bach manuscript and sheet music background

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The theme is like the head in a jazz tune, the first thing you hear in the piece, and the last. The first two four-bar phrases in the Chaconne state a theme, and the rest are increasingly abstract variations on that theme. This connection to groove-based music is more apparent if you listen to my remix of the Chaconne over Afro-funk beats. In this sense, the Bach Chaconne is like the endless one-chord grooves that John Coltrane played in the early 1960s, or the ones Miles Davis played in the late 60s through the mid-70s, or the ones Fela Kuti played his whole life. Joel Lester says that “the concentrated focus of the Chaconne grows in part from its unvarying tonality.” Maybe that’s why I like it so much–I enjoy it when musicians take simple, static harmonic ideas and push them to extreme lengths. That is remarkably flat and “uninteresting” harmony. Each phrase starts on the tonic chord (D minor or D major), and each one ends on a dominant chord (A7), which resolves back to D at the beginning of the next phrase.

But its large-scale structure is simple: a string of 64 phrases, each of which is a uniform four bars long. The Chaconne is unusually long by Bach’s standards, almost as long as the rest of the movements in the D minor Partita put together. You don’t necessarily think of “Bach” and “dance” in the same sentence, and maybe he didn’t intend anyone to dance a literal chaconne to his Chaconne. The partitas are collections of dance music in a particular key. The Chaconne is itself a part of a larger collection of short pieces, the Partita No. For example, the Goldberg Variations are collectively more than an hour long, but each individual variation is only a few minutes. His large-scale works are collections of short individual movements. When he wrote a “ sinfonia,” that meant something less than five minutes long. But the symphonic forms didn’t exist in Bach’s time. When the canonical white guys wanted to write a symphony or some other large-scale work, they used multiple themes moving through multiple key centers, so there could be lots of long and contrasting processes of statement, development, and transformation, as Joel Lester puts it. The generations of composers who came after Bach used structures like sonata form to sustain interest over long time spans.

This ultra-predictable form is more like what you’d expect in a rock or pop song than a classical work.

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The Chaconne is a Monumental Classic Of The Western Canon, but it has a surprisingly simple structure: a series of four-bar loops, each of which follows a broadly similar harmonic outline. They weren’t performed in a concert setting until 1802, more than fifty years after Bach’s death, but as with The Art of Fugue, he may not have been expecting anyone would perform them. But there’s a good chance he meant the violin partitas and sonatas to be pedagogical, a kind of method book for contrapuntal playing. Why does all this solo violin music even exist? Unfortunately, Bach didn’t document his own motivations for composing it, so we’ll probably never know. In this post, I’m doing something bigger: a look at every single measure of the piece, all 256 of them.įirst, some background. But now I have it analyzed and memorized! I did a study of the chord progressions and of the rhythmic groove. Due to my particular combination of strengths (great ear) and weaknesses (can’t read notation to save my life), I have needed to intensively analyze and memorize the piece before I could play it. Also, it’s a perfect test case for the power of Ableton Live as a tool for learning canonical classical works generally. I plan to use it for teaching, for example in Fundamentals of Western Music at the New School. This video scrolls through his entire manuscript synced to a recording!īeyond the sheer aesthetic joy of it, I have a couple of different motivations for struggling through the Chaconne. Also, here are measures 81 through 117 of the Chaconne from Bach’s manuscript:

If you want to try too, here’s a violin score. As of this writing, I can stumble through the whole piece, and can get through the first half in a way that sounds almost musical. This journey has been one long reward for the obsessive-compulsive side of my personality. Here’s Christopher Parkening doing my favorite interpretation by a guitarist (I do not sound remotely like this):

#BACH MANUSCRIPT AND SHEET MUSIC BACKGROUND HOW TO#

I have been spending much of my free time during the pandemic learning how to play the Bach Chaconne on guitar, drawing heavily on Rodolfo Betancourt’s transcription. You can now read this post in Spanish on Deviolines

Bach manuscript and sheet music background