Dear old Bach

Finally, my piano teacher deemed me "expert enough" at the arrangement of the first part of Moonlight Sonata and moved me on to another piece. (I'm still working on "Hunting Song," though).

The new piece I've started on is an arrangement of one of the themelets from "Wachet auf," better known to Anglophones as "Sleepers awake"

I said before I didn't like Schumann much, after playing a couple of his pieces? Well, I've decided after learning a few Bach pieces that I love and respect Bach even more as a composer than I did before.

For one thing, his pieces have that beautiful logic to them. Things make sense to me in them. The chord progressions sound "right," like there is no other progression that would work better. (I'm noticing that with the left-hand arrangement for "Wachet Auf" - at least in the first part).

I once had a friend who disdained Bach, who claimed his music was "too mathematical" for them. I don't know about that - it was the precision and the order that I always loved so much. Maybe I'm excessively left-brained (to use a concept that's apparently recently been discredited), but I like that order.

Madeline L'Engle once wrote about "chaos vs. cosmos," where the idea was that some people tended to believe there was an underlying order to the universe, that somehow things would sort out right at the end, and artists who ascribed to that belief would present "cosmos" - sort of an ordered rightness, the idea that there is an underlying good. On the other hand, "chaos" was people who did not see those patterns, who did not believe (I may be over extending her ideas here) that there was an underlying Good to the universe, a Good that would eventually win out over Evil.

Bach had to have been someone who believed in cosmos. I don't mean just because he was involved in the church, because he directed choirs and wrote lots of sacred music; when I listen to his music I can *hear* that he believed there was an underlying order to the universe. And I love that, I find it tremendously comforting. Listening to Bach makes me feel better when I'm distressed.

So it makes me happy to have another piece of his to work on, one that's familiar but now that I see the music for it (and yes, it's an arrangement of just one of the themes, but still), it's like I can see the underlying structure of his "argument," so to speak, it's like I can see some of his reasoning (the chord progressions) and it makes sense.

It's kind of like, I don't know...having heard for years about some ecological theory, maybe even teaching it, and then finally seeing the data and data analysis that led up to the development of the theory. It's kind of like a peek behind the curtain.

Or it's like those rare moments where, for just a second, just a tiny second, I feel like I understand things, like the cosmology and God and everything kind of makes sense. (Of course I immediately forget it, and I maybe never actually "had" it, but for a moment I feel like I understand).

I will say I'm a bit disappointed (I ran through the entire right-hand part of the piece; I'm supposed to focus on the first dozen measures or so with both hands) that the section I'm working from doesn't go far enough to include the tune of "A Mighty Fortress is our God," which Bach worked into the cantata later on. That's one of my favorite hymns and it sounds so good as part of the cantata. (When the recording of it I have is playing, I sing along - even though I have to reach 'way down' because the setting is really too low for me - when that part comes along). I love the hymn both for the tune and for the words. (both written by Luther; part of the words are based on Psalm 46).

It's funny how sometimes your own feelings color the meaning. There's a line in there that is something like, "And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us," which I know really means that people are tempted to slide into depravity, I often hear it in a way that I think perhaps more reflects my own feelings and life: I "hear" the word "undo" as more like "be overwhelmed by," in the sense of, as when I watch the evening news and put my head in my hands, because there's so much cruelty in this world, and it's easy to give in to despair. Or something.

So anyway, even though (after 2 days' practice) I can only barely pick out the first dozen measures or so with both hands, it still pleases me to be playing it.