Some things defy description, but accommodate analysis. Describing what Bach does in the final Ciaccona of his Partita n. 2 is beyond me, certainly, while it is possible to say something about portions of the piece. Here there is the polyphonic renaissance voices being put to work in the impossibly complex string work; it is often hard to believe there is only one violin being played. Further on there is the call and response of a rustic dance, ruddy faced and stomping. The unbearable tension built up towards the end is startlingly brought to a halt in a lullaby that draws itself out “like a rusty squeeze box.” There is much, much more, but to how to frame it?
J.M. Coetzee has this to say about Bach’s music:
“In Bach nothing is obscure, no single step is so miraculous as to surpass imitation. Yet when the chain of sounds is realized in time, the building process ceases at a certain moment to be the mere linking of units; the units cohere as a higher-order object in a way that I can only describe by analogy as the incarnation of ideas of exposition, complication, and resolution that are more general than music. Bach thinks in music. Music thinks itself in Bach.” (What is a Classic?)
The last line is difficult and complex. How can Bach think in music, much less the reverse? The Ciaconna from Partita n. 2 is absolute abstraction, iterated and reiterated to the breaking, both of the violin and the structural limitations of the music. I think the substance of Coetzee’s claim is that Bach figures music by using music itself. Vivaldi’s birds of spring, Bruch’s Scottish mist, Chopin’s rain and Tchaikovsky’s Russian triumph all speak with music of other things, and not to their discredit. But Bach writes music which seeks only to understand itself, the cascading notes comment and reinterpret only the ones which came before and function only to provide the structure of what will come after.
What is most shocking is the beauty. To our minds prone to conflate mathematics and mechanics we are surprised to find feeling amidst such theoretical, indifferent sounding equations. Yet the thing which strikes me most about this piece (and many others) is the sense that Bach’s carving at the joints of musical theory brought him to something quite concrete. Is it Music, and so Coetzee is right, Music thinks itself in Bach simply because they met, and now think of each other? I don’t know. The piece strains, either against itself or against something else. I am inclined to think that if the piece was straining against itself, Bach would have left it unfinished, the continuous return to theme and complication of pattern without an end. Its completion suggests something different, that the strain was not against something, but for something. If Bach did not arrive at Music at the end of his search, he did find a place to rest this staggering weight of ideas. And that is the mystery, the frame in which such music sits.
