Tír Na HiFi

This link was sent to me earlier. I love it!

http://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/ ... ve/c6jwzaa

Gramophone sent me an email with similar subject matter, albeit with different delivery:

http://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/fo ... -1685-1750

That is certainly a different perspective on the Great Man!!!

I enjoyed that.

I particularry like the following quote ....

"....
In order to understand what makes him incredible, I'm going to show you a little bit of basic counterpoint. I want you to put yourself in the horizontal, counterpoint frame of mind. Pull out a sheet of score paper, or use the noteflight demo, and try writing a 12 note melody - anything at all - that follows these rules:
•each note and it's neighbor form an interval. The only allowed intervals are major 2nd, minor 3rd, major 3rd, perfect 4th, perfect 5th, or octave. for example, if you're on a C, you're allowed to move to D, Eb, E, F, G, or a C one octave up.
•you may not have two consecutive intervals which add up to a tritone (C -> F#) or a 7th (C -> B/Bb).
•you can use a minor 6th MAYBE, if you then leave the note by going down one step.
•If there's a leap between two notes, the next note should be stepwise in the opposite direction.
•never write more than two leaps in the same direction. If you HAVE TO, the second leap should be smaller than the first leap. And the interval between the bottom of the first leap and the top of the second leap has to be in the "allowed list" above.
•The final note must be approached by step.

The first thing people discover when writing counterpoint is: it's really hard to be original. It's also really hard to write something catchy, or interesting, or fun, or emotional. Once you get the hang of the rules, it's very easy to be boring, though. Now try writing two melodies together, and include these rules for the relationship between the two (the "counterpoint"):
•The interval between the first two notes must be in the "allowed list"
•the interval between the last two notes must be in the "allowed list"
•whenever possible, the voices should be moving in opposite directions.
•if the interval between the two melodies is going to form a perfect 4th or perfect 5th, it cannot approach it with both voices moving in the same direction.
•The interval between the two voices should never be more than a 10th

This starts to get hard. There were particular cases where you could bend or relax the rules a little, but fundamentally this rule bound method was the approach to composition. And Buxtehude was doing it in 4 or 5 voices at once (which is why Bach was so interested in his work). If you're a masochist or a music student (or both!) try writing a piece in 5 voices with these rules. Just go for 4 measures of quarter tones, that will give you a taste.

Now that you have an idea of how frustrating and restricting that is,

Bach IMPROVISED pieces like this.

BAM. Mind blown. Some pieces were certainly written down in advance, but his chorale preludes in particular, and lots of his performances in general, involved extensive improvisation, often in 4 or more voices, in perfect counterpoint.

So there you have it: Bach the badass, the rebel, the guy who took the restrictive rules of counterpoint and bent them into origami.
..."

Very good!

Reminds me of species counterpoint. As I recall, all those rules were to teach anyone of suitable persuasion
and enthusiasm to compose polyphony. They all but reduced it to a procedure, first fitting a "melody" note by note
against a cantus firmus (Species 1) then getting more complicated up to Species 5 by which time the student
was ready to write fugues and stuff. The system never guaranteed it would make a Palestrina out of an aspirant but if following the rules the music would sound ok. As James says, it's easy to sound boring but once in a while an enduring composer emerged. Bach expanded things partly as a result of equal termperament that let the composer/improviser change through a cycle of keys and the like, that would have been more difficult in Renaissance days.

It's good to hear that even Bach hated his job at times!

yes, a very amusing read... thanks for that, Simon!