Sheep may safely graze: a much-abused aria by J. S. Bach

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J. S. Bach, my favorite composer (and a universal favorite, I suppose), lived in the 18th Century.  He was born in 1685, and was working by his late teens.  The earliest permanent post he held, after serving as an organist for a parish church, was as a staff musician for a ducal court, the court at Weimar.  From this point forward until Bach was given a joint appointment to the university and several churches in Leipzig, he worked for various German aristocrats, as their court musician.  (To some extent, his appointment at Leipzig also required writing music for various noblemen.)

For years, in one post and another, one of his duties was to write a multi-movement work to be performed at church, or in a ducal chapel.  These pieces, called Cantatas, were sacred works, and we call them the Church Cantatas.  He was also often commissioned to write Cantatas to celebrate various non-church events, such as birthdays, weddings, and public occasions, such as the inauguration of a town council.  Often these cantatas (also containing a number of sung pieces, both solo and chorus, with possibly an instrumental overture,) were also on sacred themes, and if not, nevertheless had a distinctly pietistic tone, since religion pervaded most aspects of life in that time and place.  But these are called Secular Cantatas, to distinguish them from the Church Cantatas.

Secular Cantata 208 was written for the birthday celebrations of one of his patrons, called “What I love best is a jolly good hunt.”  The most famous movement in it is a soprano aria (solo piece for voice) called “Schafe konen sicher weiden, wo ein guter Hilte war.”  The English translation is Sheep may safely graze when a good shepherd is near.  (Evidently the town had only recently come under the protection of the gentleman, and were anxious to represent their attitude towards him as a good shepherd.  He was also well known as an ardent huntsman.)

This aria, of which I speak has, for reasons unknown to me, become very popular throughout the world, especially in English-speaking countries, and also, surprisingly, in instrumental versions.  Not that the music isn’t excellent, but that dozens of Bach arias are just as wonderful.  Still, there is a pair of flutes in the accompaniment, and clearly the flute accompaniment lends a magic to the piece that has caught the imagination of the public.  It is a well-known wedding piece, though on the face of it, there is nothing to do with conjugal bliss in it at all, at least in the lyrics or the associations.  It’s just that it is a slow, lyrical piece that suits the needs of wedding planners, and so, there it is.

The famous British composer, Sir William Walton, borrowed this piece for a Ballet Suite he wrote, with music taken entirely from Bach’s compositions---organ pieces, sonatas and cantata movements, and, unfortunately for me, I love Walton’s version of the piece just a little more than Bach’s relatively straightforward, simple scoring and harmonization of the aria.  Bach’s song, lightly accompanied by two flutes, keyboards and bass, is expanded into a full orchestral fantasia by Walton, even if, in the end, the effect of lightness is retained.  But there is no doubt at all that the ballet movement is far, far more sensuous than the Bach aria, and this is why I feel guilty for liking it so much.

It always struck me that the tune involved, the aria itself, should be harmonized for four-part choir.  I can just imagine it being sung by a boys’ choir, matching the soft sounds of the two flutes, with maybe lower strings providing the supporting accompaniment.

This is what I first set out to do.  Since the fake voices in my software package sound kind of hokey (“Choir Oos”), I used French horns for the four vocal parts, two recorders (a sort of flute) for the flutes, a violin, a viola, a cello and a bass for the string accompaniment (in lieu of keyboard and bass).  When it was finished, the four horns sounded rather harsh; replacing the lower horns by bassoons did not improve things.

Luckily, the software allows voice substitution for playback.  So I turned the whole thing completely around, and had strings play the four voice parts, and had clarinets and bassoons fill out the harmony under the two flutes.  This is not entirely satisfactory; the strings sound fine in the voice parts, but the flutes and clarinets accompaniment sounds just like an organ.  I made it worse by using all flutes, which sounded more like a small organ than ever.  But I got tired of tinkering with it, and so that’s how it is: four solo strings playing the four voice parts, two flute as per Bach, and three generic winds playing the keyboard part, with a double bass.

The harmony is close to Bach in most places, but I did the whole thing without consulting the original Bach score, which I haven’t been able to obtain from a reliable source yet.  It is fun to try and harmonize Bach pieces by oneself; so that’s what I did.


[I must apologize; a certain business that offers composers and publishers the service of finding their work illegally put on YouTube seems to have decided that my version of this piece was stolen from something they administer, a video or a CD.  The clip, of course, has very little to do with any commercial recording, but the business concerned persists in claiming ownership or administership.  I therefore removed the video from YouTube, and am uploading it directly, rather than allow this company to merchandize it, which is a right they have negotiated with YouTube.  So the quality of this videoclip will be a little low.

Update: The video upload I tried directly here was not successful.  Meanwhile, I deleted the YouTube video, and uploaded it once again.  The claim by the rights manager was promptly reinstated, and I equally promptly challenged it.  We shall presently find out whether these people will abandon their misguided attempts to control the performance of this aria by J. S. Bach.

The situation is made more complex by the fact that the tune was borrowed by a Twentieth-century composer for a Ballet Suite, which consisted entirely of Bach music, adapted for modern orchestra.  I suspect that the copyright administering agency is trying to protect the rights of various performances of this Ballet music on CD.  While my transcription might sound modern and similarly luscious to the uneducated ear, a musical professional will realize that my present arrangement or transcription has as many rights under the law as does that previous one, and that similarities between the two transcriptions are inevitable, considering that they have a common derivation.]

The accompanying video is provided by Stephen Malinowski’s Music Animation Machine, which was profiled in several earlier posts.  I have only recently found a way of capturing the screen output from this program, if not for which I’m reduced to putting some slides as the video portion of the clip.

Afterword:
After having uploaded the video to YouTube, so that I could link it here, I made myself a full 720p HD video of it, as well as Jesu, Joy, which I presented in my previous post, and Xavier Cugat's Brazil, which I may or may not have linked earlier, and put it on DVD.  I have just finished watching it on our home video system.  I can't make BluRay videos (I wish I could), but the quality was a good as it could be short of the BluRay quality.  I was very pleased.

On an interesting aside, YouTube's ambulance chasers have accused me of not owning the rights to Sheep may safely graze; evidently an agency called the Harry Fox Agency administers the rights to this piece as well.  Every video clip I have uploaded featuring works by Bach are challenged by this agency, and subsequently abandoned.  So, I am forbidden from putting the so-called Creative Commons License on the video, which would allow anyone to copy it and use it ad libitum.  Instead I was forced to use the Standard YouTube License, which says something like: I'm not claiming any rights to this piece, and if you copy it and use it, do it at your own risk.  As far as I know, there is no risk whatever in using this video, except that of being terminally pestered by Harry Fox's boys, who will eventually have to admit defeat.  It is more than my time is worth to find out what it is exactly that Harry Fox and company think they're administering; it is probably some TV performance of a Bach piece.

I apologize for all the repetitive griping about YouTube; it was inserted at different times, and is too much trouble to remove!

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