February 20: 4-Part Chorales (BWV 253-256, 259-278, 280-318, 327) Augsburger Domsingknaben; Reinhard Kammler, conductor

Minute long bon-bons for the soul.

My high school offered an elective class on music theory, and I enrolled with a bit of trepidation — I was learning to strum and fingerpick a lot, but the mechanics behind the music were a mystery. Our teacher (Ms. Tall, great name) once said, “My students always come back years later to tell me they learned more in this class than any other one at high school.” Absurd, I thought. But she was sort of right!

For at least half of the year, we annotated the counterpoint of four-part Bach chorales — marking chords and inversions, and following how the moving vocal lines complement one another. I didn’t love the ‘rules’ of counterpoint that we had to follow when we were tasked with composing our own chorales, but they helped. Mrs. Tall would always perform our compositions for the class — we non-pianist students didn’t know how our compositions would sound. (This was ~1995, and there was no software to assist.) The pieces didn’t come out great, but they weren’t bad, and it was a thrill to work within the rulebook to produce something new and good.

Since then, I’ve held these chorales fondly in memory, even if they didn’t spend much time in my listening rotation.

Today I’m writing about an hourlong volume of the chorales, Disc 49 of 222 (!) in the Deutsche Grammophon “Bach 333” collection, performed by the Augsburger Domsingknaben, conducted by Reinhard Kammler, and recorded in 2017. (Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube). The chorales are each about a minute long, little dollops of blessing.

Great cover art selection from the DG team, you can imagine them being mischievous while singing their tunes

The pieces are arranged in alphabetical order, and also in numerical order in the BWV catalog. This is certainly not how Bach would have intended these pieces to be heard. These works are perfect miniatures, but it’s exhausting to listen to 64 short songs in a row — a different kind of exhausting than sitting through, say, a Mahler symphony. Let’s listen to some highlights:

Lying on my deathbed, deliver me to God type material here, with a text about the angel Gabriel from BWV 264:

Because the voices are so exposed, little harmonic shifts can feel huge and moving. Listen to the little suspended passing harmony six seconds into this excerpt from BWV 254:

In BWV 282, Bach almost previews barbershop quartets:

Beautiful suspended harmonies at the end of BWV 315:

And my favorite bit was catching the great Paul Simon lifting the melody of his song “American Tune” from BWV 271. After some digging, I learned that I’m not the first to catch him. It looks like Rhymin’ Simon lifted the melody from a different hymn, which was also lifted by Bach and inserted into the St. Matthew’s Passion. Bach repurposed the movement from the Passion into this chorale. Authorship is complicated:

Here’s “American Tune” for those who don’t know it:

Bonus: Paul talked about how he stole a bit of another Bach chorale in writing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on the Dick Cavett show. Resetting phrases from old composers into pop tunes should happen more often: