The Thought of Bach
One of the advantages of being European royalty in the 18th century was the opportunity to indulge your cultural preferences at a very high level. King Frederick the Great of Prussia loved music. He played the flute competently himself, and he also dabbled in composing. He was enchanted by the technical improvements which had allowed the harpsichord to give rise to the pianoforte, and he was a patron of Gottfried Silbermann, the German organ builder who was working to perfect the new instrument. Legend has it that the king at one point owned fifteen Silbermann pianos. You can do that when you are king.
Frederick also had the greatness of soul to recognize and admire genius that was orders of magnitude beyond his own skill. In 1747, when Johann Sebastian Bach arrived in Potsdam to visit his son, Carl Phillipe Emanuel, Frederick immediately canceled the scheduled musical entertainment for the court that evening, and summoned the elder Bach to the palace, before he had even changed out of his traveling clothes. Excited to show his novel instruments to the greatest musical talent of the age, the king led his guest from room to room, inviting him to play every piano. Bach obliged, improvising an original composition at each one. At one point, he asked Frederick to give him a short theme of notes, which Bach then immediately played as an extemporaneous fugue. The fascinated king, wishing to see how far this improvisation could be pushed, challenged him to create one with six different voices, but this Bach could not do on the spot. He met the challenge with another, easier theme, and the next day they repeated the same process by visiting in turn many of the notable organs of Potsdam, with Bach producing spontaneous music at each one.
Frederick was enchanted, and it seems that the elder Bach in turn was flattered and appreciative. Upon his return home to Leipzig, he composed a series of fugues and canons based on the theme proposed by Frederick, including one for six voices, and sent them to the monarch, inscribed as what he called a “musical offering.” In this collection of compositions, Bach employed all the techniques for ‘canonizing’ a theme that we heard described in the reading. The theme is offset in time and pitch, turned backward and upside down, augmented and diminished, and reformulated in every possible manner. The resulting pieces are viable musically, but quite challenging to play, and Bach didn’t actually write them out for the king, but rather set them up as a series of hints, something like musical crossword puzzles, for Frederick to solve by filling in what was missing. He could do this because the forms of the canon and fugue preserve the information that is established in the original theme, and once you understand how the composer is operating on it, you can figure out what has to happen next – that is, if you know something about music!
Music has always been an interesting intersection between the intellectual and the aesthetic. When we listen to music for its beauty and emotional impact, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it is actually a form of information, but this is what has enabled the various technologies of reproduction to make music of all kinds so accessible in our era. In this generation, we take for granted that music can be preserved, that is to say recorded, and that the volume of any instrument or performer can be adjusted to our satisfaction, both through electronic manipulation. It is worth remembering that neither of these capacities was available to Johann Sebastian and King Frederick.
Indeed, it was the function of loudness that drove the development of both the organ and the piano as keyboard instruments. The pianoforte, or ‘soft/loud’ from the Italian, was a modification of the harpsichord that enabled the player to make some notes sound louder or softer than others, depending on how firmly the keys are struck, allowing for a far more expressive performance. Nevertheless, the absolute volume of the instrument has a limit. For large public events in massive spaces like a cathedral, the challenge before the invention of electric amplification was to create sound that was loud enough to be heard by everyone. The solution to this dilemma was to force large quantities of air through pipes of different sizes; the more force behind the air, the greater the volume of sound. In early organs, where the mechanical connection between the controls and the pipes was direct, many instruments required a great deal of arm strength on the part of the player to hold down the keys. The other advantage of the organ system was that, unlike either the harpsichord or the piano, the note continues to sound for as long as the key is depressed, so that it is possible to hold notes or chords for as long as the composer or performer desires. This is the reason that organs are so commonly associated with churches; they were the instruments designed to produce music that would fill large buildings.
The purchase of this building’s Holtkamp organ in the early 1960s was a bone of contention to the congregation of the time. Some objected to it precisely because it contributed to a more ‘church-like' feel; others wanted it because the space was frequently being used as a public concert venue, for which a high quality organ would make it more attractive. Some did not wish for the visual intrusion into the minimalist architectural design of the room, and others felt that the $60,000 cost would be better spent on other endeavors. As is often the case with such debates, there were strong feelings, and hurt feelings, but ultimately the decision was to proceed. From a financial point of view, at least, this was not altogether improvident; the current value of our organ has been estimated at ¾ of a million dollars. Next Saturday, at 10:30, you will have an opportunity to hear it in full public glory, when we host an hour of the Twin Cities organ crawl, put on by the Minnesota Organ Guild, in honor of the 300th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach’s birth. Much as he and King Fredrick did in Potsdam all those years ago, many of Minnesota’s premier organists and organ fans are going to spend the day moving from one outstanding instrument to the next, hearing some of Bach’s most beloved and skilful compositions performed by the gifted musicians of our own day. This will be a once in a lifetime event, and I urge you not to miss it. I also urge you to be inspired to your highest level of outgoing welcome, so that our musical guests will remember FUS not only for the magnificence of our organ, but for the warmth of our hospitality as well.
Now Bach certainly wrote a great deal of religious music; after all, the church was by far the greatest consumer and patron of the arts until the Enlightenment had been well underway for sometime. Indeed, his Musical Offering to King Fredrick was noteworthy for being a secular composition. But what makes Bach’s music, and the thinking process by which he composed particularly the canons and fugues, interesting to me as a humanist, is not the use of scripture texts, or the format of masses or requiems. The interesting thing goes back to the character of music as information, and what makes it an intellectual as well as aesthetic enterprise. Bach’s music in particular is full of what Douglas Hofstadter calls isomorphisms, or what we might call in broader artistic terms, self-reference – that is, encoded information that reflects, or talks about, or refers back to, itself. Hofstadter was intrigued, as I am, by some elusive quality that is shared among four seemingly discreet kinds of human experience. It is found in music, where the work of Bach is one example. It is found in visual art, particularly in the paradoxical works of M. C. Escher, and Rene Magritte. You may be familiar with Escher’s endless staircases or waterfalls, that appear to flow back into themselves, or the example that appears in your program, of the two hands each drawing the other. You may recall Magritte’s famous detailed painting of a pipe, entitled, This Is Not A Pipe. Which it’s not, of course; it’s a painting. The same quality is present in certain areas of mathematics and logic, especially Kurt Goedel’s formal proof that every comprehensive mathematical system is necessarily either incomplete or inconsistent. If I tried to explain this proof in detail, my head would hurt, and we would be here all morning, but it works on the basis of paradoxical self-reference, much like the famous logical riddle about the statement, “I am a liar.” If I am a liar, then the statement must be true; in order for the statement itself to be a lie, I must be truthful. What all of these different puzzles have in common is that they cannot be resolved on the same plane or level of consciousness on which they are posed; they push us to take a mental step backwards, and to think about how we think. And this is what is most intriguing about them.
The thing that Hofstadter was primarily trying to think about was the nature of intelligence and consciousness; in particular, what is it that differentiates human consciousness from the artificial intelligence of a computer? And this is a question that has only become more interesting in the thirty years since he wrote Godel, Escher, Bach, with the explosion of computing capacity and the internet. The idea that he explores is that consciousness has something to do with the capacity to recognize self-reference, and to move intentionally among levels of awareness.
Let’s think about Escher’s Drawing Hands for a moment. There would be no problem, and much less interest, if it were merely a sketch of a human hand. We would say, unselfconsciously, “that’s a hand,” and thereby enter into the picture’s terms of reality. If it were an image of a human hand, drawing a human hand, we would be in some sense forced to experience, or acknowledge, two levels which might make us chuckle, but doesn’t constitute a logical problem. When the two hands are shown as each drawing the other, there is no logical resting place within the picture’s reality. We are forced to back up another level, and recognize that the whole thing is an image that was drawn by someone who is not part of the picture. But suppose that someone had taken a photograph of Escher while he was creating this work; would that exhaust the possible levels of reality? No, because now you have the reality within the photograph, and the higher level of the photographer who is taking it. But what if we had a photograph of that event? The same principle would apply, of course. And sooner or later, if the artist is successful, you realize that there is also the reality level of you, the observer, looking at the photograph of Escher creating the sketch of the hands drawing each other. Now if you have any inclination toward psychology, you might ponder how you feel about finding yourself in the role of the observer, and then, if you are weird for theology like me, you might ask something like, what does it mean about me as a human being, to be the kind of creature who asks how I feel about being the observer of a photograph of an artist creating a sketch of hands that are shown to be drawing each other. It is actually helpful to have a Bach canon playing in the background when you start asking these kinds of questions.
Which suggests another area of human experience that is related to this whole question of levels of reality, and that is humor. Part of what we find funny is the sudden and unexpected, but somehow congruent, slip from one level of reality to another. A pun, for instance, does this by yanking us out of the level at which language is transparent as a conveyor of information, to the level of observing the function of language as a collection of sounds. We know that language is that, of course, but most of the time, we are just going along not being aware of that level, until something startles us into thinking about it, and that moment of ‘wake up; there’s more going on here than you are paying attention to,’ as long as it is not threatening, feels amusing. This is why some people suggest that computers will never be able to make jokes, because they are inherently trapped in the level of awareness at which they are programmed to function, and cannot spontaneously move to a different level.
So is there something about this capacity that enables us both to watch ourselves watching ourselves, and to recognize that as much as we depend upon representational systems, in language or art or mathematics, in order to think and to communicate, none of them can ever be complete and perfectly coherent, that makes us distinctively human? There is this perception, which appears to be pretty universal, that there is something more going on in our being than meets the eye, or can be logically described. Many people solve the riddle by assuming that God, who is beyond our comprehension, has inserted into each of us a soul, that also somehow transcends the reach of our thought, no matter how carefully pursued. But I am not satisfied with this resignation of the problem, and I tend to think that the material universe is complex enough to support whatever it is about our consciousness that makes us such a peculiar life form. Bach was pointing to it; Escher was pointing to it; Goedel made it speak in mathematical form.
We have this strange, hard to describe ability to see the picture in terms of its own reality and as a created work of art at the same time; to hear the music and to understand its structure at the same time; to use the precision of mathematics to defeat the precision of mathematics. A kind of stereoscopic mental vision if you will, that gives dimension to the meaning of our existence, in the same way that the slight difference between our two eyes creates depth perspective in our sight. I am inclined think that there is one other kind of human experience that also rests upon this capacity for paradox, self-reflection, and movement between levels of reality, and that is the experience of reverence; the awareness in the same moment that life is both heartbreakingly brief, and utterly precious; that each of us is in a universal perspective infinitesimal, and yet the center of our own experienced universe. To be fully human is to live and move and have our being at several levels of perception all the time, and to move among the paradoxes with gentle amusement and wondering reverence. It is to embrace the mystery of a consciousness that by its own very nature can never fully explain itself; to be a finite creature contemplating the idea of infinity.
To me, this is what Bach is getting at in his beautifully self-referring loops of music; finding ways for the finite melody to point to the infinite harmony of all things; that all experience and all reality folds back upon itself and emerges again in new forms, losing no part of the truth and complexity of everything that went before. Much of it he framed for the church of his day, but the music is more enduring than the theology, for it expresses a more timeless and intriguing truth, not about god, but about who we are and how we know the world. The gallant genius who set musical puzzles to amuse a king is dust these several centuries; we of course cannot know what was in his mind at the moment of creative inspiration. In that sense, the thought of Bach is closed to us. Yet we who are privileged to hear the music to which he gave form, realized anew in the present day, certainly have our own thoughts of Bach, and the implications that we may discover in the work that he left to us.
Closing words:
We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started,
and know the place for the first time.
