Thoughts on recording Bach

I now know why old people get cranky – it’s too much effort to appear normal! As you go under the hill your view of normal changes and you have to consciously reconnect to the ever-evolving normality of younger people encountering the world afresh. 

Ive been thinking this because Ive been gazing intensively at myself while editing the third movement of my Bach Organ Trio Sonata V. It's far&away the hardest piece I’ve tackled in my organ renaissance; and one of the problems I have found in recording it is that my stamina is inexorably withering. I can now only do about 90’ of worthwhile recording at a stretch, the mental effort demanded by acute concentration on the movement of limbs as well as maintaining full consciousness of the ‘recording architecture’ (where there are errors that need to be patched, consistency of tempo, uniformity of phrasing) wears me out sooner than it used to – that means that it’s a fight to get it all right while the window is open.

There is a glib solution: do it right in the first place—as Dan & Kieran did so brilliantly the Dodgson Duo ® last week—but the reality is that in the heightened nervous attention recording demands you actually make mistakes you’ve never made before, and so you have to have a system that handles your own idiocy (like forgetting to turn the camera on, or accidentally deleting files) in order to get across the finishing line by yourself. And trying to look normal on top of all that can be the straw that sends the camel stark staring bonkers!

If you want a definition of the word supererogation it is this: to practise a Bach Trio Sonata for four years alone in a church for two hours a week and then to record it without another living soul ever hearing it. If that is not ‘beyond what is called for’ (since nobody called for it) what is?

So why? For me wrestling the notes of this beautiful but intractably hard piece into my feet and fingers was probably the same reason others climb mountains or do endurance running. In facing your limits and not allowing yourself to be beaten by your incapacities and human frailty you do touch the void that is within /around /beyond us, yet also intimately part of us. 

For some this place beyond language and controlled emotion arouses fear. And in that place lies awe – awe at the coherence of the macrocosmos and microcosmos, awe at the existence of existence, awe at the nature of life and the phenomenon of love; and more than anything awe at how all these elements are held in balance. So doing these ‘weird’ things is just my way of honouring and being present with this ‘presence’. 

Maybe it’s just the mettle from which composers are struck; but I’ve always had a strong sense of this inner Otherness. From its mysterious darkness arises the impulse to make music which is akin to the impulse of a spring to flow or grass to grow. For most of my adult life I’ve endeavoured to configure the shape of my ideas to other people’s expectations; but my return to organ playing after the age of 60 was of no interest to anyone. It was within the ’s-/place’ of solitary organ practice that I was alone with the great glistening peaks of the organ repertoire – as alone with them as a mountaineer grappling with the external elements – yet here it was me against myself. A true definition of idiocy 

Normal people do such things with others and so their world requires no analysis and thought – and if I knew anyone who wanted to the same things Id do it with them, but I dont, so I do  it alone.

Eventually the challenge of a Trio Sonata hove into my sight line. They’re marvellous music, but stinkingly hard because Bach treats the pedals as a third equal manual and, with only one line of music in each part, there is simply nowhere to hide - every aspect of the performance is exposed to scrutiny at all times. 

The inherent difficulty of playing with your feet is mitigated when the pedal part is in contrast to the manuals, because this gives your brain a way of differentiating the action of your lower limbs from your fingers, but when they’re treated as equals, as Bach does in the Trio Sonatas, the nature of the mental complexity parallels and magnifies the physical demands. Anyway, that has been the grist of my organ grinding for the past four years, not exclusively, for I have learnt and recorded a range of other music as my uTube site shows. 

It has been said that Bach is the best argument for the existence of a God; I would prefer to say that the extraordinary /graceful /resourceful order within Bach’s music puts us in touch with a profound wholeness in which it is possible to believe that there is an implicate ordering within the universe that is too consistent to be accidental. 

I have always believed Bach was a savant, which is why he was capable of multidimensional calculation far exceeding the capacity of normal minds. Yet even this doesn’t explain why or how he did what he did; and an explanation for that, it seems to me, must lie in the relationship of his conscious mind to his inner ‘otherness’—his continuous, practiced openness to the wellsprings of Life. Choose your own vocabulary for this. For Bach didn’t just write music ‘the way a sow pisses’ (to quote Mozart) he did it always with conscious intention to express a quality of order that was real to him. He could have got away with the sort slapdash approach to craftsmanship that his great contemporary Handel exhibits, but Bach never does that. Every manuscript is exquisitely finished and all the musical arguments elegantly dovetailed into a perfectly proportioned space. And I believe he did that because he knew he was profoundly ‘heard’; he knew or felt that he was performing the opus dei - paying tribute to source of existence. Tho Bach could never have known of the Indian mystic Kabir’s phrase  The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me - for the ear of the universe is itself the hearer Yet, to me, this offers the most credible explanation for the dedication and devotion that Bach showed in everything that he wrote, and forms one of the greatest free gifts any individual gave to humanity.  

So that’s what I spent 4 years doing while noone was watching!