The Musical Offering: Ricercar a 6 (Bach)
For the virtual organ recital Endlessness sponsored by Les Amis de L'orgue.
Endlessness
This is a concert in the spirit of feeling like this quarantine has no end. For this virtual recital on Endlessness, I have chosen to pair two pieces from J.S. Bach’s “The Musical Offering” with two of my own compositions.
“The Musical Offering” was essentially a contrapuntal challenge to Bach by Frederick the Great. The challenge: improvise fugues on this impossible theme. After having completed an improvisation of a three voice fugue on the given theme, Bach was then asked to do a six part fugue, which he declined to attempt.
When Bach returned home, he immediately responded to this challenge with a challenge of his own: what are the limits of counterpoint? And so he writes a work exhausting nearly every possibility of the theme he was given by his challenger, thus, returning the challenge. Indeed, the challenge is explicit: a number of the pieces are left incomplete for future generations to grapple with.
“The Musical Offering” is endless in two senses: first, Bach gave the impression that an endless number of possibilities for contrapuntal complexity and creativity are possible. And second, endless in the form of these unfinished canons, challenges left for others.
The Concert
The first piece on the program is the massive “Ricercar a 6”. I have paired this piece with my “Silhouette of a Cloud II”. Both are composed using canons and imitation. Bach uses themes that appear and disappear, contain false beginnings and false endings. Similarly, “Silhouette of a Cloud II” is also composed in canon, but it is much more flexible in pitch and in duration than with Bach. The flexibility of my canon follows the ways of the cloud, its endless change and variation, and is herded by the logic of the wind, not the logic of the number.