothing about music.”
I’ll take that bet. Just be sure that you write five-part COUNTERPOINT. No, it’s not what a choir director does.
(Yes, I took the bait. Mmmmmmmmmm bait…)
January 13th, 2010 at 1:28 PM
Here’s what the all-knowing Wikipedia says:
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“In its most general aspect, counterpoint involves the writing of musical lines that sound very different and move independently from each other but sound harmonious when played simultaneously.”
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Seems to me that would be easier than plain old harmony, since you have more freedom. Sounds like what a backup singer does.
January 13th, 2010 at 3:24 PM
So regarding Point/Counterpoint, who’s the ignorant slut?
Boy, I got in trouble for that word. That and Screw. didnt’ know what either of them meant at the time.
January 13th, 2010 at 4:06 PM
Bach is a big stupidhead.
January 14th, 2010 at 12:17 AM
He’s a German. What do you expect?
January 14th, 2010 at 1:14 AM
Problem is that counter-point is not harmony. And few back-up singers are capable of singing counter-point; but then few arraigners have the appropriate skill.
Cheers
January 14th, 2010 at 9:11 AM
Many backup singers sing “musical lines that sound very different and move independently from” the main melody, but their singing and the melody “sound harmonious when played simultaneously”
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Is Wikipedia’s definition wrong? I can’t imagine the mighty Wikipedia containing an error. It’s unthinkable.
March 24th, 2010 at 5:28 AM
Bach wrote a couple of great tunes. The toccata and fugue in Dm (as made familiar by the Stokowski orchestration) is great. The Air on G is very nice.
The (“great”) Mass in B minor is so uninteresting that it’s difficult to express how uninteresting it is without swearing heavily. Same with most of his other work. Maybe his hit tunes were stolen from somebody else?