When Bach Pulls out All the Stops
The Acoustic Impact of a Passion
Introduction
In his book Music and Embodied Cognition, Arnie Cox describes eight avenues through which we experience musical affect.¹ Some of the avenues he names, such as anticipation, expression, or intertextual association, bring to mind obvious applications in the context of experiencing music, and the abundant discourse around Johann Sebastian Bach’s music that utilizes the perspectives of these avenues is as thorough as it is sometimes conflicting. But one avenue consistently stands as the most salient one through which I am predisposed, for whatever reason, to experience the potent affects of Bach’s musical offerings. This is the avenue of “acoustic impact”, as Cox calls it, and I sense I’m not alone in my predisposition towards it when I am listening to this music. Cox makes the important clarification that “the acoustic impact is distinct from the broader sense of music’s aesthetic or emotional impact,” and in the material that follows, I try my best to consider Bach’s music in a deliberately textually-blind and texturally-sensitive way. This means that rather than emphasizing the interpretation of the music’s text and its contextual significance, I will instead prioritize an approach to the music that considers the experiential sound of it above all else. For the sake of focus, I’ve chosen to refer primarily to the opening movement from the St. John Passion, “Herr, Unser Herrscher,” as I think it demonstrates the most intense manifestations of the phenomena I want to highlight, though I will be comparing it with select other works from Bach’s output. The primary question here, then, is: “what makes the acoustic impact of ‘Herr, Unser Herrscher’ so viscerally potent?” and I hope the observations made about the sound of this particular movement will be intuitively applicable, for any listener, to the majority of Bach’s work.
Arnie Cox writes: “The acoustic impact concerns the ways that sounds ‘come at us,’ or seem to come at us, and enter us. This impact is shaped by the five components of the acoustic-auditory fact: the features of sounds that relate to pitch, duration, timbre, strength, and location of origin actual or apparent”. In the context of listening to Bach’s music, I find all five of these components to be in constant play with one another, and it is the way he deftly manipulates these parameters that makes the listening experience a mesmerizing and immersive one for me. Despite the obvious sensory primacy and immediacy of this domain in music, there seems to be less emphasis on the purely acoustic impact of Bach’s music present in conventional scholarship on the subject, and for me this has always felt inconsistent with the dominance of this avenue in my personal listening. Sometimes, it seems as though the analytical nature of some of this scholarship (and the academic mythos that emerges from it) has created, for some listeners, an intimidating moat of forbidding discourse around what is otherwise extremely emotionally-charged, fundamentally Human music. Musicologist and Bach scholar John Butt has noted:
“Many people find Bach to be a very cerebral composer; a composer who thinks and uses his brain and creates virtual pieces of music of great complexity. Those people who don’t like Bach even suggest that perhaps his music is more for the eyes and the brain than it is for the ears. And certainly to many people, Bach is sometimes seen as something of an academic composer. It is absolutely true that Bach is one of the most technically advanced composers of any time. His control of materials and of the compositional process is absolutely remarkable. And there are some structurally elegant and calculated pieces, particularly the late works such as the Art of Fugue and the Musical Offering. But I would claim that that is only one very small side of Bach, and that the vast majority of his music is important specifically for the way it does appeal to the ear, and the way it appeals to the listener. And that it is sensual on a tremendous scale.”²
To my mind also, the ear is at the front of the experience of Bach’s most powerful music, and a very common sensation for me when listening to the most intricate of Bach’s works is one of being overwhelmed by the dense resonant aggregate of the music. Particularly in his most acoustically saturated works, as in much of the organ music, the Cantatas, the Orchestral Suites and Brandenburg concerti, and especially in the choruses and arias of the Passions, the acoustic impact of Bach’s music has had an arresting and stirring affect on me since long before I had any technical fluency with its complex theoretical mechanics. And I think this is what makes any music powerful: the sound of it. Though having an understanding of the harmonic grammar and structural syntax may enhance the intellectual experience of the music, that doesn’t necessarily make an “intuitive” listening of it any less visceral. If anything, some might argue that having an internalized understanding of the logic of the harmonic progressions might even render the experience more predictable and therefore less emotionally impactful. As Cox points out: “explicit [analytical] knowledge is not requisite for potent affective responses to music, and in fact can be a threat to the rewards of listening with minimal explicit understanding”.
These “rewards”, for me, first came in the form of electric tingling pulses down my back and limbs (a kind of common aural-tactile synesthesia) that were synchronized to the undulating tumult of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.⁴ It was my first time listening to it in its entirety, and it left a lingering, glowing ecstasy. I was totally overwhelmed by the extreme density of the fugue in particular, and I didn’t “understand” anything at all about the machinations of the music. I was eleven, wearing my stepdad’s Bose headphones on full volume, and the recording was on a bargain compilation CD from Walmart called The Most Essential Classical Music in Movies. I have been chasing that exact high ever since, and a strong recording of “Herr, Unser Herrscher” has nearly the same effect on me. Like the Toccata and Fugue, it remains one of the most reliable hits.
Organo Pleno, Horror Vacui
By far the most striking characteristic of this movement, to me, is how it is seemingly bursting at the seams with motion and activity, and how this densely layered activity remains constant through to the end. The orchestra is striated into several layers, each of which contributes to the unrelenting momentum of the collective whole. I will cover the specific qualities of these layers later on: but they include the register (what Cox calls “pitch height”), rhythmic articulation (“duration”), and dynamic intensity (“strength”), and all of them remain fixed throughout the movement. This means that the sound-space is completely saturated top to bottom, start to finish, with swirling lines that drive forward irrevocably, mercilessly bulldozing through time and offering little chance for the ears to catch a breath. The way Bach overwhelms the limits of our acoustic perception with all available sound reminds me of those towering moments in the Toccata and Fugue (and in much of his other organ music), moments whose power is achieved through something known in organ performance practice as organo pleno. This Latin term simply means “full organ”, and it refers to an indication that the performer should quite literally pull out all the stops of the instrument. The mechanism of a “stop” in an organ simply redirects a passage of air from the bellows (the air supply) to a particular set of pipes, whose tonal characteristics are distinct from other sets. The practice of using combinations of stops to achieve desirable blends of sound is known in organ performance practice as “registration”, and it is essentially the equivalent to “orchestration” in instrumental composition. When all available stops are opened, the instrument’s fullest potential is released, allowing it to sound with an acoustic fullness that shakes the walls and can quite literally stun the listener. This creates the “psychological impact” Arnie Cox refers to, that is associated with the sound of “an entity large enough and powerful enough to have such an acoustic impact.” It’s is an effect Bach made frequent use of in his organ music, since that instrument is particularly suited to producing earth-shaking resonance, and, as Alex Ross describes it, “Several pieces from his years as an organ virtuoso practice a kind of sonic terrorism. The Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor feasts on dissonance with almost diabolical glee.”⁴ Between the gratuitous dissonance and the brutal opening-up of the full organ, is it possible that Bach projected the sonic arsenal of his instrument onto the florid orchestration of “Herr, Unser Herrscher?”
Bach was an organist throughout his entire life, and I suspect that his approach to orchestrating pieces like the Passions must have been influenced by his intimate familiarity with organ acoustics and registration, at least on an intuitive level. In 1774, twenty-four years after his death, Johann Sebastian’s son, composer Carl Philipp Emanuel recalled in a letter to Bach’s first biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel:
“He understood the whole building of organs in the highest degree. Organists were terrified when he sat down to play on their organs and drew the stops in his own manner, for they thought that the effect could not be good as he was planning it; but then they heard an effect that astounded them. (These sciences perished with him.) The first thing he would do in trying an organ was this: he would say, in fun, “Above all I must know whether the organ has good lungs,” and, to find out, he would draw out every speaking stop, and play in the fullest and richest possible texture. At this the organ builders would often grow quite pale with fright.”
In the thickest textures of these pieces, as in “Herr, Unser Herrscher,” the concept of organo pleno offers a convenient perspective in understanding the rich acoustic profile of the music. Though “registration” becomes orchestration here, “Herr, Unser Herrscher” still stands as an orchestral (and vocal) analogue of the organo pleno; he is figuratively “pulling out all the stops” in this movement by employing all the instruments throughout, and giving each layer of music its own distinct role to play in contributing to the overall tapestry of sound, as the separate manuals (or keyboards) and pedals of the organ do. And the resultant affect is not dissimilar to that of his most apocalyptic organ works.
The concept of organo pleno also brings to mind another metaphoric Latin collocation which applies to a broader realm of musical and artistic examples: the notion of (natura) horror vacui. Originally used by Aristotle to describe the organic tendency of the natural world to occupy empty space, the usual translation is “nature abhors a vacuum.” Since Aristotle, it has been adopted by art historians to describe a visual aesthetic which densely fills every corner of the visual space with decorative and elaborate flourishes. The way horror vacui is at play in “Herr, Unser Herrscher” is readily apparent from my above description of the musical texture. Just by listening to any moment in the piece, you get the sense of every space being occupied by sound and motion. Like the interwoven Arabesques of Islamic mosques, or impossibly intricate Gothic carved boxwood miniatures, this music writhes and unfurls to permeate every void with meticulous fractal obsession.
Though, as an aesthetic phenomenon in music, horror vacui is not just limited to the German Baroque and has examples in many genres across many centuries and traditions. It can be used to aptly describe a whole panoply of musical styles: such as the dense collective improvisations in Dixieland music, Philip Glass’s kaleidoscopic tonal tapestries, the exaltant 40-voice motet of Thomas Tallis, the rapturous chaos of John Coltrane’s Ascension, the “everything always” of Peter Ablinger’s conceptual Weiss/Weisslich 22, to name just a few. Even Ariana Grande has confessed her inclination towards extravagant, sodden vocal textures, writing in a Tweet this January:
Despite far-reaching differences of genre and tradition, what all of these examples have in common is that they exhibit an extremely low level of sonic “lacunarity”, to borrow a term from fractal geometry. This means that the averaged spectra over time of each of these musical examples would show relatively few, if any, gaps (or “lacunae”) in their acoustic fabric. This fabric is woven from the five components which, according to Arnie Cox, constitute the profile of acoustic impact. Because of their distinct compositional elements (the ways in which they tend to balance those five components of sound), each of the above examples has varying degrees of heterogeneity. But they share in having a sonic texture, which, through one component or a combination of several, is relatively saturated in its registral, durational, timbral, amplitudinal, and proximal chemistry.
In the case of “Herr, Unser Herrscher,” any potential lacunae are filled primarily by Bach’s use of the first three of Cox’s acoustic components: pitch, duration, and timbre. That is not to say that the other two, strength and location of origin are not at play here — they certainly are — but those first three components are the ones Bach explicitly determines in the score, and it is these parameters which are most responsible for filling the music’s vaulted architecture to the brim.
There’s Layers to It
As I mentioned earlier, the music is striated into several distinct layers, and there is an implied coupling of register and rhythm within these layers: lower sounds articulate more slowly (the cellos and violas at eighth notes), and high sounds exhibit a higher rate of articulation (the violins at sixteenth notes). An exception to this is the flutes and oboes, whose lines seem to soar above all the rest, in the very highest register of the music, with a wide periodicity. These layers remain fixed to their original roles throughout the duration of the movement, giving the piece its monolithic presence. The four solo voices, which enter later, vacillate between two textural modalities: homophony, as in the entrance, which prioritizes their salience from the instrumental texture and maximizes their collective diction and the delivery of the text; and extremely dense polyphony, which obfuscates the perception of text and embeds the vocalists in the larger oceanic totality of the music.
When listening to the piece, my ear sometimes wants to “zoom in” on one layer at a time, attempting to latch onto it and follow it into the abyss, periodically toggling my focus from one layer to the next. Other times, my listening attempts to apprehend the immense “wall of sound” in its entirety, which makes for a drastically different experience of the music. When this happens, I almost lose focus of the individual acoustic properties of the component layers, and instead become engulfed by the solemn harmonies and sensuous timbres that emerge from the plenum.
On Sensuality
Bach, more so than any other composer, is exceedingly good at hijacking my nervous system and making it physiologically react in ways that I cannot induce or anticipate. These intense visceral reactions are exactly what I described earlier when I recalled my experience of hearing the Toccata and Fugue for the first time as a kid. The fact that a good performance of some of Bach’s most resplendent works (like, say, Benjamin Alard’s recording of BWV831) is able to intoxicate my mind and engage my entire body through its acoustic impact demonstrates his lasting mastery of manipulating my emotions through this most powerful of senses. In Sonic Virtuality: Sound as Emergent Perception, Grimshaw and Garner explain the neurological coupling of aurality and emotional affect: “human recognition of emotion peaks during exposure to sound wave stimuli, suggesting that audition has a greater association to affective response than any other mode of sensory input.”⁵ This, to me, is a way of saying in so many words that music is an extraordinary conduit for sensual experience.
In a recent interview with John Butt,⁶ I asked him about what it is that makes Bach so good at imbuing his music with such potent sensualism, and he offered his insight:
“At the structural, compositional level, it’s the supreme control of dissonance and its resolution, and often on several different levels simultaneously. Bach has a wonderful sense of tension and release, which I would imagine is to a certain extent the primary dynamic of any sensualism. You know, it’s not just a sort of bland sugar, it’s the combination of flavors and the combination of senses which is the sensual thing. I think another aspect of it is also the overall timing; that I think Bach had a much greater awareness of our attention spans and how a phrase, even a simple four-bar phrase, has a trajectory to it and brings up a whole range of expectations. And it’s that insight, I think, into the way our senses work really, which is absolutely extreme in Bach. It’s almost like he puts a microscope to his own experiences and those he observes in others, and somehow programs them into the music.”
The use of dissonance is especially active in “Herr, Unser Herrscher,” particularly in those “soaring” oboe and flute lines, as an agent of sensual sound. As Alex Ross summarizes it, these wind lines provide “a twinge of harmonic pain — one oboe sounding an E-flat against another oboe’s held D. Oboes are piercing by nature; to place them a half step apart triggers an aggressive acoustic roughness, as when car horns lean on adjacent pitches. In the next several bars, more dissonances accumulate, sustaining tension”. And dissonance relates directly to the issue of acoustic impact because dissonance is, at its most base level, an acoustic phenomenon. From a physical perspective, dissonance is the interference of two or more proximate, incompatible frequencies which clash in the air as well as in the cochlea of the listener’s ear.⁷ A musical definition expresses the same idea, just with different terminology.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a prominent philosopher and polymath of Bach’s time, offered a metaphysical take on dissonance, writing: “The most confused discord fits into the order of the most exquisite harmony unexpectedly, as a painting is set off by shadow.”⁸ This is a sentiment that rings considerably true in the context of “Herr, Unser Herrscher.” And Alex Ross is correct in attributing that sustained tension in the movement, which lasts throughout, to the grinding counterpoint in this highest stratum of the winds. While the vocal and string lines create momentum and seethe beneath, these wind lines augment the impactful sensuality of the affect by providing a grating psychoacoustic dimension to the music, which transcends the exosonic (evironmental) resonant space, and physically penetrates the endosonic (anatomical) hearing apparatus of the listener (which might be what Cox means when he describes sounds “entering us”). This is what happens when Bach Pulls out All the Stops, and is but one way his music literally “hijacks” my nervous system.
Conclusion
There is a proliferation of texts that approach the St. John Passion (and Bach’s music in general) from various theoretical, hermeneutic, semiological, historical, and biographical perspectives, and these approaches offer significant insight into the contexts and mechanics of this music. But for me, precious little scholarship privileges the experiential aspect of Bach’s music by instead taking into account the cognitive-affective perception of the music’s acoustic properties. Maybe this is for the better. Perception is fundamentally subjective after all, and, short of conducting neurological case studies with MRI machines and EEG sensors, the most we can do to “analyze” the perceptual impact of Bach’s music is simply to describe our personal subjective experience of it. For me, that personal experience is a secular, 21st-century one that prioritizes the visceral sound of the music above any textual interpretations or mathematical obsessions, which to me are of important analytical concern but have little to do with listening. As I wrote in the beginning: many of my observations about “Herr, Unser Herrscher,” do apply to my experience of Bach’s music as a whole, though the extensive nuance of this music’s impact remains wholly ineffable.
Describing how this music feels is one thing; attempting to express what it means is another thing entirely. Composer Helmut Lachenmann writes:
“I do not know what Bach’s music might ‘mean’ for me. I even do not know what the sun might mean to me: I cannot live without it, but it is totally far away. The magic power of Bach’s music is more radical and actual to me as most all of our contemporary gymnastics. However, most people just love Bach as a Baroque idyll — which is misusable like a drug. We should not just enjoy it like a gastronomic pleasure — we should feel the creative energy of this music as a provocation and as a challenge: as an invitation to go on searching our own way in our time.” ⁹
¹ Cox, Arnie. Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking. Chapter 8: “Musical Affect”. Indiana University Press, 2017. (176–253)
² Butt, John E. “Performing Bach.” Rayson Huang Lecture-Demonstration. 21 Apr. 2017, Hong Kong, Grand Hall, Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre, The University of Hong Kong. Accessed on Youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5psbucewXo
³ (Though Arnie Cox categorizes “Chills as a fear response” as a separate avenue of musical affective experience, I assert that the experience of chills is inextricable from the effects of perceiving acoustic impact).
⁴ Ross, Alex. “Bach’s Holy Dread.” The New Yorker, 26 Dec. 2016, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/bachs-holy-dread
⁵ Grimshaw, Mark, and Tom Garner. Sonic Virtuality: Sound as Emergent Perception. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015. (40–88)
⁶ Mastel, Joshua, and John Butt. “The Sound of Bach’s Passions.” Phone Interview and transcript. 1 May, 2020. Audio accessible at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7noBy0pJ14
⁷ Bertolaso, Marta, and Nicola di Stefano. “Understanding Musical Consonance and Dissonance: Epistemological Considerations from a Systemic Perspective.” Systems, 2014, ii. (568–570)
⁸ Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: sämtliche Schriften Und Briefe. Akademie-Verlag, 1954. (VI iii 126)
⁹ Lachenmann, Helmut. Program notes: “Helmut Lachenmann + Bach.” Helmut Lachenmann + Bach, Miller Theater at Columbia University, New York, NY, 2015. Bach, Revisited.
