Wes Phillips

Paul Griffiths reviews two new books about Bach. I'll probably read both, but it's his writing I find delightful.

"A note sounds. Then it sounds again. But everything has changed. Not only is the note colored by a different resonance the second time around, but featureless time has been marked with the beginnings of a grid. The one note at the start defined only a before and an after. The second discloses a pulse. In accordance with this pulse, a third sound appears, but up a step, encouraging the accompaniment—which has not drawn attention to itself so far—to move conversely down.

"We have reached only the beginning of the second measure of the Goldberg Variations and already a process is at work, a process that will be partly completed at the end of this measure but whose every completion will imply continuation. This first two-measure phrase will summon another, and so on, until there is a whole thirty-two-measure dance, which will be only the beginning of a chain of such pieces, again thirty-two in number.

"One wants to know where all this comes from, this symmetry in action, this intimately designed time, this serene logic dependent not only on deep musical science but also on wild shifts of speed, character, and allusion and, from the performer, on dazzling feats of virtuosity and stamina. Hence the number of esoteric clues to Johann Sebastian Bach's music that have been offered, having to do with numerology, astronomy, the kabbalah, motific cross-referencing, or whatever. Hence, too, the enduring fascination with the person who wrote down these extraordinary notes."