Passages That Bother Me, Episode 1

January 04, 2016

Welcome to 2016, and the first installment of a rare topic which I may revive from time to time, namely: passages in Bach's music that bother me. There aren't many of them, but, well, it happens. Today I'm discussing a passage from the first Bourreé from the English Suite No. 2 in A Minor. Here is the piece played in its entirety in a straightforward albeit not very exciting manner on harpsichord by Martin Galling.

Now, here is the passage that bothers me. It's the final phrase of the piece.

And here's why it bothers me. It sounds like there are wrong notes here. Take a look at the upper voice: a figure made of two parts, both of which are ascending. In the image below, I've colored the notes of the lower part red to separate them from the upper part. Keep your eyes on the red notes as you listen to the passage again. At least one of those notes should leap out at you as sounding wrong.

Did you hear it? Okay, first some general remarks. The upper part is very logical, ascending by step each bar, and also ascending by at least one chromatic alteration each half bar. The lower part of the upper voice however is not so orderly. It ascends, but seems to willfully resist cooperating with the upper part, instead hanging on the A for two full bars, then stepping up to B for a bar, then C for a bar, and finally stepping up D to E in the next bar, just before the two parts become one again.

Now besides the fact that the parts aren't agreeing, what bothers me about this is that bad doublings result from the lower part against the bass voice, and it is the first of these bad doublings that should have leaped out at you when focusing on those red notes. It is in the fourth bar of the upper system, the A octave doubling against the bass. This sounds wrong because that A is the 7th of a B dominant 7 structure in that half of the bar, which anyone trained in harmony knows naturally resolves down by step, and for this reason (and also just because it will tend to "stick out") shouldn't be doubled. If it has to be doubled, then it should be doubled in contrary motion. That's what Bach has done here, but the motion of the upper part is too slow to be heard as contrary motion. It just sounds like a bad doubling. That lower part of the upper voice has been harping on that A already for a bar and a half. Why repeat it here when it doesn't need to be repeated, and the note it moves to next works better? That note should definitely be a B, not an A. Problem solved.

There is another doubling that bothers me: the C two bars later, also a doubled 7th, but this is a lower neighbor in the bass voice on the up beat, so it doesn't sound as bad as the other doubled 7th. It's a harder one to get around, though of course there are ways. Here is an analysis showing how each of the lower notes in the upper voice is functioning within the harmony, also marking the doubled 7ths.

Let's take a look at some ways Bach could have written this passage which would not bother me so much. Here is a variant in which both of the upper parts cooperate, so that the lower part steps up in the same way the upper part does. The letters in parentheses are the names of the notes in the lower part of the upper voice. Look how nice and orderly it is!

To me this sounds better than what Bach wrote. The upper voice is more uniform, and the bad doublings are avoided. An argument that could be made against it is that maybe it's a bit dull in comparison, so here is another option in which the measure from Bach's version where the lower part steps from D to E is taken as a model for a pattern beginning after one measure of A in the lower part. The result is a middle ground between Bach's version and the more conventional one above. The lower part ascends in a more orderly way, avoids the bad doubling of the A, and is still interesting in itself. (You may also notice that I changed a note in the bass voice to avoid the doubled C which still happens when this pattern is used.)

Well there you have it. Give another listen to the whole piece and see what you think. Am I right? Wrong? Of course I'm right. I like Bach's version because it's out of kilter, and maybe it has a story to tell. Let's say that the upper part is like a parent who says to its child (the lower part) "Come on, we're going up and up — here we go!" but the child resists, and says "I don't want to go!" only to be dragged along up and up eventually in a shallow parabolic curve. My revisions lack this kind of drama. They are more orderly, and as a result maybe they aren't as interesting. But, honestly, I think my versions sound better. That is my conclusion!

See you next time, when I'll discuss a few of the times that Bach deliberately wrote parallell octaves, (and no, I'm not talking about the Toccata in D Minor or the Fugue in E Minor).

Happy New Year,
Aaron

P.S. The Dm7 in the fifth bar of the analysis should probably really be labeled as F Maj7 on the downbeat. The E7 in the preceding bar then can be shown to move in a standard progression (deceptive resolution), and the E is a suspended Major 7th against the F above it as a root, instead of a suspended 9th against the 3rd above it with no root. I dispensed with the F Maj7 label because of the downward resolution of the suspended E to the D. It's really both things. F Maj7 on the downbeat which changes to Dm7 on beat two.