Meurig Bowen
Artistic curator and director
‘From Gounod’s Ave Maria to scatting Swingles and Wendy Carlos’s Moogs, I’ve always been fascinated by the range of Bach revamps. Are they inspired and enhancing, or gratuitous and unnecessary?’
‘Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe’. Apt words from Douglas Adams, creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Nor is there any shortage of quotes from composers reflecting their lofty admiration of Johann Sebastian.
From Wagner’s ‘the most stupendous miracle’ assessment to Brahms’s ‘study him and you will find everything’, many have lined up over the years to bow down with a mixture of resigned admiration and ecstatic gratitude to Bach.
And yet the composer revered above all others is the one whose music has been most reworked over the centuries. If Bach, as so many of us believe, attained such heaven-sent perfection in his music, why mess with it so much? It could of course simply be that Baroque music’s clear melodic shapes, gratifying bass lines and alluring chord progressions lend themselves particularly to arrangement in other eras. But then, why have Handel and Vivaldi been given so much less attention? Max Richter’s stunning reimagining of The Four Seasons is the exception that rather proves that rule – though it’s worth noting that the other best-known Vivaldi arrangements were by Bach himself.
Bach’s keyboard music, especially, has been copiously filled out and coloured in for the modern piano and symphony orchestra – whether by composer-pianists such as Liszt, Busoni and Grainger, or composers and conductors such as Schoenberg, Respighi, Walton,
Stokowski, Wood or Ormandy. And beyond the beefed-up polychrome of an orchestral transcription are the ways Bach is refurbished in other genres.
The impulse for most has been to pay tribute rather than attempt to improve on Bach. What, after all, can be wrong with a sincere act of veneration – even if some manifestations over the decades have attracted a hail of purist invective for being vulgar, or quite simply unnecessary? For some, the motivation may have been one of selfimprovement – composers used to copy out the music of others simply to learn from it. Bach did so himself, knowing that the act of writing someone else’s music out on to the page brought him much closer to its compositional process than mere study or performance.
Often the intention has been conspicuously to update Bach to the arranger’s own era, giving it contemporary colour, flavour, resonance or even relevance. The three notable 1960s revamps – by Jacques Loussier, the Swingle Singers and Wendy Carlos – and rock band Sky’s Toccata are the most prominent cases of this. Yet Webern’s Ricercar from The Musical Offering and Elgar’s C Minor Fantasia and Fugue are so distinctively orchestrated that they undoubtedly say something wonderfully eloquent about their own musical times too.
To the naysayers, there is the justification that Bach himself might actually have approved. He was an arranger himself, of his own music and that of others (see p45). For him, and for his era, instrumentation could be flexible depending on the forces available. The fact that embellishment and improvisation were so much a part of
‘‘ Often the intention has been to update Bach to the arranger’s own era, giving it contemporary relevance’’
early 18th-century musical practice gives the jazz fraternity in particular a special, almost unchallengeable licence to do what they want to do to Bach’s music.
It’s also worth considering the music that more obliquely pays homage to Bach. A certain structural debt of gratitude is paid in Tippett’s oratorio A Child of our Time and Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano. Melodic connections are made in Berg’s Violin Concerto and Gubaidulina’s Offertorium, broader aesthetic ones in Villa-lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras and Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks. Factor in, too, all the pieces whose contrapuntal virtuosity wouldn’t exist without Bach’s – and, admittedly, Palestrina’s – masterful presence looming.
From the final movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony and Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge onwards, there are examples across the eras.
And then, beyond classical confines, you can encounter Bach’s influence in some more unusual places. Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring is a strange bedfellow with Lady Lynda in The Beach Boys’ eponymous 1979 track. Bookending the electropop of Lady Gaga’s 2009 Bad Romance is a curious stretch of speeded-up B minor Fugue, BWV 869 on faux harpsichord. Early 1970s Genesis features plenty of Bachian figuration and harmonic progressions from keyboardist Tony Banks and guitarist Steve Hackett – tracks such as The Return of the Giant Hogweed, The Fountain of Salmacis and Horizons betray a lot of Bach in Banks and Hackett’s youthful Prog Rock veins. Also very much of its time – a wincingly out-of-tune Hammond organ backing the counterfeit Toccata strings figuration – is Pop Looks Bach by Sam Fonteyn. Recorded for the Boosey & Hawkes Library in 1970, it lay dormant there for nearly a decade, before finding fame as the signature tune to BBC TV’S Ski Sunday.
But it’s time to come off the fence. What are the outstanding ‘covers’ – to borrow pop and rock’s term – of Bach’s music? Stretching back over more than a century-and-a-half, here is a Top Ten to explore…
Gounod Ave Maria (1853)
Appearing at the very start of The Well-tempered Clavier, the C Major Prelude, BWV 846 is chord progression perfection – and, as many amateur pianists discover, it’s also easier to play than all of the other ‘48’ sets of preludes and fugues that follow. Gounod’s simple melody superimposed over Bach’s music somehow manages to layer on further perfection, imperceptibly giving it a sublime, Romantic makeover.
Elgar Fantasia and Fugue in C minor (1922)
A number of 20th-century composers and conductors – ranging from Reger and Respighi to Schoenberg and Honegger – made orchestral transcriptions of Bach. Some are mere facsimiles of the original, in orchestral clothing, while others reveal more of the arranger’s own musical personality too. The best of these is Elgar’s expansive take on the Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 537. There are moments of thrilling, outrageous swagger, and a fair dose of extra Elgarian notes. It’s Lutheran Germany meets the Three Choirs Festival.
Webern Ricercar (1935)
With an orchestra of the same size, Webern achieves something completely different in his scoring of the Ricercar from The Musical Offering. This is an ascetic, cerebral treatment, where Bach’s lines are lit from constantly changing angles, and where a multiplicity of ingenious chamber textures rarely enlarge further. Where the Gounod makes Bach sound Romantic, this makes him starkly modern. Grainger Blithe Bells (1931)
Percy Grainger idolised Bach, and made some fine piano transcriptions – though far less numerous than those of his one-time teacher Ferruccio Busoni. As the proponent of ‘elastic scoring’ – allowing for different types and numbers of instruments – and advocate of tuned percussion, Grainger created the most delicious of all Bach orchestral arrangements. His ‘free ramble’ on ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ from Bach’s Hunt Cantata, BWV 208, Blithe Bells is cute, sentimental and reverential, bringing instruments like the glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba and celeste unusually to the fore. Grainger’s own added flourishes give extra piquancy to this exquisite miniature.
Jacques Loussier Play Bach (1959 onwards)
With four albums appearing on Decca between 1959 and ’64, Jacques Loussier’s transformations for jazz trio were a defining point. Bach was the matchmaker for two genres that had previously kept their distance, and while for some it was an accomplished and tastefully cool way of combining concert hall with jazz club, others
‘‘ Gounod’s simple melody superimposed over Bach’s music somehow manages to layer on further perfection’’
considered it pure vandalism. From 1966 until the banning of tobacco advertising on British television in 1991, Loussier’s languid take on Air on the G String was the soundtrack for a witty sequence of Hamlet cigar commercials. For him, presumably, happiness was a generously repeating royalty cheque.
The Swingle Singers Jazz Sébastien Bach (1963 onwards)
Paris was also the birthplace in 1963 of the other great jazz-meets-bach moment. Ward Swingle’s scatting vocalists brought further cool and voice-as-instrument virtuosity to a wide range of Bach – the Badinerie from the Orchestral Suite in B minor, BWV 1067 being the most celebrated. Wendy Carlos and the Moog (1968 onwards)
Wendy Carlos ended this revolutionary decade in Bach revamps with two trailblazing albums, Switched-on Bach (1968) and The Well-tempered Synthesizer (1969). Carlos lovingly, painstakingly overdubbed Bach’s counterpoint line by line, because Robert Moog’s virtually brand-new modular synthesizer could only play one note at a time. It feels revealingly fresh today, so it must have been bogglingly futuristic 50 years ago. Two wonderful de facto Carlos tribute bands – The Art of Moog and the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble – have carried on the good work. John Williams and Sky Toccata (1980)
While Julian Bream played it straight in the 1970s, the world’s other most famous classical guitarist at the time, John Williams, got himself a rock band. Sky’s take on Bach’s Toccata in D Minor, BWV 565 wasn’t the first time rock had appropriated classical – Emerson, Lake and Palmer had got there first with Musorgsky and Copland. But the way it accentuated the portentous, gothic pomp of the original was particularly brave, given that by 1980 Prog Rock had been slayed by Punk.
Courson and Akendengué
Lambarena – Bach to Africa (1993)
Organist and doctor-missionary Albert Schweitzer is the connecting point in this
Sony recording, in which producer Hughes de Courson and composer Pierre Akendengué fuse Schweitzer’s beloved Bach with the rhythms and instruments of his adopted Central African country, Gabon. The combination is sometimes awkward, sometimes inspired, but there is no doubting the integrity and good intentions of this culture-traversing project.
Camerata Brasil Bach in Brazil (2000)
When the eight-instrument Camerata Brasil mixed the music of Bach with their local choro, the combination was not that far-fetched – dating back to the 19th century, this Brazilian instrumental genre has its origins in Baroque dance music. The result, in which Bach works such as the Double Concerto in D minor and Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 are heard on six- and seven-string guitars, cavaquinho and viola caipira, is infectiously uplifting in an unmistakeably South American style.