Friday Performance Pick – 52

J.S. Bach – Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582

There is a zombie movie playing in the next room. Or maybe it’s a television program. And no, let’s be clear, Professor Carol is not in the next room watching it. I won’t explain why I’m having this brush with zombies. Circumstances take us to various places, and the circumstances that have brought me into the company of zombies today are as boring and unimportant as the zombies themselves.

In the soundtrack underneath the zombie horror, I hear snippets of Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor. Maybe the filmmakers think of Bach as especially scary. But why? It might be the pipe organ, an instrument of enormous and inexhaustive power that blows sound through dark cavernous spaces. Or maybe it’s the complexity of Bach’s music itself – something that seems to lie beyond comprehension.

silberman-organ-frieburg
Freiberg Cathedral, Dr. Bernd Gross (CC BY-SA 3.0)

But we can make Bach a little less scary and more comprehensible. The overall structure of the passacaglia is easy to grasp. A passacaglia is an ostinato form. An ostinato repeats a short theme continuously and builds variations around it. The ostinato in a passacaglia appears (usually) in the bass line. Its cousin, the chaconne, generally contains a repeated harmonic progression.

Bach’s passacaglia begins with a solo statement of the ostinato bass line, and it can be heard distinctly throughout the 20 variations that follow. Occasionally the ostinato theme migrates to an upper voice. But once you know the theme, you have a solid point of reference for all of the intricate variations.

The double fugue that follows the passacaglia (at 7:57) is built on the first half of the same theme, but a fugue follows a different set of rules that we can’t do justice to here. Still, because you will be very familiar with the theme when the fugue begins, you should be able to hear it clearly as it moves sequentially through all the voices and is transformed in a variety of ways.

You don’t have to understand all of the intricacies to appreciate Bach’s mastery: a little bit of understanding goes a long way. True mastery depends on clarity, not mere complexity, and Bach’s music often provides the clearest examples of the Baroque forms.

Really, it’s not scary at all, and it will always make more sense than zombies.