Happy new year, everyone! Fill it with music of all kinds.
In this podcast, violist and author Edward Klorman and I discuss his new book, Bach: The Cello Suites. About halfway through, Edward provides musical commentary at the keyboard and shows how you can hear certain single lines of the suites as chordal.
Edward’s website. Edward’s book on Amazon.
Transcript:
Evan Goldfine: Welcome to the sixth episode of the podcast, A Year of Bach. I’m Evan Goldfine, and today I’m joined by Edward Klorman, a violist, author and professor of music at the University of Wisconsin. Edward recently published a small volume called Bach, the Cello Suites, in the new Cambridge Music Handbook series, and it’s a nice history of the suites dating from the time of their composition up to the present day, and we’ll be talking about those suites and more today.
Edward, welcome.
Edward Klorman: Thanks so much for having me.
Evan Goldfine: Edward’s also been kind enough to set up his teaching keyboard, so we’re going to have some musical examples throughout our discussion, which will be fun. And for those of you listening at home at more than 1x speed, please be sure to slow down for those examples or else it’ll sound not the way that you want.
My favorite part of the book, Edward, is your exploration of two fundamental problems or questions that we have with these works. Namely, we don’t know what quite the notes were or what the intended instrument was. So I’ll ask [00:01:00] you about each of those in turn. So how come we don’t know for sure what the notes were in the cello suites?
Edward Klorman: Right. If I were setting up to write a book on Bach’s unaccompanied violin music, you know, I’m not going to write a book on Bach’s unaccompanied violin music. These would be much more straightforward questions. In that case, we have an autograph manuscript that means that Bach, however long he spent composing them, he eventually copied it out into what we call a fair copy.
That’s like a final draft that’s written with sort of calligraphy with no signs of creative deliberation. And basically, it’s very clear what are the notes he meant, if there’s a slur, exactly where it begins and ends. This is a beautiful manuscript many people have seen. Some people even have as a poster the page with the Chaconne in D minor.
Some people put that up on their wall. You can find this online pretty easily. But for the cello suites, there is no autographed manuscript, so that’s led to all kinds of problems and questions. But really what it comes down to then are what are the surviving sources and how do we make sense of them.
There’s four main manuscript copies that survive. People usually [00:02:00] call them sources A, B, C, and D. For a long time, the assumption was, well, source A, which was made by his second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach, that surely must be the best source, because basically she’s his wife. He must have been supervising it was the thinking. But it has a lot of mistakes in it.
So it has some notes that couldn’t be right, some notes that are a little bit questionable, the slurs, which are what people really rely on to know how to do the bowing, you know, how many notes to take in one bow, whether it should be connected or separate, whatever. They’re very vaguely written. And so the question is, how much should we be looking at the other copies?
Who made them? What are the conditions when they made them? There’s been a lot of new thinking in the past decade. So, sources A and B were made during Bach’s lifetime. One by his wife, one by an organist who was sort of in his circle, may or may not have been his student. That has its own idiosyncrasies in that one.
But then the other two sources are much later, and for the longest [00:03:00] time, they were anonymous, so people said, well, let’s just forget those, they’re so remote from the composer, how can we rely on them? Well, the copyist of the first half of source C, I’m getting pretty deep in the weeds already with your first question, that copyist has recently been identified.
So what we now know, is that sources C and D were copied from a copy that C .P .E. Bach owned. So this was a treasured manuscript that, um, you know, one of Bach’s sons had.
Evan Goldfine: But we don’t have C .P .E.’s copy.
Edward Klorman: We know that it exists because there’s an archive of his, like a listing, a catalog of his estate.
So when he died, his possessions were sold and that manuscript is listed there. So we know he owned it and kept it until the end of his life. But we don’t actually have that copy. But we know that sources C and D derived from it and were made by professional copyists. So now suddenly there’s a lot of new interest in those sources that had for a long time been forgotten or ignored or considered to be. So in other words, [00:04:00] everything I thought I knew about the relative priority of these sources when I was in school, maybe 20 some years ago, that’s really been rethought, especially through the research of a cellist and musicologist named Andrew Talley, based at Northwestern University.
He’s the editor of the most recent Barron Writer Edition, and so he’s really made a strong case that we should deprioritize Anna Magdalena and start looking more at these other copies.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah, so when you say that some of the Anna Magdalena Bach’s notes were wrong, how do we know ‘wrong’?
Edward Klorman: I know. Yeah, that is a tough question.
People who deal with editing texts always have to deal with this question in Hamlet in the “to be or not to be” speech, I think there are two main sources for Shakespeare, one of which refers to a solid body, and one of which refers to a sullied body, and either one could, they’re different, but they’re both possible.
Both adjectives, you know, they make sort of grammatical sense. So what do I mean by wrong? One example something could be wrong would be maybe a wrong movement title. [00:05:00] Another thing that could be wrong might be half of a measure is written twice, or there are some notes that are a step too high or a line too high, so it’s supposed to be maybe on the third line of the staff and it’s on the fourth line of the staff.
The reason that might happen is you really want to think about the circumstances when this copy was made. You know, folks might think, well, This was made for posterity, because we think of this as our source and the closest we can get into the Bach household and thinking about this music. But the circumstances were that a student of Bach’s, who played violin, commissioned copies of the solo violin and cello pieces.
J .S. Bach didn’t have time to do this, so he tasked his wife with doing this. But, you know, she’s busy raising children, she was also very accomplished and, you know, um, a busy performer of her own. So, one imagines this work happening probably late at night by candlelight. I don’t know about you, but I’m not my freshest at that time of day.
I don’t usually work by candlelight, but I couldn’t imagine that would help. And this copy [00:06:00] was made on commission for someone to buy it for his own reference. This is how music that wasn’t published circulated. There are... Errors that are, I mean, to really answer your question, notes that seem like they couldn’t be right, they don’t belong to what the harmony appears to be, or maybe they’re different from all the other surviving sources.
For suite number five, the C minor cello suite, there actually is a version that J .S. Bach wrote in his hand for lute, so we can compare to that lute version which we have in his handwriting. But the type of the error she made suggests that she wasn’t hearing the music in her head as she was writing, meaning a musician who’s working slowly and carefully is going to be audiating the music and checking what they’re writing.
Does it make sense? But if you’re working quickly and maybe for a deadline or something like this, that’s more the impression we have of her copying. And I say all of this, not in the least to criticize her as a musician or her contribution for making this copy. But just to say that, for [00:07:00] the longest time, her copy was referred to as the original.
And this difference between Anna Magdalena Bach and J .S. Bach was sort of effaced. It was sort of like, in the absence of an autograph, this was treated as like a surrogate autograph. And so its every eccentricity was really reveled in and taken very seriously. It’s almost like in traditions of writing out the Bible in Hebrew, there are certain words that are known to be mistaken, but they’ve been mistaken for so long, we continue to copy them with those mistakes that have become traditional.
That’s the kind of question we have dealing with, with these texts. And ultimately, a cellist has to make a choice, because some note questions are fundamentally unknowable. And, it’s a great thing that there are over 300 recordings of the cello suites, and there’s room for people to play them different ways.
Evan Goldfine: It’s fun to think about Anna Magdalena’s customer coming home and playing this copy and coming upon the phrase that might be a step above where it ought to be. And did that cellist [00:08:00] make that adjustment back himself or herself to get it back in line, or how did they react?
Obviously also completely unknowable, but that customer didn’t have a reference of their own to go back against in terms of a recording or an autograph copy. So they probably just had to make do themselves. I don’t know if there’s been much scholarship about how people played their music back in those days.
Edward Klorman: Right. The only thing I’d add to what you just described is, one imagines in a world where music is circulating in manuscripts where there are errors, and that’s common, and where maybe the people playing them are composers to some extent themselves. So, this is a violinist and composer who’s receiving this.
There may be, in the same way that maybe a professional chef, if they’re reading a recipe, they might do it exactly as written, or they might read it and interpret it and play sort of their version of it. The copyist of Source B, that’s someone named, Johann Peter Kellner, he is one of the major sources of Bach’s music.
He copied out quite a lot of music, including music by J .S. Bach, but he, [00:09:00] often made little adjustments or changes or even inserted passages of his own music or he would make a mistake copying and rather than correct it he’d sort of compose around the mistake so this was clearly a reference that he made for himself and his copying standards were sort of good enough for himself but, what’s interesting is, you know, he was an organist who played violin a little bit, but not cello so far as we know, so why is he copying the cello suites?
Probably for his own reference or his own teaching. Suite number five is written for a cello that is tuned, the term we use is scordatura. That means, instead of the standard tuning in fifths, c g d a the top string is tuned down a step to g but the way it’s notated you notate the way it fingers rather than the way it sounds so it’s sort of like the top string is like a transposing instrument.
Evan Goldfine: It’s like a tab tablature on the guitar. You just paint by number.
Edward Klorman: The German term is a grifbrett which basically means like finger board or fingering notation and so, [00:10:00] this copyist of source B, he tried to write it all out at sounding pitch.
That’s a very hard thing to do if you’re not a cellist. He made lots and lots of mistakes, but the result of what he wrote is he writes some chords that are unplayable on any cello. So, if you’re a cellist, and if you picked up his copy and had no other copy around, there would be chords that you can’t play because you’re supposed to play two notes on the same string.
They could be playable in the version as Bach wrote it, what all the other sources have, but that tells you that these copyists are making copies for particular reasons, in his case for reference, and that might give you some clue about what their idiosyncrasies might be. The other thing that’s kind of like a Rosetta Stone that plays into this is So, several of these copyists also made copies of the violin sonatas and partitas.
So, Anna Magdalena Bach, when she was making this copy, she did the violin pieces and the cello pieces. Johann Peter Kellner also did both of them. And the copyist of the first half of Source C, his name is Schober, he also made a copy of the violin pieces. So, that’s very interesting because [00:11:00] there, We have Bach’s autograph and their copies.
So if you want to get a sense of how reliable are they in which ways and what respect you can sort of compare them and maybe extrapolate from there what that would tell you about their respective copies of the cello suites.
Evan Goldfine: Interesting. So the other big mystery is also we’re not exactly sure the instrument that this was written for.
We call them the cello suites, but the four -string cello that we see in orchestras today is not the one that was around in Bach’s time. So what was the violin cello or violon- cello?
Edward Klorman: Violon-cello. So this is a funny way. So violone, that’s basically word for bass means like large bass instrument.
Violoncello would be a small, large bass instrument. So that’s, that’s the instrument we now call a cello. And then, um, suite number six which is written for a five string instrument and that might have been an instrument called violon cello piccolo so in terms of etymology that would be a tiny small huge string instrument so you see that these names get a little complicated when you dig into [00:12:00] them. Besides the violin family, there’s also the viole or viola da gamba family.
That’s a French family of instruments. They’re the ones with the sort of sloped looking shoulders that look like a double bass. There’s a large tradition of unaccompanied music and also consort music for da gamba. But that instrument was a little bit in decline during Bach’s lifetime and the cello was starting to be on the rise.
Particularly in Italian -speaking countries, there was, new solo and virtuoso music for the cello. Probably in Bach’s orbit, the instrument we call the cello was mostly known as an instrument that played bass lines. And the idea of writing this virtuoso music for cello was sort of a new thing in terms of German music making, so far as we understand.
There was a big tradition also of writing unaccompanied violin music by German composers. Bach would have known some of that music. But yeah, I looked at writings by folks in Bach’s orbit, so these would be North German writers on music, including one of his cousins, [00:13:00] Walter, and this other author, Matheson, who was a really prolific writer of sort of encyclopedias about music.
And they say a cello could have four, five, or six strings, may or may not have frets. There are bigger ones and there are smaller ones. Some authors say if you’re going to play really virtuoso music, you might play on a smaller instrument, with lighter strings and you’d use light -colored horsehair there.
Whereas if you want to play bass lines as loudly as possible, you might play a bigger instrument with coarser hair. That’s the black horse hair. So you might have two different instruments, depending what you’re using them for. Then they describe this instrument called the violoncello da spalla, that means basically shoulder cello.
And they say it’s an instrument you held up like this on your shoulder with a strap around the neck, and it’s fingered sort of like a violin, and they consider it to be a type of cello. So, some of the authors, when they write, you know, an entry in their encyclopedia on what is a cello, they write in particular about this instrument.
[00:14:00] And that’s led some people to speculate, could this have been the instrument Bach might have intended the cello suites for? We don’t really know. I don’t believe there are extant instruments of this type. There’s been a movement to revive it, so today some people call it viola da spalla, others call it violoncello da spalla.
But it’s unclear are the instruments that they’re building now, are they like those old ones? The ones they make now are ones that if you play violin, you could learn to play this. And the thinking would be, well, we know Bach played every kind of keyboard instrument. We know he played violin and viola really well.
And so the folks who are into viola da spalla think, well, maybe this is what he considered to be a type of cello. And the thinking would be then the same player could learn to play the unaccompanied violin pieces.
Followed by the unaccompanied cello pieces, that maybe it’s like a two -part manuscript for one musician to play all of them. Other folks feel there’s really very little evidence for that and that the viola da spalla, to the extent that it existed, was more of a bassline instrument. [00:15:00] I think the jury might still be out on some of these questions.
Maybe a better question would be, do we know that Bach had a specific kind of instrument in mind, or maybe what he envisioned was sort of flexible arrangement that people could adapt for the type of instrument that they played on since the cello was itself a little in flux.
That would be like other keyboard music that he wrote that you could play on harpsichord or clavichord or, you know, on different types of instruments.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah, so as we go from these mysteries and really we can’t put our finger exactly what Bach was about so much of Bach, spending so much time with him, he seems almost like a cipher, even for people who have been engaged with his work for so long.
It’s fun to read about, but it kind of elides from the main point, which is the music itself, so I’d like to get into the meat of what this is. For for better or worse, my blog and podcasts here are more about taste than hard musicology. And that’s how I connect to it. And while still [00:16:00] trying to play a little bit on the keyboard and the guitar.
And I found that for myself in the cello suites, I appreciate a wider range of interpretations as opposed to the violin sonatas and partitas For my violin works, I want them to be more emotive, and some of the dry performances leave me cold. But the cello suites seem a little bit more robust.
They can be banged up in a lot of ways, they work romantic, they work stoic, they work fast, they work slow. But the one caveat is that I, I kind of feel sensitive if certain phrases just sound wrong. Maybe that’s, I’m particularly sensitive to that in the cello suites. But maybe I can ask that of you, like, what do you want out of these performances?
When you’re listening to it, you’re obviously devoted enough to these pieces that you wrote a book about them.
Edward Klorman: I have been playing these pieces since I was a teenager, so that’s been a long time now. And I’ve played them many different kinds of ways. The very first performances I’ve heard were recordings you might describe as romantic, were by musicians like in Pablo Casals’ orbit.
Or people influenced by [00:17:00] that, and then one day when I first heard performances on Baroque instruments. So here would be an example. The, C minor cello suite, the Allemande. The first time I ever heard it performed, I think the recording was very singing. It was like, ta -dum, ba -da -da -dum, ba -dum, ba -dum.
And then when I heard a Baroque performance that really wanted to sound like a French Baroque, ba -dum, ba -dum, ba -dum, ba -dum, ba -dum, ba -dum, ba -dum, ba -dum, ba -dum, ba -dum,
And it was, I mean, so, okay, my first reaction is, that’s weird. But then I realized, well, there’s certain things that I really hear in this version I didn’t hear in the other. Among other things, that movement is written in a la breve, it’s written in cut time. So I really felt the sense of it being in two, these gestures that lead over upbeats with a lot of, I guess in French they call it with élan, with direction.
So that was interesting. You know, I play on modern viola and I play on Baroque viola, and I play a little differently in different contexts. And, you know, for folks who live with this music over a lifetime, it changes with you and you find new things to bring out in it. So part of why I go into [00:18:00] some of the musicology on why are these different cellos is I want people to feel liberated from this question of which is the right way.
I think many folks who might see. I’ve studied these pieces over decades and you play for different people and you have different teachers and one insists, oh, it must be slurred. And the other, it must be separate. Why this tempo? It should be that tempo. Every generation has remade the cello suites in their own image and with their own taste.
And often it’s framed in terms of, Well, you should do it this way because here’s my argument why it’s what Bach wanted. That’s often, I think, something we make up instead of saying it’s what I prefer or it’s what I’ve grown attached to. You can hear really beautiful performance of these pieces on cello.
Or on viola, or on marimba. It’s really surprising the range of instruments people can play this music with authenticity and each with its own approach. The other thing is, you know, when Bach adapted suite number five for lute, he made changes that made it suitable for the lute. The lute is not a sustaining instrument in the way that a cello is, so maybe that informed maybe [00:19:00] some of the ornaments that were added or what have you.
It’s sort of a counterfactual to ask what would Bach want us to be doing with his music today, but the idea that we couldn’t be adapting it in ways that draw from our own music making or our own approach to our instrument, that surely was part of Bach’s music making in his lifetime, and it’s something I’d encourage musicians today to feel comfortable with.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah, one of my favorite parts about listening to different interpretations of all of Bach’s works is that because there’s very little marking in the scores about how to play them, it lays the performer open to be able to share themselves through it.
My favorite recordings tend to be the more serious ones. Maybe I like these pieces more serious. And I think of guys like Rostropovich and Janos Starker, who are just, they take it so serious. These were very serious guys, they were very very grave about this. And that’s how they connected to the music and that’s how i’m connected to the music. And then if you have your baroque person in cut time that was phrasing [00:20:00] that initial prelude for number five, that connected with you in a different way.
That’s a little less grave. It’s more about laying into the dance part of it. And certain interpreters will lay into the dance. I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks listening to all sorts of cello suites in anticipation of this. And there really is such a broad variety of ways to get at it. And sometimes it just like, I don’t connect, but that’s my fault.
Not necessarily the the performer. And sometimes it’s the performer that I think is not getting it. And that that’s that’s the taste thing. I don’t know if I’m being, too critical of these performers who’ve gone there, or if it’s just taste. If you’re putting on a recording, where are you connecting right now?
What’s your preferred style?
Edward Klorman: You know, I really like performances where I feel like there’s some sort of engagement with what the notes are telling you. So in other words, you know, you’re right that there aren’t a lot of dynamic markings, expressive markings, but maybe there’s an appoggiatura that has a quality of intensity and then it resolves to a consonant note.
Maybe there’s a [00:21:00] chain of suspensions. I know that, you know, if you read treatises from the 18th century, they encourage you, they say that the suspension, the dissonance rouses the feeling of pain in the listener, And then when it resolves, we feel this feeling of sweetness with the consonants. Now, you can express that idea in many ways.
You can use more vibrato or less vibrato. You can sustain, you can use less sustain. You can use this sound or that sound. But there’s many ways that that could be articulated. As I’ve been writing this book, I’ve been listening to a really wide range, including some of the earliest recordings there are.
There are recordings of individual movements from the 1920s. These are performances with piano accompaniment. That’s something nobody would do today. But it’s super interesting because the piano plays the harmony. They leave out some of Bach’s chords and it turns it into this almost like bel canto seamless melody that reflects some of the aesthetics in string playing from the turn of the 20th century. It’s not at all how I’m used to hearing this music, but it’s just wonderful that we have this as a record of how some of the first [00:22:00] audiences first encountering these pieces might have been hearing them. I’m not really answering your question about recordings.
I mean, there’s over 300. When you mentioned Starker, he was one of the first that I spent a lot of time with. He recorded them five times. It was his fifth recording that won the Grammy Award. Yo -Yo Ma has recorded them three times. So that really gives you the sense of the seriousness of engagement, but also their sense that, I guess these musicians just must have felt that they could improve upon their previous efforts or that they found something new that would justify making a new recording.
It’s interesting to think of.
Evan Goldfine: You’ve been kind enough to have brought your keyboard with you so we can have some live musical accompaniment when we’re talking about this. Part of the magic of the cello suites is that there’s almost a feeling of counterpoint on a single line.
So I’m curious as how you think Bach is able to accomplish that with a musical example.
Edward Klorman: An example I use to think in these terms is from the suite number one that’s in G major. It has a pair of minuets, one in G major and one in G minor.
So here’s how the opening of the minuet number two in G [00:23:00] minor goes.
So
a few things I noticed is it has a bass line. If I take the lowest note of each bar, G, F, play
that an octave higher so it’s easier to hear. G, F, Eb, D , that’s a bass line we sometimes call lament bass. This bass line in minor that just moves down by step from scale degree 1 to 5. And then if I compare that to the melody, the melody is sort of following it in parallel tenths. So, here’s my G in the bass, here’s my Bb in the melody.
B flat moves down to A, A moves [00:24:00] down to G, F sharp, so I hear this melody in bass, that’s sort of like the skeleton that Bach was composing around, and there’s even kind of a tenor line that I can trace, um.
So it’s almost like the chords Bach might have been imagining would have sounded something like this.
And then what he ends up doing is finding a way to express those patterns, on an unaccompanied cello. So he’s basically using register, right, the lowest notes are the bass notes, the highest notes are the melody notes. And the stuff in the middle is, are those suspensions that add that extra intensity.
We know from one of Bach’s students, he said that [00:25:00] Bach used to play the unaccompanied violin music at the keyboard, fleshing out the harmony as much as he felt was needed. We don’t know for sure did he do this with the cello music, but it seems that he used these pieces to teach this idea of how, just what you’re saying, this kind of, this kind of, Phantom counterpoint, where without using any chords or any double stops, you can express the idea of different voices interacting, and then in the mind of the listener, we have a way of parsing it as bass melody and harmony.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah, when you played that with the fleshed out chords, it reminded me of some of the choral music that it sounds like the harmonies that he would use in the, in the cantatas even.
Edward Klorman: There’s other pieces that use some of these same patterns.
So like the minuet from the D minor suite, for example. I’ll play it an octave higher just so you can hear.
So we still have that same bass line.
That lament bass line. So these were [00:26:00] sort of like, music theorists call these schemas, or schemata, that a composer could, compose different kinds of pieces using the same pattern. So it wouldn’t surprise me if you could find other movements that you know that are based on the same, same sort of baseline or progression.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah, yeah. And, When we have that scheme, we can keep it in our head and it moves along and the single line is moving like floating on top of it and we’re filling in the blanks and that’s one of the things I love about improvised jazz music also, so when you have the head of the song, you hear the song and then you’re improvising over the same chords and the same melody and you should have that in your head as that is repeated and you’re playing along the melody in your head and then the improviser on top of it and of course, Bach was improvising.
All the great, composers were master improvisers, and a lot of the compositions that we have were, you know, Drawn from those improvisations as far as we know.
Edward Klorman: Right, the D minor Violin Chaconne would be an example of the same thing you’re talking about. So, you know, the first eight bars would be kind of like a theme, against which you hear each of the successive variations, absolutely.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah, [00:27:00] Goldberg variations too. I mean, like, you’re always, you’re always hearing that theme throughout. Yeah, super cool. Can we go deep into my... most underrated movement from these suites, which is the second movement from the third, uh, suite, which is the Allemande from the C major. And I got to know this from the great Andres Segovia.
There was an album of his recording of the D minor violin sonata, which you just spoke about and also the the cello suite in c major and this is my intro to Bach for me. I was like, wow, This is amazing stuff because I was playing classical guitar and I didn’t know you could do Bach on it I mean, we’re all we all come to our more important recordings in strange ways, and this was from BMG Music Service because they had 12 for the price of one and then they kept mailing CDs to me forever. I’m dating myself to the late 90s here when I was in college.
But I would love to hear the first 8 bars of the first movement of the first 8 bars of the second movement and how those might [00:28:00] talk to each other and you know, and how Segovia was able to kind of cheat a little bit by carrying along his bass lines and adding extras.
Edward Klorman: Sure. Okay. So, uh, C major suite, here’s the prelude.
And then the Allemande. Then it starts going somewhere else.
Sorry. Okay. So, I mean, the main thing here I would point out is the prelude begins with this big scale going from basically the top of the cello’s range, or the top of the range [00:29:00] that Bach uses in these pieces, to the lowest note on the cello, the open C string.
And then doesn’t the Allemande sound like a variation on that?
So we have this descending cascade that spans two registers, ending on the low C string. The next movement, the Courante, does the same thing even more efficiently. Sorry. I keep playing it wrong. There we go. So we have that arpeggio that gets us from that top C to the bottom C. Then the Gigue from this, uh, movement...
It’s almost like it’s the same scale but, inverted. So instead of, you know, cascading down, it’s, rising up sort of, maybe that makes our heroic, conclusion to the suite to wrap it all up together. . Many of the suites have this sense that there’s something going on in the beginning of the prelude that sets an agenda that the other movements work out.
. I used to think that this was a 19th century [00:30:00] idea that we impose anachronistically on Bach’s music. In the 19th century, there was a lot of interest in organicism, so composers like Brahms would have a little seed of an idea in the first movement that predicts something that happens in the second movement and so on.
But as I did my research, I found that there were many musicians in Bach’s orbit who had the same idea, that they say the first movement of a suite, should be like the proposition of which the other movements are the examples. There was an English lutenist named Thomas Mace, who wrote a book in the, I think, 1670s, and he said, to make a suite, the movement should be something of a kin, that that kinship, he said, should go beyond just being in the same key. Many of the suites have something like this. A good example also would be the prelude to the first cello suite.
So we have this chord progression.[00:31:00]
So what you hear in that progression is a pedal in the bass. G G stays in the bass A melody that goes B, C, C, B So that’s like a neighbor progression And then we have this tenor line D, E, F sharp, G , many of the movements from the suite have like a variation on that So like the, the minuet from that suite Begins with that same chord Then we have the bass F Sorry, the tenor, D, E, F sharp, G.
So that’s expressed just as chords in the prelude, but then they become the basis of many of the other movements too. That could very well be how Bach might have composed or improvised these pieces.
Evan Goldfine: Right, you think in the chords and then you kind of peel it apart just to show the outline of it.
And then we as listeners are filling it in in real time. I think Bach was a master at [00:32:00] this, in that there are certain, two -part inventions for keyboard are very much like chords that are spread out.
There’s some other little preludes that are very figurative. Or the first movement of the well-tempered clavier, the C major prelude, and the first movement of the first cello suite, again, it’s just these chords that are broken up and he’s moving us along the chords, but we’re kept in the repeating rhythm over and over again.
And, and that I think anchors the listener to the performer in the moment.
Edward Klorman: There’s actually an early version of the C major prelude from Book One of the Well -Tempered Clavier that’s in a notebook, he made for one of his sons. And in that version, he ran out of space on the page, and so at a certain point he stopped writing out every note and he just wrote chords.
And the idea was you’d continue the figuration. You’d just continue using the same pattern. Same thing in the Chaconne in D minor, there’s a big arpeggio section. He writes out the figuration for a little bit, and then he just writes arpeggio, meaning he’s trusting the violinist to continue adding the figuration.
He’s just going to [00:33:00] show you the chords. So clearly this was something musicians used and were expected to learn how to read, and it must have been part of the process of composing these pieces.
Evan Goldfine: And in the Chaconne, those arpeggios, contemporary artists have gone in many different directions going up and down in the violin or the guitar, especially, there’s been a many, many different ways to play all of those notes and have that feeling of movement in that beautiful section about, I guess, a quarter of the way through.
I also think in the second movement of the third suite that you played, to just parse that melody. It’s a few notes on the way up and then it’s just a C major scale going all the way down. It’s just the most basic building block of any song. And it’s perfect. I don’t, like, it’s just a simple scale, and it reminded me, there’s a movement at the end of, Swan Lake, by Tchaikovsky, the pas de deux is da -da -da -da -dum -da -da -dum.
It’s just a, C major scale. It’s the same thing. And, you know, as I’ve gotten older, that simplicity, I think, is resonating with me
Edward Klorman: [00:34:00] The complexity can play out in what you do with the materials and the materials themselves don’t need to be so complex and then the other thing to think with the cello suites is, I mean, Bach seems to have thought of the cello as an instrument that had more constraints than the violin did.
Maybe that’s because he played the violin and not really the cello that we know of, but, in his violin music, there are these fugues with, Two, three, four note chords all over. It’s basically as dense almost as his keyboard music gets, even though it’s violin instead of keyboard.
The cello music in general has a lot less by way of that kind of finger twisting. It’s more about what can Bach imply using an economy of means. And that has to do with the chordal writing, it has to do with what kinds of shifts there are, but it might also have to do with some of the melodic materials like these scales that you mentioned.
Evan Goldfine: One other bit of music that I wanted to get into in particular is the first movement of the sixth suite, which has an unusual sort of droning pattern. I’m going to not speak well [00:35:00] musicologically about this, so I’ll, I’ll hand it off to you about that kind of droning and repeating pattern over two strings that create a haunting sound on the violin and on the cello.
Edward Klorman: Right. So this one’s a little hard to do on keyboard because what you’re describing, well, it sounds something like this.
Okay, but on the keyboard, I’m playing, I’m playing that D twice. But the idea on cello is you’re going to play the, the note D, as a fingered note on one string and then as an open string. So you’re getting like two notes in a row, but two different timbres.
So, this is a little hard to simulate on a keyboard, so I’ll describe it and then I’ll play it. Bach has this figure, this figuration, with repeated notes, only the way he has you play it is you play the same note twice in a row on two different strings. So I’m going to hear... So one of them is going to be a fingered note on one string, and then it’s going to match the pitch of an open string.
So you hear D, D, but with two different tone qualities. So you get the sound of a stopped note, and then you get the really ringing sound of a different string, the [00:36:00] open strings, which are the most resonant string. So here’s my best impression of that on the keyboard. Right. And this is actually something Bach thought about quite a lot in different movements of the Suites.
There’s this French term, barriolage, for music that goes back and forth between two different strings, often with an open string. So, for instance, in the Prelude from the G Major Suite, there’s, well, so the piece is in G major. That means it’s going to emphasize the open G string. The dominant note is D.
It’s going to emphasize the open D string. There’s a big fermata on the open C string. But then there’s a big passage on, on the second page of the second half of the piece that’s all back and forth between, um, different notes and the open A string. So here’s A.
So every other note is this really ringing, this very bright, open A string, but it means all of the stop notes have to be played on the D [00:37:00] string, so you get this real contrast of tone quality between one of the ringingest, the most ringing strings that there is, and then the very high register way up on the D string where it has this different quality.
So in a way, it’s like he’s writing for just one cello, but he’s really using four different strings in different ways and composing in a way that maximizes their contrast, almost as if you had two different sounding instruments.
Evan Goldfine: So as we wrap up our conversation here, I’m curious as to how the cello suites live differently inside of you before and after writing this book.
How do you listen to it differently? What have you learned besides the facts of the book? But how do you feel closer or further apart from them than at the beginning of your project?
Edward Klorman: Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, I’ve learned a lot about how different musicians have made sense of them from one decade to the next, from one generation to the next.
One thing that really shocked me was learning how some of the first, when these pieces first started to be played in recitals in the 1860s and 70s, that a lot of audiences [00:38:00] didn’t really like them or were puzzled by them. But they felt, well, really, this is just a bunch of scales, aren’t these really just etudes?
Why are we hearing them in concerts? That was a new idea for me because I had grown up with this music as being this sort of icon, the pinnacle of what a cello or a viola could aspire toward. What does that leave me with? That’s hard to say. Other than that, I’m a little more modest about what’s knowable or how convinced I can, and when I, when I perform myself, I want to be convinced the way I’m playing it is the way the phrase should go.
But that doesn’t mean that for someone else that has to be their way the phrase should go, or that ten years from now I won’t feel differently about it, because certainly people’s relationship with how to make music of these pieces has changed a lot over time. The other thing I think about is, for example, preludes in general are moderately fast to fast tempo, usually a Baroque prelude.
The prelude to the D minor suite, though, people usually play sort of slowly, ponderously, mysteriously. And, um, one thing I came to realize is, In the 19th century, if we look at [00:39:00] editions, some of them have metronome markings. Some of those were played pretty quick, like, Yum -bum -bum, ba -da -da -dee -da -da -da -da.
It was a pretty quick tempo. And it seems to have been Pablo Casals, his recordings, which were quite a bit slower, influenced many, many, many musicians. Because for a long time, his was the main recording that was available. He was a very influential and charismatic teacher. Even folks who don’t think of themselves as influenced by Casals very much seem to be.
So, performances that seem to me too fast because I’m used to it slow, maybe I’m too much influenced by one particularly inspiring and charismatic musician’s thumbprint on the way I think this music should go. Maybe we should all afford to be a little more open to different possibilities.
Evan Goldfine: Sure. I always struggle with keeping that feeling in mind, this openness, with my also strong aesthetic feeling like, ‘It really shouldn’t be that fast or that’s not right. [00:40:00] That’s missing the point of what you’re trying to do.’ I was at the New York Philharmonic last year, and there was a guest conductor who came in to last minute and played Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, and there’s a one of the most famous works of his is the slow movement there and this guy played it at a clip and like I was a minute from shouting “slow down” at the conductor, it was just so wrong. I was talking to people around me after in halftime, and people really didn’t like. In those sort of moments, it felt like yeah yeah i know we’re all connected to the recordings that we like of that but it’s like that for a reason maybe. Maybe it’s just me, or Pablo Casals got to the nugget of something that’s true, and we’re all resonating with that.
And maybe you can also play it faster, but maybe, I don’t know, there’s just so many open questions about this, and the rightness and wrongness I’m moving away from, but I still struggle with that. I guess that’s been a theme of our conversation today.
Edward Klorman: Well, for a lot of performers, I mean, if you play this piece for [00:41:00] decades, or if you’re a cellist, and you teach it every year, and you play it every year, you can really get, pretty cemented in a habit Or what youre accustomed to And then, of course things, that are different You know, the version of Thanksgiving dinner You grew up on with your family That was spiced a particular way Or the meal prepared this way And then you marry into a family That does it different Well, thats gotta be wrong So, I sometimes wonder if we have that kind of relationship with some of these pieces, and on the one hand, we treasure the depth of relationship that we have, and we can, interpret in a way that has a lot of layers to it, because we kind of go deeper in one avenue, but I suppose an outstanding musician should be able to find another way and make it musical and convincing.
If only as an exercise, there might be aspects of what you’d learn from that that you’d carry into playing at a different tempo. I’ll give just one example. Yeah. The prelude to the E -flat major cello suite. It has these big leaps.
This is on [00:42:00] the lowest string of the cello. This is on the highest string of the cello. And because of the kind of technical difficulty of those leaps, many cellists emphasize the bass note of every measure and almost hold it a little extra long. It almost sounds like instead of 8 eighth notes per measure you have sort of more like nine .
What would this music sounds like if I could zoom out and get a synoptic view of it If I speed it up and play it as chords,
So I hear that scale in the bass line, right? But sometimes when I hear people play, I hear... it’s like every downbeat gets so much emphasis that I miss that sense of scale. So even the tempo I was playing that chords with is not a tempo that’s playable on the cello, but it might reveal something to me about a line that [00:43:00] can add something when I bring it back to a tempo that’s more suitable on the cello.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah, just playing the chords almost sounded like a hymn, you know, that’s cool. Well, Edward, this has been so great. Thank you for talking about the Cello Suites today. I’ll show the book again. This is Bach the Cello Suites. A little book in New Cambridge Music Handbook Series. A fun read of the history of the Cello Suites from its undated original date.
We don’t even know the date that he wrote it up. So thank you, Edward, and you can find Edward on his website.
Edward Klorman: The website is edwardklorman.com and then if you Google Edward Klorman Bach the Cello Suites you’ll find some info about the book.
Evan Goldfine: Thank you so much.
Edward Klorman: Thanks Evan.
