then we saw the stars again

Johann Sebastian Bach, Aria, the Goldberg variations

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It’s the end of the year. For some it’s the end of the decade, though everyone knows that the decade will only end next year… either way, everywhere you turn someone is writing a top 3/5/10/100 somewhere.

So that set me thinking. If I were to pick my 3 favourite piano pieces, which would they be? I’m perfectly aware that those 3 choices would change tomorrow, next week, or even later, but I’ve been giving this top 3 some thinking, and for the time being, I’ll stick to it. So in the next couple of episodes, this is what I’ll share, rather than a more obvious tie to a postrock theme or feature. Of course, you may find affinities of your own if you listen closely…
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It seems only natural that I should include Johann Sebastian Bach here. The hard part is knowing which piece to include. Am I going for the Well tempered Clavier, or the art of the fugue?
Fine, I’ll go for the Goldberg Variations instead.

Baroque music often puts people off by its unnecessary intricacy and overarching structural complexity. Baroque composers took music theory apart and experimented on each and every chord known at the time, and beyond. While it is a staggering work of genius, it is not always touching, or soulful. Not with Bach though, and especially not with the Goldberg Variations.

The main theme, or Aria, is one of the purest pieces of music ever composed, a self-contained miniature that harbors the essence of what music could, and should, be. What happens after that is a series of 30 variations, of varying length and difficulty, some in major and some in minor keys and transpositions, some fugal and some contrapuntal, until we reach home again, and the aria is played once more, as a recapitulation, and a sendoff.
It’s hard to describe the effect that the reprise has on the listener: the sense of a journey completed, the access to a higher level of consciousness, the tangibility of time as you appreciate what it took to close the parenthesis… but I think that Bach really works best as a sort of spiritual experience. And I think I’m a good candidate for this: as a convinced agnostic, I find the Goldberg Variations the strongest case for the Divine, an intelligent and benevolent Design that knows what he/she/it is doing.

Much has been commented on the perfection on the Goldberg Variations in terms of its mathematical and musical balance. Variations are ordered in such a way that cycles and intervals recur, and the inner structure only becomes more apparent the more you listen to it. If one were to think of music as the purest form of art, with no beginning and no end, then look no further than the Goldberg Variations.

It’s philosophy without words, truth without distortion.

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Of course, it’s impossible to talk about Bach without mentioning Glenn Gould. The Canadian pianist was perhaps the most influential artist to record and update Bach to suit modern-day taste. His choice of the piano instead of the harpsichord is fundamental in the way we perceive his music nowadays, and his attention to details in the studio paved the way for many technical innovations in the field of recording.

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It’s fascinating to see how Gould’s mind works when he plays, and his humming is part and parcel of the experience, like Thelonious Monk. In Bach, Gould found an intellectual challenge, a stimulating conversation with his many selves (you do have to be slightly schizophrenic to play Bach well, I believe) and a world without end. It only seems logical that Carl Sagan chose his version of the Well Tempered Clavier to send into space on the Voyager Golden record.

To this day, it has become the furthest man-made object in the universe.

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Note: the version on the mp3 is by Murray Perahia, recorded for Sony. Not to take anything away from Glenn Gould, but I have come to prefer this more recent take. You decide.