BACH & SON: RE-ARRANGERS

by: David White

I find the incessant rearranging as part of the career of a composer to be fascinating. We gain insight into the dull drudge of working on creating a cantata every week for three weeks, or multiple chamber works for each week. The guy was human – he borrowed from himself all the time, and reworked his precious bits of great music into a number of works.

Perhaps not suprising in our world, where even our teenage children (well, mine, at least) are very aware of intellectual property because they fear the awful sting of a YouTube copyright block, or even worse, a takedown (ask someone under 20), we consider arranging another work to be rather unusual, even a bit lazy or at least, suspect behavior. The days of rampant “sampling” have been exposed as a passing fad, not a symptom of the decline of imagination as a foundational part of the creative process.

But Johann Sebastian Bach was a serial arranger and re-arranger. Perhaps because his training consisted of hand-copying music, so if the act of copying was very like the act of creating, well…who wouldn’t take a phrase of two and insert it here where I need a few bars. Those with deeper knowledge of the lives of the great classical music composers know that arranging, borrowing, outright stealing took place quite often, with or without the composer’s knowledge and usually without any kind of permission.

But J.S.B and his son C.P.E.B weren’t arranger/thieves, not at all. To them, it was a healthy part of their work as composers. In doing the research, you learn that the job of composer (not that you can look it up on LinkedIn) has an image of someone hunched over piles of sheet music, some blank, some torn, or even putting it all into a computer program, agonizing over notes.

An examination of JSB shows him to be remarkably prolific with no mention of any kind of writer’s block – because writer’s block meant unemployment and no money (something he shares with all composers up to the present day). But JSB and CPEB operate not in some lonely writer’s room, they resembled more the modern day contractor.

A scratch of the workaday world of Bach & Son and you find works reworked, repurposed, rewritten for different instruments, whatever you need, however you need it – that’s our motto at J.S. Bach & Son.

Today’s scholars, when they come across a reworked work of J.S. Bach start a reaction similar to when art scholars find that Leonardo daVinci painted over something to create something else. The excitement when they detail that there are eraser marks on a piece of paper from 1690 indicating that Bach actually wrote a piece in G Minor for oboe instead of D Major for viola da gamba.

Now, musically it’s really not all the much meat for the non-wig-wearing classical music lover to even stop their scrolling for a moment. And I don’t remember much earth-shattering scholarship coming from either a charcoal figure beneath a Rembrandt or a Bach arrangement of a concerto that he turned into a trio sonata that ended up as a solo partita for keyboard.

This acceptance of the thought of Bach as a musical painter, roofer or general contractor lends me to a greater understanding of why he is held in such high regard over three hundred years after his death. We all do what he does, in all our jobs, we use the same techniques – it’s often a calling card. We look at photos of a painter’s last job up the street, or on their social media and we say, “I want that!”. Bach had that pressure and more – someone would say “I want that” but he couldn’t create the same exact work, when we’d be happy with the same exact fireplace or kitchen island that we saw on our friend’s Insta.

So he could give his audience “that” – the thing they loved about last week’s piece, but he also had a creative mind that turned a tiny bit of reused material into something we’d wish we could write on our best day.

Bach’s Concerto for Harpsichord in D Minor, BWV 1052 was arranged for multiple instruments – during Bach’s lifetime, often by Bach himself. And since Mendelssohn ushered in the era of “Bach: Exalted Genius” (rightfully so, not too much sarcasm there), it’s been arranged and arranged again. So harpsichord, make way for violin, until it’s time for the oboe, then the marimba…and now we have the guitar as well.

CPEB is a gadget man, even more so than his dad. Possibly even more practical, maybe less ego-driven, who knows, who cares, but when he wrote his harpsichord concerto in A Major (and quite a few more concertos just like it), he designed it so it could be performed on a number of instruments. Not for guitar, because, well, it hadn’t been perfected for this kind of use yet.

I could go on, but the C.P.E. Bach of window replacements is coming to the house in a few minutes…