Playing Bach

Bach taught me the most self evident truths about piano playing

At the end of every year, when Spotify takes it upon itself to remind you of all the music you’ve listened to, there are two certainties: Future will be my top artist, and Johann Sebastian Bach will appear—often in multiple guises. Last year, in fact, Bach showed up three times in my top five: as Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer himself; Tilman Hoppstock, whose guitar arrangements of Bach I frequent; and Daniel Barenboim, whose overly romantic versions of The Well-Tempered Clavier I particularly enjoy—especially the slower fugues.

Bach is a composer I’ve grown to appreciate more with every passing year. Even in his most deceptively simple pieces, there’s always something to discover. His music, to borrow a metaphor from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, is a garden of forking paths—a labyrinth of endless possibilities.

It was through playing Bach that I first learned the piano isn’t just about playing the notes on the page. When I was assigned my first Bach piece, my teacher, Ms. Emine, was very specific: buy the right editions and listen to the right recordings. I remember going with my father to the Juilliard Bookstore—at the time housed in a trailer—where we browsed their surprisingly vast selection given the limited space. That’s where we found the urtext editions of The Well-Tempered Clavier, The Six Little Preludes, and the Two- and Three-Part Inventions. We were also instructed to find the Glenn Gould recordings. But my teacher had one rule: listen to Gould for the possibilities of interpretation, but never imitate his playing.

Upon opening these editions of Bach for the first time I was greeted with quite a surprise. I was met with a page that was devoid of the usual indications of piano music. No dynamic markings to indicate loudness. No slurs to indicate phrasing. No articulations to indicate how a note should be played. Just finger numbers and the notes themselves. “How should I play this music?” I wondered to myself.

With these little pieces of Bach. The first Little Prelude in C major was my introduction to Baroque articulation conventions. The concept of non-legato was a strange one to me. After all this time of being told that I need to develop legato playing, now I was being told the opposite. To articulate each eight note written, and play sixteenth notes legato! These so-called rules were difficult to grasp and get the hang of. Especially when the Glenn Gould’s recordings I was assigned to listen to played everything non-legato! Pedantically so.

What I would come to learn with each subsequent Little Prelude and eventually the two part inventions, was the art of interpretation and phrasing. What constitutes a phrase? How do you distinguish this phrase from that phrase? What are the possibilities?

My first true test, and one of my lifelong piano companions came in the form of the C minor prelude and fugue from the Book 1 of the Well Tempered Clavier. I had heard Ms. Emine perform it many times—at open houses, in lessons, as an example of where I might be able to one day go. To me it was a particularly impressive sounding piece. I noticed how the wall of texture of the main phrase —which makes up almost the entirety of the prelude—shifted and and molded itself around the changing harmony. Dynamics would change with the phrasing. The piece would culminate to a canon at a furious pace that was reminiscent of the canons of the two part inventions. And right when you think the ride is over, the fugue begins and with that a lifetime of studies.

With the prelude, I was tasked by my teacher to consider multiple forms of interpretations. Should I distinguish the phrases through dynamics? How can accenting play a role in phrasing? Of course, the piece was no push over technically either. It required my full attention. But what I find remarkable that after all the dust settled in learning the prelude, the fugue is what would push my conception of music even further!

Fugues have this arcane air about them. The word itself—from the Latin fuga, meaning “flight” or “escape”—was like nothing I’d heard. The form unfolds systematically, almost as if the music is revealing itself to you, like one of Borges’ imagined labyrinths in his short story collection Fictions. And most importantly the way that you have to play fugues is very different from how you’re accustomed to playing the piano.

Playing a fugue is unlike any other kind of piano playing. I think of them as ballets for your fingers—choreographies that must be learned to unify the voices. One doesn’t learn the pieces through a right hand , left hand, approach. Instead Ms. Emine went with me through the piece to teach me that there were three separate lines that existed. Lines flow back and forth between fingers. Sometimes a single line can exist between one or two fingers. I would have to learn each of them separately, before I could put everything together. It’s completely unintuitive from the melody and accompaniment that was standard in beginner piano pieces.

And this is where Bach reveals his brilliance. The most obvious insight becomes the most profound: music is made of separate lines and voices. The act of bringing out these lines and weaving them together is one of the things I find most satisfying in piano playing and is something I have worked on for over two decades.

Bach is one of my favorite composers and every time I sit down to play the various preludes and fugues I’ve learned over my lifetime, I feel like I am uncovering or rediscovering some truth that had been hitherto lost to mankind. I will end with a passage from “The Circular Ruins” by Jorge Luis Borges, that approximates my perception of Bach’s music.

“He comprehended that the effort to mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of was the most arduous task a man could undertake, though he might penetrate all the enigmas of the upper and lower orders: much more arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind.”

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