Chapter 3: Bach’s Musical Science and the Imitation of Nature
“For Bach, art lay between the reality of the world – nature – and God, who ordered this reality.” -- Christoph Wolff
Bach, the Musical Scientist
In his biography Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff begins with a ten-page essay, a Proloque titled “Bach and the Notion of Musical Science,” which sets forth the thesis that Bach preferred to refer to himself as “one who produces works of musical science” rather than a “mere practitioner of music”. Wolff writes:
Some two months after his fifty-second birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach opened a copy of a new, fashionable, and deliberately progressive music periodical and found himself the subject of a fierce attack. “Mr. Bach,” he read, “is the most eminent of the music makers (Musicanten) in Leipzig.” So began an unsigned controversial piece of music journalism (in the form of a letter) published in 1737…….And while the sentence hardly strikes us today as inflammatory, the article’s author and editor of the periodical, a twenty-nine-year-old upstart named Johann Adolph Scheibe, knew that the terms “eminent” and “music maker” contradicted one another……
Of the numerous critical points in this vitriolic yet ultimately inconsequential piece of early music criticism, what offended Bach the most was being referred to as a Musicant – a mere practitioner. But Bach also had his defenders. In an elaborate response published the following year, Johann Abraham Birnbaum, a lecturer in rhetoric at Leipzig University, immediately took issue with the utterly inappropriate label Musicant as applied to Bach (who apparently was enraged by Scheibe’s assault.[1]
It is understandable why Bach did not like being labeled a mere “musician” as this is analogous to a highly trained classical pianist being called a “piano player” or a world-class violinist being called a “fiddler.” Bach’s musical abilities were comprehensive and staggering, as Wolff emphasizes later in the Prologue while describing the closing section of Bach’s obituary written by Johann Agricola and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach:
In the closing section of the Obituary, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Agricola enumerate further talents of Bach’s: his ability to recognize without an instant’s hesitation the intricate developmental potential of a musical subject, his inclination toward a serious style without rejecting the comic, his facility in reading large scores, his fine musical ear, and his skill in conducting. The confident declaration that “Bach was the greatest organist and clavier player that we have ever had” is followed by observations regarding his art of improvisation and his use of “strange, new, expressive, and beautiful ideas,” his “most perfect accuracy in performance,” his invention of a new fingering system, his intimate knowledge of organ construction, his facility in tuning the harpsichord, and the fact that “he knew of no tonalities that, because of pure intonation, one must avoid,” a noteworthy comment in those days when few keyboard performers dared to wander beyond keys with three sharps or flats.[2]
Wolff explains later in the Prologue that at the heart of what Bach considered musical science was the Aristotelian principle “art imitates nature,” as described by Birnbaum:
The essential aims of true art are to imitate nature, and, where necessary, to aid it. If art imitates nature, then indisputably the natural element must everywhere shine through in works of art. Accordingly it is impossible that art should take away the natural element from those things in which it imitates nature – including music. If art aids nature, then its aim is to preserve it, and to improve its condition; certainly not to destroy it. Many things are delivered to us by nature in the most misshapen states, which, however, acquire the most beautiful appearance when they have been formed by art. Thus, art lends nature a beauty it lacks, and increases the beauty it possesses. Now, the greater the art is – that is, the more industriously and painstakingly it works at the improvement of nature – the more brilliantly shines the beauty thus brought into being. Accordingly, it is impossible that the greatest art should darken the beauty of a thing.[3]
Wolff sums up the topics of Bach, art, and music with the statement, “For Bach, art lay between the reality of the world – nature – and God, who ordered this reality.”
Next, Wolff cites Agricola who referred to the great scientist, Isaac Newton (1643-1727), in his writing about the recently deceased J.S. Bach. Wolff makes parallels between the giant of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, Isaac Newton, and the compositional science of Bach:
And under the umbrella of seventeenth-century Lutheran theology, Bach’s musical discoveries – like Newton’s scientific advances, which Bach almost certainly did not know – took him to the areas of the creative mind undreamed of before and ultimately pointed to the operations of God.
If the natural philosophy of Bach’s time defined itself as “a science of all things that teaches us how and why they are or can be,” Bach’s musical philosophy might well be understood analogously: as the science of musical phenomena that teaches us how and why they are or can be, and also how they relate to nature – God’s creation and Newton’s world system.[4]
Arguably the most ubiquitous aspect of the operations of God and the imitation of nature is the phenomenon of symmetry. Most of God’s creations, as well as much of nature itself, are imbued with symmetry either perfect or slightly imperfect. Virtually all humans, larger animals, smaller animals, insects, raindrops, snowflakes are symmetrical in some way. For example, most babies are born with two arms, one on each side of the body. This is symmetry. A person’s face is the same on each side (with slight imperfections). This is symmetry. The Taj Mahal as well as many other notable structures throughout human history were designed to be symmetrical in one or more ways. The Christian theological tenet of The Alpha & The Omega, the first and the last, is one of ultimate symmetry and unity. Hence, what could better point to the operations of God and the imitation of nature than musical elements that symbolize The Alpha & The Omega? We shall see how Bach achieved this fascinating “secret” trademark in the next chapter.
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Endnotes
[1] Christoph Wolff. Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New York, London, W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 1.
[2] Wolff, 4.
[3] Wolff, 5.
[4] Wolff, 7.
