How to hide incompetence

August 19, 2019

Let's say you've got good counterpoint chops, but you have trouble sorting out your ideas, and when it comes to form, you struggle. Here's how to cover that up.

1. Make it busy.
2. Add more ideas.
3. Use more techniques.
4. Make it long.

Any of these things will draw attention to your strengths and distract listeners away from your weaknesses.

If you need examples of how these tricks work, your hero is Johann Ludwig Krebs (1713-1780). Krebs could have been a great composer, but he wasn't. If only he had had a better teacher… oh, wait, Krebs was a student of Johann Sebastian Bach. In fact, it has been said that Krebs was Bach's best student. Some claim that even Bach himself said this. I think if Bach said this, he was just being polite. Bach had been a friend of Krebs's father, and Krebs jr. also worked for Bach. On the other hand, just because Bach was a great composer, that doesn't mean he was a great teacher. But his students tended to write very good counterpoint, so we guess Bach was a pretty good teacher. It's true that Krebs could write counterpoint very well. But there is a reason not many people today know who Krebs was. The reason is that Krebs was not a very good composer. Sadly, when it comes to his free organ works, he was a pretty bad composer. Why?

Despite his very Bach-like counterpoint, Krebs's music falls short. The main problems are too many unfocused ideas and a sense of timing and form that is all but nonexistent. A sort of mindlessness pervades Krebs's free organ music. Perhaps even worse, there is a sense of "Oh, I can do that too!" If one were to judge his music only by these free organ works, Krebs seems to be an 18th Century "wannabe" composer.

It is instructive to compare the organ music of Krebs to Bach's organ music. One can learn some things this way about what makes Bach's music so good. On the surface, Krebs's counterpoint often looks like Bach's, but important things are missing - things like reason, coherence, and purpose. Krebs's work is sort of like what artificial intelligence might be able to produce from studying Bach. AI produces brainless output. It has no mind and no soul. That is what Krebs's free organ music tends to sound like. Sometimes Krebs simply stole directly from Bach (which is incidentally something attempts at AI-Bach composition also have done). For example, in Krebs organ Toccata in a-Moll (Krebs-WV 411), there are a few bars which are suspiciously similar to Bach's Toccata in F-Dur BWV540. Listen and compare:

Krebs-WV411

Bach BWV540

Notice the pitch levels are even the same. This is not really so surprising, since we know that Krebs copied Bach's organ scores by hand (in fact many of Bach's works were preserved only as hand copies from Krebs!) Listen to a little more of both works, and the difference in quality between them is not hard to miss. Where Bach used a strong idea and worked it out brilliantly with perfect timing, Krebs simply stole the idea and dropped it into his music with no rhyme or reason. The idea appears briefly and has basically no relation to anything around it. Krebs even oversteps a very basic guideline and pushes the stolen sequence one step further than Bach did. Then music just keeps plodding on and on, for no real reason. There are numerous other instances of this kind of thievery. In this even more appalling example, Krebs lifted a sequence almost note for note out of Bach's Die Kunst der Fuga (The Art of Fugue).

Krebs Partita in B-Flat

Bach BWV 1080

Again, the pitch levels are the same. Conicidence? Not likely. (By the way, I've never seen anyone else point these things out.) That J.L.Krebs obviously had his mitts on The Art of Fugue seems like something musicologists should be looking into. Maybe they have and I just never heard about it. I suppose it's possible that Krebs slipped in these little quotes from his teacher on purpose as jokes, in order to get a rise out of Bach. But I don't get the sense that Krebs wanted his music to be funny. Or maybe these really are Krebs's ideas, gems amidst the chaos, and Bach cherry-picked them from Krebs to develop in his own music … and maybe unicorns exist.

Besides writing good counterpoint, technically speaking, what Bach was able to do better than anyone else was to tell a good story. In Bach's music, the technique alone is not only solid, and the ideas are not only strong, but the form is also balanced, the timing is right on, the drama is effective, and the feeling is authentic. In a good story, we care about what happens, we find meaning, we are moved emotionally, and by the end of the story, we feel a sense of catharsis. How that is done is not easy to understand or explain. But that's what Bach was able to achieve with his music, and that's what distinguishes his music from mere counterpoint.

Though Krebs fell short of being able to tell a good story, we can be grateful to him for teaching us thereby that writing good counterpoint, though it is a good start, is not enough. Not nearly enough! So far, Artificial Intelligence (which in fact means brainlessness and soullessness) teaches us something similar.

Maybe you have figured out by now that the tricks listed above don't actually work. When the music is busy, has lots of things in it, and is long, and technically dense, that is very likely to be a bad piece of music, where no coherent story is being told. Instead, it's similar to someone babbling. Babies babble. Most of us did this in our infancy. It was entertaining, for a while. It's how most of us learned to talk. As we get older, we have a choice to make: to continue to babble forever, using distraction to get by, or to grow up and get to work on telling good stories.

Best Regards,
Aaron