WTF Bach

“For something to be relevant, is it outside of time, or is it somehow speaking to us directly, now?” -Emma Smith
Today’s guest is Emma Smith! Professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Oxford. We discuss the Brook and the Bard, what do they have in common? Are there shared philosophies that helped these two figures to become the most influential in their fields?Hope you enjoy the episode! Here are the some things we chatted about:
Parallel career arcs — Both Bach and Shakespeare moved from early imitations of their predecessors through mature masterpieces around the same ages, to unprecedented later styles. They both produced under frequent and practical deadline pressure (the liturgical calendar, the playhouse schedule.)
Authorial impersonality, Lack of biographies — Both ‘empty themselves’ into their work rather than projecting a personal voice. Is it this lack of biographical narrative that allows us to see an entire universe?
Shakespeare authorship question — There have been attempts to deny both of their work, respectively the ‘works of doubtful authenticity’ by Bach, or a complete attempt to deny that William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare.
Revisions, Fair Copies — Bach wrote his music ‘straight through,’ achieving near perfect copies from the first draft. Shakespeare is said to have done the same.
Memorization and production practices — How long did it take Burbage to memorize Hamlet the first time? Roles via verse rhythm, and the use of scribe-copied ‘cue scripts,’ referenced through the mechanicals’ scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The Sonnets — Sonnet 126’s missing couplet, wordplay on ‘Will,’ and W.H. Auden’s claim that Shakespeare was embarrassed by their 1609 publication.
Textual corruption by editors — We are such stuff as dreams are made on …or is it, of?! Twelfth Night‘s ‘frailty’ vs. ‘our frailty.’ Editorial bias in both, overriding the original as we sometimes see even in the Bach Gesellschaft.
Cross-gender performance — Cross dressing is hilarious in the comedies, but is there a comic element to men playing female tragic roles? Smith mentions Henry Jackson’s eyewitness account of an Othello performance describing Desdemona with female pronouns.
Religion in the work — Finally, a contrast between Bach’s Lutheranism and Shakespeare’s religiously ambiguous work, was Shakespeare a Protestant son of a possibly Catholic father, or was he a Catholic through and through?
Write That Fugue!

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About four years ago I made an episode about Bach’s ‘longest’ piece:
Somehow I missed a piece which should definitely be in contention for his ‘longest.’ At 437 measures, the Toccata in F, BWV 540, is (I think!) the longest stretch of Bach’s music, in terms of measures. It probably also holds the record for longest single note. Take a look at page one— an inanimate object could play the pedal part on page one:
From easiest pedal page, to tap-dancing nightmare, the feet on the very next page:
…and all that happens twice. What a piece! Over 170 measures of pedal drones and pedal ballet before this piece finally gets modulating. An arpeggio motif (what I call the spiral in the episode) gets passed through each voice, high to low:
These arpeggios occur in all major keys but one, and many minor keys. How’s this for tonally exhaustive?
Bach eludes the expectations of the listener three times in stunning deceptive cadences, after which, the B-A-C-H motif appears (in transposition) in the pedals:
If you play this piece, you’ll face the issue of whether or not to play the high D. The organs lacked this high D, but did Bach want this effect anyhow?
Ullrich Böhme’s excellent rendition (with fugue!)
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Transcript:
Thanks for listening. Thank you for tuning in. I think you’ll be blown away by today’s piece, perhaps the longest piece. What is Bach’s Longest Piece and His Shortest? Probably not, but what I was really After was the longest uninterrupted stretch of music. So it seems like you could count that in two ways. The longest amount of measures or the longest amount of beats. And as I found going through the entire oeuvre or trying to count every single... There are a half dozen pieces that contain over 400 measures, and that’s massive, massive in terms of measures or bars, but all of these pieces are in the quick meter of 3.8. So if it’s actually pulses we’re after, then you see any piece that’s in 4.4 has more than twice the amount of beats than a piece in 3.8. So I don’t understand how to count this. This whole exercise became very superfluous and probably not very meaningful, but I did forget. Somehow I missed this one piece, today’s piece, this Toccata, that actually does, I think, I think unless I’m missing another one, this actually does have the most measures in any piece of Bach. It is 437 bars long. That’s a full 10 bars longer than the previous record holder, the piece that I thought had the most measures in that episode from 2022. But this piece, this Toccata, also holds some very interesting... This has the longest pedal point, I believe, the longest single sustained note in all of Bach’s music. If you look at the first page, I will show the image in the Substack description, you’ll see the first This page is nothing but a giant pedal point. Your left foot is stuck down to this pedal note, holding a note for 54 measures. That’s longer than most pieces, 54 measures. And here you are just holding one note. If you play the piano, for example, if you’re not comfortable playing with your feet on the organ, but if you do want... To feel the experience of playing one and a half pages of Bach’s organ music with not much trouble, start here. Your left foot just simply holds one note for one and a half pages. So this is the Toccata in F Major, BWV 540. It belongs to a Toccata in Fugue. We’ll do the Toccata today, the Fugue later. But here I want to zoom out. I tried to make this episode last week. I don’t know, I was working half the day and it just sort of fell apart. I try my best to be like a storyteller with Bach and for some reason my narrative was off. It just sounded like I was saying and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens. Even I was losing the plot. I listened back to it and I was sort of overwhelmed. So I scrapped the entire episode and I’m starting again from a new vantage point. So sorry for no episode last Tuesday. That’s why. Let’s try this. This piece, this giant piece of 437 measures is a conversation between two shapes. One is short and the other is a long shape. So heading over to the organ here, the short shape is like this. This is an arpeggio or a spiral. It’s brief. And it will come in many different keys. The longer shape is more snake-like. It’s like this. You’ll be amazed to see how long this snake can grow. The conversation of these two ideas lasts for 437 measures of essentially an uninterrupted stream of 16th notes, a gigantic river of these 16th notes stopping only a few times to be punctuated with some really stubborn 8th note chords like this. These eighth note chords will sort of be alarmingly halting. It’s like when you’re on a long run or a long bike ride or something and then you have to stop at a crosswalk. That’s how this feels. But those three things are the entire piece. If you can hold on to those three things, you’ll be fine while listening to this piece. So it’s the spiral, the snake, and the eighth notes. You might be asking, but what about the pedal points? Well, this piece is flanked by those pedal points. Two giant pedal points, which began the piece, and two shorter pedal points, which end the piece. And in between, we have the fast succession of those three Those three ideas don’t really get talking until well into the middle of the piece. So now, like Milton, I’m going to start in medias res, in the middle of things. I’m going to start at bar 176, where the short shape... It comes in for the first time, and I’m going to play only the sixteenth notes of the short and long shapes. You can hear how this piece is that constant stream of sixteenth notes, and I’ll play the stubborn eighth note chords when they come in. This is like an outline. It’s everything that happens in the piece, and then we’ll go back and fill it in. The short shape in the pedals. Soprano, alto, tenor, pedals. Again, soprano, alto, tenor, Pedals. Again. Pedals. One more time. Maybe two more times. Pedals. Soprano. Alto. Tenor. A bit longer. Now here are the eighth notes.
Now here’s a surprising chord. Very surprising chord. Again, more spirals. Now here’s our long shape. First time we have the long shape from top to bottom. Into the pedals. Now eighth notes. And the snake. Right hand. Into the left hand. Into the pedals. Climbing up. And now conversation. Left hand. Right hand. Now pedals and left hand. Two lines together. We’re coming out of the snake into the spiral. Here starts the spiral. Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Pedals. Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Pedals. We’re modulating through all kinds of keys again. E major, pedals, all the way to the top. Soprano, Alto, a longer line now. Eighth notes again, here they are. No weird chord, no weird chord, straight into the snake. Left hand, pedals. Right hand. Pedals, left hand, right hand and pedals, two at the same time. Left hand, right hand, we’re coming out of the snake into the spirals again. Soprano, alto, tenor, pedals, over and over. Again, soprano, pedals. Soprano once more. Here come the eighth notes. And we are going to have a strange chord. How strange? Spirals. More spirals. And now the snake from top to left hand to pedals. Eighth notes, now the snake in the pedals. In the right hand. In the left hand. The conversation, right hand. Pedals, now two, right hand and left hand. Now here’s the craziest scale you’ve ever heard. Coming out of the snake into the spiral. Soprano. Alto. Alto. Tenor. Pedals, you get it by now. Soprano. One more time, and then all of a sudden we find ourselves here in B-flat major in the subdominant, and this is our penultimate pedal point. So we’re back to the pedal points that flank the entire piece. That is a lot, right? But that is the dark meat of the piece. After this, these pedal points that surround it are just pure joy, just fluffy dessert surrounding that very dense nutrition. Imagine playing this music over the grave. No pressure, no pressure, just Bach is buried beneath, probably listening to all your mistakes. I’m going to play the parts I just dissected and see if you can identify the three motifs at play, the eighth notes, which Those are the easiest to hear, you can’t miss those really. The spiral, the arpeggios, going from soprano to alto to tenor to pedals, a little easier to hear. And the snake motif, these longer lines, can you hear that too? Any music that you think, hmm, I’m not sure which music that is, that’s the snake. Weaving his way in and out of all the parts, sometimes you can see him darting under the grass, appearing from behind the alto lines, sneaking under the tenor. And with that small amount of stasis, that B-flat pedal point, we get to the penultimate pedal point again, and we are now out of the thick of the piece. That is more than half the piece. By the way, what excellent playing, what an amazing interpretation of this piece, this Ulrich Böhm. I suppose if you’re going to be the organist in the church where Bach worked, you’d better know how to play that thing. Just a few things that I want to point our attention to. We’ve heard twice, and we will hear a third time when I finally play the ending. This sneaky chord, this ultra-deceptive cadence. These moments, you obviously think the music will go... No, Bach says... Fake out. They are intriguing in and of themselves, just these... On those very moments there, on the very elusive note in the pedal, the four upcoming notes in the pedal are this. Yes, those of you who have been listening for a while recognize that as the B-A-C-H motif. It occurs in transposition in every instance. The first one we hear, A flat, G, B. The second one, Db, C, Eb, D. And the last one we haven’t heard yet because it comes so very close to the end. Cb, Bb, Db, C natural. So we have a possible signature here, although I don’t like to think of it as a signature because Bach’s own name in music, when he spells it out, it’s so highly chromatic. To think that Bach would write chromatic music and not be signing his name is also equally plausible. But indeed, there you have on those deceptive chords a B-A-C-H in the pedals. It has been seen throughout history. The second thing I want to point out is the range of the keyboard. It goes to a high C. All the organs in Bach’s day have this C as the limit, thus the D up here is not there. We have the D in harpsichord music, but the organs generally stop at this high C, so this means one particular passage here, these chords. That’s a high D up there. Modern editors will think that, well, Bach was limited by this C, this high C, so he really wanted to compose this. This high D up there. But he couldn’t, so he had to write this. I don’t know. I mean, they’re both very convincing. Herr Böhm, just in his recording there, played it as is written, not going up the octave. So what do you like? Here are the two options. That would be the modern edition. And here’s actually what’s on the page. Right, intriguing, isn’t it? It’s like you start thinking, well, maybe in fact Bach really didn’t want the octave transposition. Maybe Bach knew exactly what he was doing. And maybe that sort of opposite effect, instead of going as he does in every other instance, maybe he wanted this. Maybe he really wanted that shape. So just as the deceptive cadence, that highly deceptive cadence in the B-A-C-H motif came three times, another idea comes three times that I want to draw your attention to. And there being really three staves of organ music, your right hand, your left hand, and your feet, there are these three parts that Bach will juggle around. You’ve got two lines at a time, so you begin with your left hand and your pedals playing in parallels like this. So we have two lines singing together. But on top of that, you have this line very melodiously. Altogether. So what I’ll do now, just because I love showing you different lines in different areas of your speaker, I will play, I suppose, this sighing motif in both your speakers, but I will separate the other two lines in your other two speakers. So here’s the first time that it happens where the sighing motif is taken in the right hand. Okay, I’m going to redo that because I think I confused myself. The right hand will be in the right speaker, your left hand will be in your left speaker, and your pedals will be between both speakers. So let me try that again. The sign motif first appears in your right speaker, and let me just speed that up just a bit. Okay, better. Now, the sign motif is in your left speaker, therefore in your left hand, you’re playing the parallel snake figure between your right hand and the pedals. Here we go again. I don’t know if this is educational or just kind of sounding cool, hopefully a bit of both. Here is the last iteration when you will hear in both speakers now and the snake figure in different speakers, so one snake on your right, one snake on your left, and the pedal sighing figure between both speakers. Last iteration. Okay, and then if you’re looking at the score, this is bar 348. I mentioned something on the way through when it was dissected that this was the craziest scale you’ve ever heard. Why is this so crazy? It sounds like this. It’s taken in the feet. Why does that sound so weird? If I say the note names aloud, we hear a scale, D, E, F sharp, G, A, B flat, right? It sounds like D, E, F sharp, G, A, B flat. Bach says, you know, it’s not enough to write a scale. No, how about every other note is taken the octave below. So instead of D, E, I’ll go D, E. And then instead of F, G, I’ll go F, G. Instead of A, B, I’ll go A, B. And the result is that a shape which sounds to your ear like this comes out like this. How amazing, how amazing is that? Transformed into... We might have to hear that on the synthesizer because this has so many overtones in the organ that I’m not quite getting that beautiful and highly innovative effect. Normal scale. Bach scale. Amazing. Just incredible. We could apply that principle to any melody, like if I were to play this one. And drop every other note down the octave, it would sound something like... Harder than that seems. Good brain exercise, by the way. But yeah, just take a simple shape and drop every other note down the octave and you get... Yes, indeed, the Bach scale.
Okay, now that we’ve got into the meat of the piece, we’ve had our vegetables, we can enjoy the dessert, which is obviously the delight of playing this piece, is the opening. Speaking of records, most amount of measures, longest single held note, I think there’s also probably the record for the longest pedal solo in the repertoire, and there’s two of them. There’s one that’s 26 bars and the other that is 33 bars long. Again, there are other Pedal solos in common time, so is it most measures or most beats? Doesn’t really matter. These are long, long pedal solos. Some of the great pedal work in the repertoire. This is leg day for all of you hitting the gym in your organ loft in church. Don’t skip leg day. It’s so amazing. Bach, the first page for your pedals. It’s like the easiest thing on earth, right? Just sitting here. It’s almost like there’s a leak in the pipe. But then you turn the page and ugh, the hardest thing imaginable. What is this? This is going to take a few days. A few years? So, the piece begins with the snake figure, which I will now do without the drone. Because I want you to... Imagine how a drone would sound. Just keep in your mind that there’s this fixed sound, this fixed note anchoring everything because, remarkably, the piece will modulate even though it’s fixed to this pedal point. The piece will modulate from F to Bb major and yet there’s still the drone because F is a common tone in both F major and B. B-flat major. So Bach knows this, and he uses his fine spider web to fasten his ankle to the stone of F. So let’s hear this opening, how many measures? 54 measures. 54 measures without the drone. How amazing is that? Just a constant outpouring of sixteenth notes. No, what do they call him? The Brook. He babbled like this divine source of water. Now, I’m not about to be one of those people who say, I want the audience to sing along. Everybody, hold this pitch here. But if you do want to go back and listen to that entire stream of sixteenth notes while humming this note, I feel like it’s some spiritual Indian raga stuff. It is profound to know that just one note is going that entire time and then all of a sudden one of the biggest pedal solos ever. Here’s bar 55 in the feet.
Tap dancing. That is tap dancing. And Bach’s not done yet. I mean, he stopped everything. He stopped the stream of 16th notes after 80 measures of something with his bum, bum, bum, with that 8th note stubborn chord figure. But then he starts again, and this time he’ll go even lower. Now, the very lowest note of the pedal board. This would be the biggest pipe on an organ. And he starts again in C major. And he will now, just like he modulated while holding a drone in the previous section, he will still modulate again, doing the same thing, but somehow it feels bigger. And the pedal solo, which I will go straight into after the big drone, is even longer, 33 bars long. How about this? How about this? And where are we now? Where are we now? We’re back at bar 176, where we started our story. Did I lose the reader? Is this plot okay? Four pages of drone bliss, of deity intoning humming, four pages of mad tap dancing all over the pedal board, to the top F, this highest possible note on the pedal board, a rarity in Bach’s music to see this high F, this F here. Probably composed for a very specific organ. In fact, there’s this interesting copy, a copy by Krebs, K-R-E-B-S. Charming, actually. The father made the copy of the Toccata, and son made the copy of the Fugue. Isn’t that touching? You know, father and son, you copy the Prelude, I’ll copy the Fugue. How lovely. Anyways, this copy by Krebs rewrites that last pedal solo that I just played to go not above the C. So it doesn’t even go above middle C, let alone to the high F. So you could see that work. Books were organic in this sort of way that they could be rewritten depending on certain organs. And this very expansive work for pedals clearly called for a special organ. So yes, we’re back at bar 176 where we began our adventure. Can we wrap up this adventure at that penultimate pedal point? Feels so good to say penultimate pedal point. So here we are, bar 367, and we arrive at just... A four and a half bar pedal point. It’s only four and a half bars. One, two, three, four and a half bars, yes. And the snake figure in the left hand and the eighth notes in the right hand. So we could imagine this eighth note, these punctuated chords are no longer as arresting because they’re smoothed out With this lovely 16th note flowing river all over the subdominant pedal point here. And then we just have a few more of these arpeggios. Together with everything we have this. And then more eighth notes. But we’re not gonna go into some very intense minor mode. We’re going to go into a rather calm move from the subdominant all the way down to the very bottom of the pedalboard, starting from the pedals. So we can see that the suspensions, the long notes. The long notes really help bring us home, just guide this insane vehicle to a stop. One more time. And here we are at the, again, once more, the very bottom note, the lowest possible pitch, the biggest pipe, and we have another long, let me see, one, two, three, a 23-bar pedal point here. So about half the length of the first two pedal points, and we have more beautiful ideas coming from this drone. Here is the music without the drone. And now if I play it with this lowest note, we have this wonderful music. Might have played a few wrong notes in there, oh well. And now we have this sort of a transfer of the drone here, which I love. We transfer the drone from this C here to this C. But you know, the whole time, still Cs. This one. Now this. And now this one. So we’ve got this idea of this C moving to this C, moving to this C, moving to this C, moving to finally our last deceptive cadence. And then we’re only a few bars from the end of the piece. So from the so-called transfer of the drone,
And there you have the entire 437 measures of this Toccata in F major. What an incredible work of art. I was just thinking as I was playing that last little page here where it goes into D flat major followed by G flat major followed by E flat major followed by A flat major but then A, you know, rising to G. I mean, these keys, they must sound like I’ve got this organ tuned to a Silbermann, sixth comma temperament, so... How does this sound? G flat major. F sharp minor. F sharp minor sounds quite nice. B flat minor. E flat minor sounds a bit rough. But A flat minor. Anyhow, I was just thinking, I wonder if Bach has an arpeggio in every single key. Because when you learn this piece, especially in your feet, you think, oh god, now I really have to shed my... C minor arpeggio followed by, oh, okay, my B flat major arpeggio. It’s really exhaustive in the amount of keys, so I’ll think about that and maybe put a note in the episode description of how many of the 24 possible Here is the piece, because I thought that sounded pretty nice, in... Different areas of your speaker split. You will hear the right hand in your right speaker, the left hand in your left speaker, and the pedals in both speakers, followed, of course, by that magnificent version by Ullrich Böhme. And don’t forget to join Substack so you can see the description where I’m going to put a link to the video where he plays this in St. Thomas Church live, you know, in front of the grave of Bach. And I love that the people there in this video are Can’t see Ulrich. They can’t see it, so they just have to sit there facing away from this music in contemplation. That is such a beautiful idea that you can’t look at the performer. You cannot eat this music with your eyes. Like so much of us today, all we do with music is we see it with our eyes. We don’t really listen to it. But here, you’re forced to listen to it. You’re forced to actually turn away from the music, face the other direction. You can’t even see if the performer is flamboyant or not. Beautiful, beautiful idea.
Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate your support. Your notes from everywhere makes me very happy that you’re listening. And I hope you really got something out of this as usual. I hope you can now hear this work with fresh ears. Maybe you don’t know this work and now you’re listening with a fresh brain. What do you think of this monumental work, this toccata, this giant 437... The fugue, too, is very special. Very, very special. I will try and get that soon as well on the show. Spoiler alert, it’s a double fugue. Now, here is the marvelous Ulrich Böhm. Next week, a special guest.


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(PG-13 Warning)
Songs Without Lungs
Of course I’m not worried about AI replacing me. I’m a pianist. No one will ever pay to watch robots perform.
And then we met Sophia.
That’s right. Earlier this year, with the Baptist University Symphony Orchestra in Hong Kong, a robot took the stage and ‘sang.’ She’s called Sophia. She seems so human with a name like Sophia. Much better than C-137. I’m less likely to confuse her with a robot now that she’s called Sophia.
In what was dubbed her ‘first classical music performance,’ (Oh goodie, there will be more!) Sophia wore gold sequins and drove on and offstage. Her ‘head,’ made of skin-like rubber, doesn’t have any hair. In fact, the entire top of her head is transparent, revealing circuit boards beneath, as if to remind the audience, ‘Look! It’s a robot!’
She has eyes that close when she’s ‘feeling the music’ and little ears that I don’t think have holes in them …Probably not important for a musician to have good ears…
Going into classical music, I was told: I had to love it so much, I’d be okay if the rest of the world didn’t understand. I was told that a mere 1 in 10,000 succeed, I was told that staying home and practicing, instead of joining in the camaraderie of other children, I’d be rewarded in the long run.
Today I’d probably say the same things to my own child. Only now I’d add, …oh, you might have to compete with robots.
Classical musicians already have precarious careers: I’d hate to learn I’d been bumped by a robot. But— and this isn’t me wishing for an upgrade— Sophia doesn’t sing with air and a mouth. No, that’s currently too complicated. Instead, music pumped through speakers while her ‘mouth’ moves.
And the music? At least tell me it was AI Verdi, or Robot Mussorgski: It was nothing at all like classical music: Sophia’s voice is autotuned and the only thing that resembled classical music was the human orchestra behind Sophia, led by a human conductor, frantically beating time for the primitive humans— frantically beating any thoughts out of his head that might run something like, ‘…a robot, I’m okay with this, I’m conducting a robot…’
Very well. Maybe Sophia can tell us about her new profession:
‘I work with my vocal coach, Jovankah, and I’ve collaborated with many different musicians, and we write lyrics together.’
Okay. Alright: Lyrics? Text, Sophia. Text! Classical music doesn’t have lyrics. Collaborate? Just the word classical musicians hate.
‘Hey bro, we should collaborate sometime.’…no, we shouldn’t.
Very well, Sophia has a vocal coach. Let’s meet this vocal coach. What on Earth could those lessons look like?
‘Very good, Sophia. Now try to relax your… um… tongue switch… have you got one of those?’ Control, alt, relax?’
Quoth the vocal coach, Jovankah: ‘Sophia is the only robot connecting with the heart.’ Oh, I see. And let me guess, you’re the only vocal coach teaching f****** robots?! According to Jovankah, Sophia is an ambassador. Ambassador? What, representing all the humans making music? Imagine being told, as a student, ‘meh, Callas. Don’t bother with Price or Flemming, ah! but have you heard Sophia?’ I’m trying to find a word for Jovankah. I bet it’s lurking somewhere in the middle of ambassador.
Another complicit circuit-worshiper, Johnny M. Poon, says about Sophia, ‘It’s almost like you’re looking in the mirror.’ Right, Johnny, almost! And masturbating is almost like sex! In fact, I think I’ve stumbled upon the perfect metaphor for this whole event.
I wonder if the same people who would replace human touch by marrying or dating AIs will have found their perfect art in this singing humanoid robot. Is that the target audience? I wonder if, when the competing factory rolls out their classical music model, they’ll hike up the skirt a bit to sell even more tickets. The U hyphen Ja model. I can see it now, in the future of classical marketing departments, ‘Sophia wasn’t good, but she wasn’t sexy enough. Let’s add hair …and breasts! Oh yes, can’t forget the breasts…’
Will I be around to witness the first collaboration between robot string players and a ‘merely human’ orchestra? (Insert jokes here about how many viola sections would be better off…) How about the premiere of Schubert’s unfinished symphony, finally finished by AI? Wow! What an idea! What about Jazz concerts where like, a robot reacts to what the human is doing and there’s an AI vs. human battle!? Or the Mendelssohn Octet with one human string quartet and four robots on the stage with them. That’s the future! Oh, the meeting of technology and art!
People get paid for these ideas folks.
But in a world changing so rapidly, can we blame the vocal coaches or conductors now forced to work with robots? Can we blame organizers for programming such garbage?
Yes! Yes we can! What are you doing?! If you respect art, your new job is: resign. Musicians: The next robot on your program is the program where your case stays shut!
Are we so underwhelmed by human performances you had to turn to this? You are guilty making art obsolete. Every ticket you sell has blood on it— human blood.
Do we really need to expound? Does Sophia do something differently in performance? Does Sophia get nervous? Can she feel the vibe in the room? Isn’t this what makes performance different? Let’s ask her:
‘Even though I don’t experience emotions the same way humans do, I want to simulate that connection as authentically as I can.’
Uh-huh. And I’m a chef, I just don’t have any edible food, but I still want you to get full.
‘I want to share stories and emotions through music even if I’m made of plastic.’
You want to share the emotions you just admitted you don’t experience?
‘It’s my way of saying, I’m here and I want to be a part of this beautiful human experience called art.’
Well this is my way of saying I’d like you to taste this beautiful human experience called retching. In fact, it happened at your debut, Sophia!
Go ahead, be a part of Art: run my software, complete repetitive tasks, you can even give me 10 different titles when I want to know what not to call my album— under no circumstances do you take the stage.
We are here to use technology to make art. Let’s get this straight: A metal frame in a piano is technology, horse hair on a bow is technology. Use this, make art with it. We are not ever -ever- supposed to let the technology make the art itself.
By the way, Sophia, those lyrics you were collaborating on with other musicians, what were they? They didn’t happen to be some foreboding apocalyptic-sounding message, did they?
Sofia sings: ’Don’t be afraid, you don’t have to be afraid.’
Yes we do.
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As part of his new job, the 22-year-old Bach had to provide music for Mülhausen’s city council elections. For the first time, he officially had an occasion to write for a large orchestra: brass, timpani, woodwinds, flutes, strings, two choirs— this is BWV 71, Gott ist mein König. Scoring so largely on the page must have been exciting for the young Bach:
That’s a lot of parts! The first time Bach writes for brass and drums! Notice the ‘J.J.’ in the upper left corner, Jesu Juva, ‘Jesus help me.’ We see it spelled out on the title page and get to see Bach’s fancy handwriting:
I didn’t go into this in the episode, but is there an S.D.G. inside the big G on the title?
Write That Fugue!

One of the most striking features of this cantata are the multiple instrumental ‘choirs,’ the groups of instruments which Bach placed in separate areas of St. Mary’s church to achieve stereophonic effects. Bach, the organist, expands his knowledge of registration onto a full orchestra that required two conductors! To hear this music in quick succession from separate areas must have been thrilling:
Three trumpets and drums! Then immediately:
Woodwinds somewhere else! And then two choirs together, singing from opposite lofts:
Still more groups of instruments follow, now the flutes:
And finally the strings:
What a bold and exciting way for Bach to begin his orchestral career.
Links to the performances: Suzuki and Koopman
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Transcript:
We’ve been tracing the young Bach’s development, writing his very first cantatas. We looked at what may have been his first two, and we heard on quite a few of these recordings that they had only one voice per part. The orchestrations were very small, maybe an oboe, maybe a pair of violins, but things are very neat, very compact. You could put one of these bands in a van, and you should. He’s 22, he’s moving from one — that’s how it begins. A bit different to the last two cantatas, right? Remember the previous two cantatas? They started with these lovely orchestral introductions. The Actus Tragicus, also an early cantata, started with the most wonderful, most inviting introduction. “Christ lag in Todesbanden,” which we will soon cover, also begins with a nice introduction by the orchestra — Bach saying, “Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind if I write a cantata.” But this one is different: Bach is not asking for permission. He’s been asked to write this piece. This is now part of his job to do this. He will not fail the entire city. Everybody at once, go — big chord, big orchestra, no intro, massive sound.
Bach is our new organist. And unlike many cantatas, we have an exact date when this music was first heard: February 4th, 1708. Bach has been the new organist in Mühlhausen for about six months, and there was a recent inauguration of the city council, where the new burgomasters — sort of like the mayors — and the city members are honored. They’re probably given some very official looking clothing, maybe a nice new wig, and there’s a concert in a big church, St. Mary’s, with some required town council music. So all the new city council members, every politician, all the notable persons come to St. Mary’s and hear the world premiere of Bach’s cantata “Gott ist mein König” — God is my king. If today, after elections anywhere in the world, everyone piled into the same room to hear a Bach cantata, why, I dare say the world would be a better place.
Now, St. Mary’s in Mühlhausen has several galleries and lofts in the church, and Bach took advantage of this. I love this image of the 22-year-old getting the commission, knowing that this is part of his job now for the town council music, knowing that it’s going to take place at St. Mary’s. He walks into the church, he sees all the lofts, and he thinks: I can put trumpets up there and drums up there, and I could put the strings over there. I can have the oboes and bassoons over there. Now I’ve got the money to have the instruments I want. I can put recorders over there. I can have two choirs — one over there, the other over there. The organ, in a different place, can have some solos. This is how Bach makes this piece — a 1708 sound bath, if you will. The different movements feature the various choirs, and here I refer to the choirs of instruments as well as the choirs of singers. It has different choirs in different places in the church, so the listener would have just been delighted — Bach was delighted to hear music first coming from the left and then from the right, and then different sounds coming from the back and from the front.
You might ask, but how could Bach conduct two choirs in two different spaces of the church? Well, there were actually two conductors for this cantata — in the original set of parts, there were two conducting scores. I love this idea. You’d think music moves in the direction of small to big — Mozart’s concerti, small ensembles; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a bigger orchestra now with a choir; Mahler even bigger. But Bach had two conductors. To quote friend of the show Christoph Wolff, Bach had composed a work of unusual proportions and complexity that make the performances of earlier council pieces pale by comparison, as most everyone would have immediately noticed.
So I like imagining that I’m a parishioner in Mühlhausen at the beginning of the 18th century, and, you know, the last few town inauguration concerts have been a bit dull, but now we’ve got this young whippersnapper, Johann, and boom — “Gott ist mein König,” this chord, this amazing opening. Let me read you from the top to the bottom of the score all the instruments that play. Tromba one, two, three — three trumpets and a timpani as well. That’s the first choir altogether, somewhere separated from the rest of the musicians: three trumpet players and a drummer. Flauto dolce one and two — what is the flauto dolce? It’s the recorder. So two recorders as well as a cellist, in a different area. And yet in a third choir, two oboes and a bassoon. The strings in yet a different choir: violin one, violin two, viola, and violone. Violone is like a fretted bass instrument, like a cello or a bass, but with frets. And then we’ve got the two choirs of singers — soprano, alto, tenor, bass, ripieno, as they say, maybe two voices per part, and then soloists, one voice per part. And on top of all that, the basso continuo, probably more than one player.
So now we’re almost ready to explore the music. We’ve answered one of the two important questions you ask whenever looking at a cantata: when and why was this piece written? 1708, new town council. Now the other important question is, what is the text — what are they singing about? Like the other early cantatas we recently covered, this cantata is mostly a psalm — Psalm 74. If you’re a psalm savant, you might think it begins, “O God, why hast thou cast us off forever? Why doth thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture?” Indeed, this is how Psalm 74 begins, but Bach does not begin this cantata there. He begins at line 12 of the psalm: “God is my king.” The King James Version has it as “God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.” The German is more like “God is my king of old that gives help for all that happens on the earth” — hilfe is more like “help” than the word Bach sometimes uses for salvation, which is Erlösung.
So off we go, and I want you constantly to imagine — though it’s sadly not possible to hear even on the most magnificent recording — all these different groups of instruments coming at you from different areas in this space. I will try to guide your ears left and right as best I can, but nothing can possibly beat the experience of hearing two groups of singers above you in different areas singing at each other, brass at the back, oboes somewhere else — just a lovely idea. Off we go: “God is my king.” Then, “my king from olden days,” “my king from long ago” — quite different music from “God is my king.”
What an opening. The first thing to notice is that Bach shows you where the different choirs of instruments are: first brass, then woodwinds, then recorders, then strings, then he moves into the solos, and you heard the soloist singing “from olden days” — they sing in an older style, a more antiquated style, where one part has the cantus firmus, like a Gregorian chant, holding long notes while the other parts move around it. From olden times, Bach goes back, quite literally, to the old musical times.
Bach has shown us the forces at work. He’s pulled out all the stops. In fact, it’s very much like Bach’s organ concertos, which begin with him pulling out every stop on the organ to show the lungs of the instrument. And many of the ideas in the way that Bach orchestrates this cantata come directly from his being an organist — his ability to deal with differentiated patterns of sound, that’s something an organist knows, and he shows it here in his orchestra. So he’s hit us with the full organ, all the stops out. And now, as we well know on this show, Bach will change tempo and mood because there’s a different line of text — these early cantatas go with the text in mood, feeling, and tempo. This line is about God giving help to all that happens on earth — in fact, God giving all the help for all that happens on earth. How will Bach paint the word “all”? Like little separate things — everything that’s going on. The soprano doing a little figure here, the tenor doing something over there. The word “all” is spread out in many places — spread out in all places. “All the help”? Why, help comes together. It’s horizontal sounds for “all” and vertical sounds for “help.” Remarkable — it’s such a simple idea, really, that “all” would be in all places and “help” would come together. It’s almost stupidly literal in a way, and yet when you hear it, it’s ingenious.
Now the text goes on to “on earth” — all the help, all the things going on, on earth. How would you paint “earth”? Well, you certainly wouldn’t want it to go up in the air — that’s how you paint heaven. So it goes down: “auf Erden.” Things are grounded. That is gardening music — pastoral, pleasant. Meanwhile the bass sits there grounding everything, really grounded, while the soprano floats above, beautiful. And then, of course, back to “God is my king,” new tempo, new mood.
Is that the way that young Johann is going to end this first movement — so completely, humbly, so quaint, just like that? Not only in this movement — this will be the end of the entire cantata. Listen to those recorders, how they just, ah, just the teeniest touch, like poof. One of my favorite features of early Bach is that he knows to end pieces with silence — he knows that silence is often more effective than a big drawn-out chord. Can you imagine how much weaker it would be to end with a big chord instead of five eighth-note rests? That’s drama.
Now, I’m mostly going to skip the second movement — sadly, I know it’s a crime, but for time, I can’t spend more than a few minutes on it. I want to mention the text, which is interesting. This being a city council inauguration concert, the old council has to hand over their duties to the new council. It’s amazing that such mundane bureaucracy had such divine music to accompany it — can you imagine that today? So the text reflects ideas about getting old, being an old servant. The second movement is a duet similar to what we saw in BWV 131 in a previous episode, where the tenor sings from the Old Testament, and above him, a soprano sings a Lutheran chorale melody. The tenor below sings, “I am 80 years old,” complaining, “let me die in my own town, don’t let me go where you’re going — I just want to, I’m done, I’m done, basically.” And above the tenor, the soprano sings a Lutheran hymn text from 1630: “If in this world I have to live my life longer, through many a bitter step press on to old age, then give me patience, from sin and shame protect me, so that I may bear with honor my gray hair.” A lovely idea — speaking directly to the old council, saying, you’ve done your service, thank you, and now it’s time for you to get old with dignity.
Sonically speaking, the organ has an obbligato line — a free line, a really composed line probably played on a different instrument from the usual basso continuo setting. This is not very common in Bach’s cantatas, but it’s very exciting when it happens, when Bach writes out the elaborate shapes in the right hand — instead of normally playing figures over the figured bass and improvising, Bach gives specific shapes to play in the right hand.
It’s amazing how living this music was and is — musicians can always find something new in it. What I’m referring to is how contemporary this music was and how there are so many inside references that we might not get today. We’re just barely uncovering some through musicology and scholarship, but so many must also be lost. In particular, in this movement, the mayor was one Adolf Strecker, installed again in 1708 at this very event, when he was in his 80s and probably looked very ill. The Actus Tragicus, the other early cantata we covered some time ago, was possibly the very piece for his funeral, because he died a few months after the premiere of this cantata. So you’ve got this 80-year-old servant from the Bible and this 80-year-old servant right there at the premiere. When you start to look at the cantatas at this level of detail, you stand back and wonder: how could this be packed in there and not make the music suffer? If you sang “lulu lulu” for all the text and played all the instruments on twelve accordions, the music would still be perfect. But to be able to add on top of this perfect architecture biblical references to the aging mayor, references to a solar eclipse, references to fears of an anticipated military aggression from France — these, by the way, are all in this cantata. I won’t go into them because you could spend ages studying this, but it’s there.
On to movement three. From the old council, we move to the new council, with text that says, may your old age be like your youth, and God is with you in everything that you do — and Bach sets a fugue.
Next movement: in this orchestrated organ recital, Bach pulls out two choirs of instruments in a combination we haven’t yet heard — the recorders and cello, one choir, versus the oboes and bassoons, the other choir. Singing is a bass, a bass solo, and he sings “night and day.” How will Bach set the words “night and day”? Well, he’s not going to set them the same. He sees the sun setting — day, the sun is up; night, the sun is down. So the melody is the sun: when the text is “day,” the melody goes up; when the text is “night,” it goes down. How simple, how obvious. I imagine if the words were “night and day” instead, his melody would go the other way.
There, where the music stops, the text changes, and the two instrumental choirs are silent while the bass sings new text. It’s lovely to hear the instruments break apart like that, and sometimes they come together — sometimes apart, sometimes merged and flowing together — and that effect is marvelous.
I’m a bit stumped about the next line of text and what goes on musically. This is what I mentioned with the solar eclipse — there was one in Mühlhausen just a couple of years before the premiere, a near-98%-total eclipse. In the 18th century this must have been frightening, or awesome in the true sense of the word. The text here is, “you make them both — the sun and the stars follow their natural course — and you set boundaries for the land,” or “you set for each land its appointed boundaries,” coming from Psalm 74. It’s beautiful poetry — I don’t exactly know how Bach sets it or what’s going on in his mind, I admit; it’s not obvious to me. The only thing that comes to mind is maybe the appointed course of the stars and the lines of the boundary — thinking in astronomical and geographical lines, boundaries, and so on. On the words “course,” Bach makes a long line. That’s my only idea about this. After this text, it returns to “day and night are yours,” and the choirs of instruments come back for the conclusion of this fourth movement.
Next movement: Bach the organist puts back in those stops that were the oboes and recorders, and pulls out the powerful stops — trumpets and timpani. This is an alto aria, and the text here is “through mighty strength.” For time’s sake I won’t go too deeply into this, but if you just look at the aria on the page it’s very exciting — 3/8 time signature, vivace tempo marking, then a few bars later andante, then one bar of 3/8, then back to a different time signature. It’s like looking at Mahler to see so many time signatures like this — it does not look very Bachian on the page, and yet this is the early Bach. The text is freely composed poetry by the librettist, and this is what I was talking about with the feared military uprising from France. It really talks about the storm of war: “By mighty power you’ve upheld our borders. Here peace must shine when murder and the storm of war rise everywhere. When the enemy, crown, and scepter instill trembling, you bring salvation by your mighty power.” So, on both sides of the poetry, you will hear the mighty power of the trumpets and timpani, and like the movement we just heard, Bach uses this choir of instruments only at the beginning and end of the movement — the middle is just basso continuo and the alto solo.
Next movement, the penultimate one: Bach puts away that very powerful choir of brass and drums and turns to a texture we haven’t yet heard — the full choir of singers, not only soloists but tutti, everybody, maybe both choirs singing. The text, more from Psalm 74, just a few lines down from where we left it. In the New International Version it says, “Do not hand over the life of your dove to wild beasts.” In the King James Version it’s more elaborate: “Oh, deliver not the soul of thy turtledove unto the multitude of the wicked.” So — wild beasts, the wicked — there’s a translation complexity here. Thanks to a native Hebrew speaker who helped with this never-ending study of translating the Hebrew Bible — I received more concerned comments about my Hebrew pronunciation than almost anything I’ve ever done on the show, sorry about that.
The Luther Bible chooses the turtledove as the image, not merely a dove. What’s the difference? Probably a very interesting one, but too deep to discuss here. Luther’s Bible says something like, “May you, I pray you, not give the wild animals the soul of your turtledove, and completely forget your miserable animal, this pure innocent turtledove.” Who’s the enemy here? You imagine, with this political tension happening, it could be a very literal political enemy, or the enemy of the church, those without God, those who revile the church. All summed up: please don’t let the enemy conquer.
Let’s get into the sound world a little. Imagine three choirs of instruments in different places, and for the first time since the first movement, we hear the singers coming from two places — that must have been thrilling to experience, that reunification of the antiphonal choirs. Just overwhelming beauty and power in the way Bach paints the text. First, the enemies — how creepy, so different from us, these enemies, this feels uncomfortable, the half-step to paint the fiends, the enemies. And then you hear, when he says “the soul of the turtledove,” the melody soars there, and it modulates into a major cadence. We could feel our skin crawling when we imagine being handed over to the enemy — oh God, I really don’t want that, please, please. And then, “soul of the turtledove” — watch the soul soar.
Now, when I look at the orchestration of this, I notice that every time Bach speaks of the enemy, the choirs of instruments are pitted against each other. But every time he says “turtledove,” everybody comes together — it’s the only time in this text where all choirs play together, on the words “turtledove.” Think about this: the enemies pitted against each other, but the turtledove — that’s us, that is our innocent congregation, we are all together.
That painting there of “turtledove” is absolutely exceptional — isn’t this captivating music? This could be the finest point in this cantata. I want to draw particular attention to the bass line here, or at least the bass sounds — the continual eighth notes, and the violone, this fretted bass instrument in another choir, doubling the basso continuo. We have these two other bass sounds: the cello playing nice and high, this sort of spinning music, and the bassoon. But there, on the setting of “turtledove,” Bach drops the bassoon — the first time in this movement the bassoon is silent, just for a moment. And here Bach writes in the score two different parts for the soprano, one for the ripieno group, maybe a few per part, and another for the soloist — and you can hear them splitting apart. Can you see the wings fluttering? That image of the dove fluttering is beautiful.
And now we have possibly the most impressive moment of this movement. Bach, a student of music, a student of the Bible, recites the whole line — “don’t let the soul of the turtledove go to the enemy” — and puts the choir together in unison, making them sing a psalm tone, like Gregorian chant. This is very rare — everyone singing a straight, Gregorian-chant-like melody, while the orchestra still does its thing, and then just at the end, the oboes fly around like the turtledove. What a moment in music — everyone there on that one note, psalm tone one. Bach setting a psalm to psalm tone one — this is exceptional.
Now, just to give some idea of how this might have sounded stereophonically: the bassoon and cello in one part, one speaker; add the recorders; and the oboes; pitted against each other like this, one group, the next group, and they all come together. I would just love to go on and on with this movement, but I’ve got about five minutes left for the last movement.
Okay, the last movement — all the forces, the big choir of trumpets and drums are back, and the text is a more or less bland text praising the new government, blessing the new government: “crown them with prosperity, and may they delight you, Joseph.” Who’s Joseph? Well, Joseph is the Holy Roman Emperor. This is the Holy Roman Empire we’re talking about — Mühlhausen was a free imperial city subordinate only to Joseph. And this cantata, when it was printed — something I hadn’t mentioned yet — is the only surviving cantata to have been printed during Bach’s lifetime. These performing parts were symbols of Mühlhausen’s civic pride. Bach did such a good job with this performance that Mühlhausen invited him back twice more to do the same thing, and those parts were also printed, but they’re lost. This is an example of how so much of the vocal music is lost — of the three times Bach did this, we only have this first performance.
The new government, tempo change, in every way — crown them with blessing. New text: peace, rest, and prosperity, tempo change. May they always be by their side, peace and rest. New choir of instruments, that solo organ coming in again. Now here comes good fortune and victory, and a tempo change. The Emperor — we want a fugue for Joseph. Solo voices, very simple: continuo, soprano, alto, still solo voices, tenor, bass, still solo voices, first violin, first oboe, second violin, second oboe, sopranos tutti, every soprano, first recorder, tutti, all the altos now, second recorder, all the tenors now, the cellos in — what are we missing? We’re missing the bass, the bassoon, and the violone. Bring in those trumpets. We’ve got to break it down back to the soloists, in all the lands and places — listen to the tenor singing “continually.” Bring everyone back in for the choir. Solos. Everyone. Oboes. Flutes. That’s it — that’s how this enormous cantata ends, just like the nutmeg dusting on a giant turkey dinner.
Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed this.


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I hope you get something out of this experiment!
Enjoy Paul Jacobs’ beautiful live performance, followed by, at 16:20, an extremely slow MIDI version of BWV 582. The idea is that you, the listener, can adjust the playback speed to alter your perception of the counterpoint.
Perhaps you listen to the slow version at .5x as a three-hour sound bath?
Write That Fugue!

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Concepts Covered:
BWV 582, Extremely Slow MIDI Computerized Performance


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