Bach's most often-performed piece: Jesu Joy

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In my last post, girls and boys, I gave you two versions of a well-known piece, namely the famous chorale from Cantata No. 147 of Johann Sebastian Bach.

A word about these Cantatas.  Bach wrote close to 200 of these, which were a set of pieces intended to be performed by the choir in Church on Sunday (and other feast days on which the Congregation attended church, such as Christmas and New Year’s Day, which could fall on any day).  The Cantata consisted of possibly an instrumental Overture, then several combinations of a recitative (a sung preamble in free rhythm) followed by an aria (a song), or just an aria by itself, or a chorale (an elaborate setting of a verse of a hymn).  Most people know no Bach chorales at all except for this one example, with words in English beginning with “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring”.  So, to summarize, Jesu Joy (as it is convenient to call it) is just one movement of a long Cantata, consisting of 10 movements (one of Bach’s longest Cantatas).  When Bach died in 1750, his thousand-odd compositions were cataloged (which makes sense, obviously) by various musicologists, the last and greatest of which was Wolfgang Schmeider, who assigned a number to every composition.  Thus, a certain cantata, based on the chorale “How brightly beams the morning star” was assigned number 1, and the cantata which contains Jesu Joy (which is called Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben) is assigned number 147, followed by others, all the way up to Number 212, which is also a cantata (possibly not actually by Bach; these are the things that musicologists try to resolve), after which come the organ pieces, and so on and so forth.  (The Art of Fugue is number 1080.)  The Cantatas were long works: some of them could be as long as half an hour.  But Church in Bach’s day lasted more than an hour (sometimes up to three hours), so there was plenty of time for other less interesting things to be placed in the order of service, so that it was not too terribly delightful, and was an appropriately sober affair, as befitted a sacred duty.

For the purposes of the example I provided in the previous post, I transcribed the entire chorale into my music software as well as I was able.  There are actually 10 parts: the four chorus parts: Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass; the Trumpet, which plays along with the Soprano (which you hardly hear, and which I left out), the very audible Oboe, which plays the elaborate counter melody (my wife disapproves of the hyphen, so you see that it has been left out) which is characteristic of this chorale, and chorales that are written in similar style (that’s six parts so far), the three upper string parts: two violins and a viola, of which the first violin plays along with the Oboe (that’s nine, but I left out the first violin), and the Continuo.  The Continuo was any collection of keyboards and bass; in this case it probably consisted of cello, double-bass, and a small organ.  (There were usually at least two organs in most churches back then, and there was a little organ that played along with the choir; this is the one they probably used.  The big organ was generally for congregational singing, and for solo organ music, e.g. the Voluntary, the Offertory, and the Recessional or Postlude.)  I left out the organ as well.  There just isn't a good organ sound in my software.

Being an amateur, I found it very hard to keep all the parts on the screen at once, and the pdf of the score from which I was working (which also looked suspiciously like output from a more powerful version of the very same software I was using).  There is a lot of repetition in this piece, and I was tempted to cut and paste similar-sounding sections, but to my horror I discovered that there were slight but important variations in the segments, so I had to backtrack and re-enter the parts by hand.

Entering the parts by hand entails mousing over to the spot where a note is to be placed, and clicking.  But the note could be a whole note, a half note, a quarter note, and eighth note or smaller, and could be dotted, or tied to the next note.  Each of these things must be set first, before you mouse and click.  It took forever.  As I entered the parts, I remembered the parts I sang as a student: the soprano first, then as my voice dropped, Alto, then Tenor, and finally Bass.  Since I could read music, I was conscripted to teach the parts to the bigger kids, and I remember sitting at the piano for hours, while some thick-skulled tenor tried to get his part straight.

When we sang, of course, the accompaniment was on a piano.  Now I was entering the string parts, and learning how complex and imaginative they were: the second violin and the viola mostly play lines very close together, and in some interesting places, cross parts.  Crossing parts is a very tricky business, and music harmony teachers usually strongly discourage it.  But Bach knew that the lower instruments found it a lot of fun to occasionally play a note or phrase higher than one of the higher-voiced instruments, so the viola was given a number of notes that were higher than those of the violin, usually in a phrase that would be more graceful if it was allowed to rise through the other part.  The violin part sometimes wound down through the viola part for the same reason, to let it play an arpeggio without interruption.

Modern conductors have tended to play this chorale at a very brisk pace, and with a somewhat detached touch:  “BOINK – pink – pink, BOINK – pink – pink,” and so on.  Now, there is absolutely no harm in boinking along like that, but when you copy out the parts over several days, like I did, and listen to them over and over again, you get the distinct impression that the music was written very deliberately to be played legato (connectedly and smoothly) to produce quite the opposite of the detached sound.  You be the judge.  Bach uses a lot of seventh chords (remember them?) which need to resolve, that is they have a strong leaning towards a certain motion, and it seems to me that they resolve more convincingly when the playing is legato, or smooth.  When the playing is detached (staccato), the chords sound actually jazzy, and I don’t think jazziness was intended.  Jazz has a lot of detached chords of the seventh, just for the sound they make, without any purpose of leaning intended at all; in fact it is quite common in Jazz to actually end a piece on a seventh chord.  (By the way, in case you were wondering, this particular cantata was written to be performed on the Feast of the Annunciation, and it was all about the confusion and the ecstasy of the Virgin Mary.)

So here it is.  Listen to it carefully, at a moderately low volume (it sounds better if it isn’t played loud), and feel the complex texture of the interweaving lines under the melody.  Everything is melody, from the oboe to the four choir voices (I should know; every part is equally melodious), and the strings, practically hugging themselves in a frenzy of exaltation.  There is a reason this piece is Bach’s most beloved to modern audiences; he must have enjoyed writing it.  Far more effort and energy was vested in this one movement than a congregation could have appreciated at a single hearing.  I could listen to it ten times, and hear a new texture in it every time.

[Added later:

Some time ago I reported on Stephen Malinowski’s Music Animation Machine.  (Perhaps it’s time I wrote it up again.)  This lovely piece of software enables us to play a MIDI file, and at the same time see a visual interpretation of the music in a number of sophisticated ways.

I exported a MIDI version (MIDI = ‘Musical Instrument Digital Interface’) of the chorale to disk, then played it through the Music Animation Machine, and recorded the video output.  Here is a link to the video.  (Instead of the music being played in the MAM, this is the same music file in the earlier video, an MP3.  The software I usually use does a better job with the sound, while the MAM does a far better job with the visuals.

The video was captured using Debut software.