10 ms·

What Did Bach Sound Like to Bach?

139 points by tintinnabula 6y ago

ocfnash 6y ago
Not strictly related but I recall once hearing that Bach may have never heard his Brandenburg concertos performed. Looking at Wikipedia now I see: "Because King Frederick William I of Prussia was not a significant patron of the arts, Christian Ludwig seems to have lacked the musicians in his Berlin ensemble to perform the concertos. The full score was left unused in the Margrave's library until his death in 1734 [and] was only rediscovered in the archives of Brandenburg by Siegfried Wilhelm Dehn in 1849" I have just switched them on and feel very grateful that I can.
- dddddaviddddd 6y ago
  Nor the Mass in B Minor, again because the resources to perform it were never available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_B_minor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_B_minor
idoubtit 6y ago
> As interest in the early music movement has grown, performers and musicologists have increasingly turned to period instruments, smaller ensembles, and faster tempos to try to more faithfully recreate the music of the past. This is misleading. The interest in baroque music grew strongly in the 50s. The turn toward period instruments, smaller ensembles, and faster tempos appeared at the end of the 60s, and was steadily established in the 70s with great leaders like Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. There have been little changes over the past 30 years. This looks like a fun but futile project. Though I strongly relate to the desire to know more about Bach's music. As Émile Cioran wrote, "Bach's music is the only argument proving that the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure".
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure. Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure. * Emil Cioran, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7427027 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7427027 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran
  - spindle 6y ago
    And Gil Shaham on Bach (70-second video): https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=n6d6JEZCObg https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=n6d6JEZCObg
  - teilo 6y ago
    A close friend of mine did his doctorate on Emil Cioran: https://www.amazon.com/Emil-Cioran-cr%C3%ADtica-progreso-hist%C3%B3rico/dp/1722723491 https://www.amazon.com/Emil-Cioran-cr%C3%ADtica-progreso-his... https://www.amazon.com/Emil-Cioran-Criticism-Historical-Progress/dp/0648499626 https://www.amazon.com/Emil-Cioran-Criticism-Historical-Prog...
- rrmm 6y ago
  The hard part is I don't think we hear harmony the same way. The way we hear music, what makes sense about music, is a function of the music we've listened to in our culture as we have matured. I don't think we can really ever cross that gap. And it's probably not a bad thing. We have a much broader palette of sounds and harmony to draw from. Early music especially had a much different theory of harmony.
  - rrmm 6y ago
    Probably the same thing can be said about shakespeare as well. We just have a very wildly different context than its contemporaneous viewers. And our culture and language as it is now is hugely influenced by all of shakespeare's works that we probably miss a lot of what could have been novel and interesting about it.
  - dharma1 6y ago
    This is interesting - I think going backwards in time, different musical harmonic/sound conventions still make "sense" to us. Like you could be listening do music from nearly any period of time from the past 500+ years and it would broadly "make sense" to the listener, even if you weren't directly exposed to it before (with the exception of perhaps experimental 20th century atonal classical music, or microtonal music from other cultures). But I'm not sure it works the other way around - if you took a 17th century person and played music from the last 50-100 years to them - Michael Jackson, bossa nova, Debussy, Smashing Pumpkins, whatever - they probably wouldn't "get it".
    - rrmm 6y ago
      Some stuff based on pentatonic scales (blues) would probably make sense. From what I recall it's almost universal in different cultures. Bobby Mcferrin has a fun demo about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk But yeah I bet some jazz would be baffling. I wonder how fast it'd take people to get into it. You could probably find some indigneous populations to work with.
      - 6y ago
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  > The turn toward period instruments, smaller ensembles, and faster tempos appeared at the end of the 60s, and was steadily established in the 70s with great leaders like Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Is Harnoncourt generally associated with fast tempos? I thought the opposite. His recording of Händel's Messiah runs to 141 minutes (according to Amazon, I don't have my copy here). Almost all other performances I've come across try to squeeze it into two hours. I much prefer Harnoncourt's slower tempo. Though he might have treated other pieces differently.
  - alessivs 6y ago
    > Is Harnoncourt generally associated with fast tempos? Historically informed performance feeds on research on the place, time, established practices, theoretical treatises, instrument construction limitations, interpretative styles, etc. where the music took place. The approach to interpretation is revised upon new discovery. Faster tempi (than romantically-inclined interpretations) are sometimes incidental outcomes, and not exclusive to Harnoncourt. One ingredient for the observation, is at the time Harnoncourt was making strides in the 1950s, conductors were reading tempo markings of old music as if the metronome had already been invented (it is an early 1800s invention). Many famous pieces marked adagio, andante, largo, lento, (denoting a slow tempo) were performed comparatively faster than the romantic readings, as such markings were used quite liberally. Another ingredient is that Harnoncourt had a unique reading of orchestral classical pieces that emphasized tempo and dynamic contrast (e.g. Mozart piano concerti, Beethoven symphonies), which may lead to perceive sections were played faster than usual. And I don't think those traits were set on stone in his idearium. If he were alive today, my impression is he would revise his decades-old reading of Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers, perhaps with slower tempo, applying transpositions in the Magnificat, and refraining from doubling strings and brass in the Dixit Dominus. That is to say, it's not really about tempo, or any specific performance feature, though that's all that may come to our ears, or that we may be able to understand without extensive music knowledge.
  - masswerk 6y ago
    Someone I would have associated more easily with faster tempi is Trevor Pinnock. However, there are some rather fast interpretations by Harnoncourt (maybe more likely of Händel than Bach)
- Bud 6y ago
  Professional period-performance singer here: Definitely not true that "there have been little changes over the past 30 years"; both the scholarly understanding of performance practice, and the performances themselves, have radically advanced and matured since 1990.
  - idoubtit 6y ago
    I did not mean to say nothing has changed, but, as a naive listener, the interpretation of baroque music, and especially Bach's cantata, is not radically different now from what it was in the 1990s. Bach's cantatas under Karl Richter are totally different from Gustav Leonhardt recordings just 10 or 20 years later. Add 20 years to get around 1990, and Philippe Herreweghe, Masaaki Suzuki or Christophe Coin bring some obvious changes. For each of them I can't notice deep changes in their more recent recordings. But I admit that I can't name any conductor for Bach's cantatas that has started conducting in the 21st century. I don't think I have any recording like this. Recommandations are welcomed.
rpz 6y ago
Honestly I was expecting the article to discuss tuning/temperament! Has anybody listened to Bach or Chopin's preludes played on a well tempered piano? To me it feels as if those pieces were written to take advantage of the different purities/impurities of certain intervals in each key.
- gjm11 6y ago
  There's a recording of the WTC by Richard Egarr that uses the tuning system derived by Bradley Lehman from the squiggles on the cover-page of the WTC manuscript. (See http://www.larips.com/ http://www.larips.com/ for more about that.) It sounds pretty good to me, though I'm far from being an expert. (Caveat: Some but not all listeners, of whom I am one, hear an annoying mains-hum-like sound on the Egarr CDs. I don't know whether it's a thing that affects some CDs but not others, or whether it's filtered out by some reproduction equipment but not all, or what.)
- 3131s 6y ago
  Composers did take advantage of the interesting properties of earlier temperaments. With a non-equal temperament each key signature has a characteristic tonality due to its particular series of intervals, and a key that is 'far away' from the home key that an instrument is tuned for can have harsher sounding intervals. Equal temperaments like 12-TET were favored at least in part because they opened up possibilities for romantic era composers interested in exploring new ideas in modal harmony and more elaborate song structures.
- peterkos 6y ago
  In a similar vein, singing to a more "natural" tuning (i.e. quarter-comma mean tone) is insanely more comfortable. Adam Newley and 12Tone on youtube have excellent videos that explore this topic further!
stereo 6y ago
If you've never heard Bach performed on period instruments, you're in for a treat. Here's a performance of the third Brandenburg concerto by the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSHLlidrZh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSHLlidrZh8 Compared to "normal" instruments, you'll hear something that's a lot lighter, less monumental, more fun, a bit faster especially in the third movement. I was lucky enough to see them live a few times, and it's really great to hear how much they listen to each other, how much work has gone into their performance, and how much fun they're having, with big smiles and happy looks.
- ekrebs 6y ago
  Here’s another link that shows the musicians. You’re right they are having a blast. Thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole this morning. https://youtu.be/pdsyNwUoON0 https://youtu.be/pdsyNwUoON0
- tim333 6y ago
  I was recently rather taken by the opening of the St John Passion by Sukuki https://youtu.be/SiKgrevzT-g https://youtu.be/SiKgrevzT-g
  - idoubtit 6y ago
    The director's name is Masaaki Suzuki.
    - tim333 6y ago
      Oops - typo
- lordleft 6y ago
  You've honed in on why I love listening to Bach on period instruments; it's kind of a musical analogue to folks who are really into some niche of CS, propelled purely by love and obsession. That passion comes through in the music.
- dvcrn 6y ago
_n_b_ 6y ago
Related, the standard pitch for an orchestra has also changed over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#History_of_pitch_standards_in_Western_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#History_of_pitch...
quijoteuniv 6y ago
Great tittle for an article! :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dwheeler 6y ago
A follow-up article should be, "What did older Beethoven sound like to the older Beethoven?" (provides recording of silence)
- tim333 6y ago
  He could probably hear it in his head to an extent.
  - rectang 6y ago
    Naturally he could, but the feedback loop was broken, so he wasn't able to refine his compositions as effectively. A lot of late period Beethoven has aspects which are "off" somehow. But the fact that Beethoven produced something which was even coherent under those conditions is just mind boggling.
    - senderista 6y ago
      The arrangement may sound off occasionally (great conductors like Mahler or Mendelssohn couldn’t always get their orchestration right the first time either), but the music itself certainly didn’t suffer. Yes, late Beethoven is often just weird, but not in any amateurish way.
      - rectang 6y ago
        I don't hear it so much in arrangement, but in things like harmonic rhythm or harmonies. So that means we disagree, because harmonic rhythm is an aspect of the "music" by anybody's definition. I wrote about a couple examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104132 I don't think "amateurish" is a good word. It's more of an extremely accomplished work but needing an additional round of editing. Stuff which would have been obvious to Beethoven had he actually been able to hear it, but since he never got the chance to, it never got corrected.
        senderista 6y ago
dwheeler 6y ago
This is very cool. There's similar work that reveals how Byzantine choral work sounded in the Hagia Sophia, which I find to be beautiful in an unearthly way: http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/hear-the-sound-of-the-hagia-sophia-recreated-in-authentic-byzantine-chant.html http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/hear-the-sound-of-the-hag...
rabidonrails 6y ago
Reminds me of this excellent video with Ben Zander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2S-OjTb4nU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2S-OjTb4nU Especially at this part: https://youtu.be/b2S-OjTb4nU?t=233 https://youtu.be/b2S-OjTb4nU?t=233
lordleft 6y ago
I love listening to Bach on period music. I especially enjoy the sound of the harpsichord.
rectang 6y ago
Listening on period instuments can be revelatory. The first movement of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata, which is murky on a modern piano, is comparatively clearer on the fortepiano. The fortepiano has much faster and more pronounced decay (in the Attack-Decay-Sustain-Release ADSR formulation) and weaker bass, but that punchiness works well for the Waldstein as it makes it easier to hear the rhythm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fhmm_hfZAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fhmm_hfZAo As a complement to period instruments, I found that Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos also made me listen to Bach in a new light. Physical low-register instruments do not speak all that clearly — not even today, and not in Bach's time either. Compare a string bass with an electric bass — or even more starkly, a synthesizer bass! The bass register in Switched-On Bach has much cleaner, more identifiable pitch than Bach would have heard from a period ensemble playing one of the Brandenburg Concerti. But is one actually more "true" to Bach than the other? My feeling is that what Bach heard in his head were closer to a synthesizer version than a baroque chamber ensemble version. Because even though a good composer strives to write for a medium and compensate for the strengths and weaknesses of actual instruments, the essence of Bach is counterpoint and harmony, not orchestration.
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  Wendy Carlos is a well-known name (mostly for the Clockwork Orange soundtrack I think), but her recordings are not as accessible as they ought to be. That is, there are no (legal) digital downloads or streaming options for her oeuvre, and the CD's and records have been out of print for years. I only recently discovered Switched-On Bach (and the other three albums that followed: Switched-On Bach II, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, and Switched-On Brandenburgs), and you are right; these are really interesting performances of such well-known classical works. Worth exploring! And for a light classical snack: she created a 'sequel' to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals with 'Weird Al' Yankovic in 1989!
  - gregsadetsky 6y ago
    Side 1 of Switched on Bach on IA: https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach2 https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach2 Side 2: https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach1 https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach1 I also (weirdly?) found them hosted on the site of the Computer History Museum: Side 1 https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/sound-recording/2016/05/102695358-04-01-acc.mp3 https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/sound-r... Side 2 https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/sound-recording/2016/05/102695358-04-02-acc.mp3 https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/sound-r... An incredible masterpiece.
edgarvaldes 6y ago
Why is Bach more prevalent in HN discussions than, say, Mozart or Beethoven?
- asimpletune 6y ago
  Wild guess here, obviously I don’t know what everyone is thinking, but Bach’s music was very beautiful in an almost mathematical sense. Compositions where the right and left hand are exactly the same but delayed by a bar or two, pieces that are the same played forwards and backwards, etc... Bach was a true genius, as were Mozart and Beethoven, but I think the symmetry of Bach’s music around the axis of time and harmony could be why he’s more prevalent on HN.
- lwb 6y ago
  In my experience, Bach appeals more to analytical and mathematical types because the music relies less on dramatic swells and romantic melodies, and more on complex, baroque counterpoint that requires multiple listens to truly unravel. That and it makes people feel smart.
teilo 6y ago
I visited Thomaskirche a few years ago. Please tell me they are going to release multi-channel impulse response files which represent the work they have done on this project! That would allow us to simulate this historic space at home. Aural archeology!
vagab0nd 6y ago
No one has mentioned the crab canon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU

139 points by tintinnabula 6y ago

Not strictly related but I recall once hearing that Bach may have never heard his Brandenburg concertos performed. Looking at Wikipedia now I see: "Because King Frederick William I of Prussia was not a significant patron of the arts, Christian Ludwig seems to have lacked the musicians in his Berlin ensemble to perform the concertos. The full score was left unused in the Margrave's library until his death in 1734 [and] was only rediscovered in the archives of Brandenburg by Siegfried Wilhelm Dehn in 1849" I have just switched them on and feel very grateful that I can.

dddddaviddddd 6y ago
Nor the Mass in B Minor, again because the resources to perform it were never available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_B_minor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_B_minor

idoubtit 6y ago

> As interest in the early music movement has grown, performers and musicologists have increasingly turned to period instruments, smaller ensembles, and faster tempos to try to more faithfully recreate the music of the past. This is misleading. The interest in baroque music grew strongly in the 50s. The turn toward period instruments, smaller ensembles, and faster tempos appeared at the end of the 60s, and was steadily established in the 70s with great leaders like Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. There have been little changes over the past 30 years. This looks like a fun but futile project. Though I strongly relate to the desire to know more about Bach's music. As Émile Cioran wrote, "Bach's music is the only argument proving that the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure".

throw0101a 6y ago
> Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure. Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure. * Emil Cioran, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7427027 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7427027 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran
- spindle 6y ago
  And Gil Shaham on Bach (70-second video): https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=n6d6JEZCObg https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=n6d6JEZCObg
- teilo 6y ago
  A close friend of mine did his doctorate on Emil Cioran: https://www.amazon.com/Emil-Cioran-cr%C3%ADtica-progreso-hist%C3%B3rico/dp/1722723491 https://www.amazon.com/Emil-Cioran-cr%C3%ADtica-progreso-his... https://www.amazon.com/Emil-Cioran-Criticism-Historical-Progress/dp/0648499626 https://www.amazon.com/Emil-Cioran-Criticism-Historical-Prog...
rrmm 6y ago
The hard part is I don't think we hear harmony the same way. The way we hear music, what makes sense about music, is a function of the music we've listened to in our culture as we have matured. I don't think we can really ever cross that gap. And it's probably not a bad thing. We have a much broader palette of sounds and harmony to draw from. Early music especially had a much different theory of harmony.
- rrmm 6y ago
  Probably the same thing can be said about shakespeare as well. We just have a very wildly different context than its contemporaneous viewers. And our culture and language as it is now is hugely influenced by all of shakespeare's works that we probably miss a lot of what could have been novel and interesting about it.
- dharma1 6y ago
  This is interesting - I think going backwards in time, different musical harmonic/sound conventions still make "sense" to us. Like you could be listening do music from nearly any period of time from the past 500+ years and it would broadly "make sense" to the listener, even if you weren't directly exposed to it before (with the exception of perhaps experimental 20th century atonal classical music, or microtonal music from other cultures). But I'm not sure it works the other way around - if you took a 17th century person and played music from the last 50-100 years to them - Michael Jackson, bossa nova, Debussy, Smashing Pumpkins, whatever - they probably wouldn't "get it".
  - rrmm 6y ago
    Some stuff based on pentatonic scales (blues) would probably make sense. From what I recall it's almost universal in different cultures. Bobby Mcferrin has a fun demo about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk But yeah I bet some jazz would be baffling. I wonder how fast it'd take people to get into it. You could probably find some indigneous populations to work with.
    - 6y ago
tom_mellior 6y ago
> The turn toward period instruments, smaller ensembles, and faster tempos appeared at the end of the 60s, and was steadily established in the 70s with great leaders like Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Is Harnoncourt generally associated with fast tempos? I thought the opposite. His recording of Händel's Messiah runs to 141 minutes (according to Amazon, I don't have my copy here). Almost all other performances I've come across try to squeeze it into two hours. I much prefer Harnoncourt's slower tempo. Though he might have treated other pieces differently.
- alessivs 6y ago
  > Is Harnoncourt generally associated with fast tempos? Historically informed performance feeds on research on the place, time, established practices, theoretical treatises, instrument construction limitations, interpretative styles, etc. where the music took place. The approach to interpretation is revised upon new discovery. Faster tempi (than romantically-inclined interpretations) are sometimes incidental outcomes, and not exclusive to Harnoncourt. One ingredient for the observation, is at the time Harnoncourt was making strides in the 1950s, conductors were reading tempo markings of old music as if the metronome had already been invented (it is an early 1800s invention). Many famous pieces marked adagio, andante, largo, lento, (denoting a slow tempo) were performed comparatively faster than the romantic readings, as such markings were used quite liberally. Another ingredient is that Harnoncourt had a unique reading of orchestral classical pieces that emphasized tempo and dynamic contrast (e.g. Mozart piano concerti, Beethoven symphonies), which may lead to perceive sections were played faster than usual. And I don't think those traits were set on stone in his idearium. If he were alive today, my impression is he would revise his decades-old reading of Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers, perhaps with slower tempo, applying transpositions in the Magnificat, and refraining from doubling strings and brass in the Dixit Dominus. That is to say, it's not really about tempo, or any specific performance feature, though that's all that may come to our ears, or that we may be able to understand without extensive music knowledge.
- masswerk 6y ago
  Someone I would have associated more easily with faster tempi is Trevor Pinnock. However, there are some rather fast interpretations by Harnoncourt (maybe more likely of Händel than Bach)
Bud 6y ago
Professional period-performance singer here: Definitely not true that "there have been little changes over the past 30 years"; both the scholarly understanding of performance practice, and the performances themselves, have radically advanced and matured since 1990.
- idoubtit 6y ago
  I did not mean to say nothing has changed, but, as a naive listener, the interpretation of baroque music, and especially Bach's cantata, is not radically different now from what it was in the 1990s. Bach's cantatas under Karl Richter are totally different from Gustav Leonhardt recordings just 10 or 20 years later. Add 20 years to get around 1990, and Philippe Herreweghe, Masaaki Suzuki or Christophe Coin bring some obvious changes. For each of them I can't notice deep changes in their more recent recordings. But I admit that I can't name any conductor for Bach's cantatas that has started conducting in the 21st century. I don't think I have any recording like this. Recommandations are welcomed.

rpz 6y ago

Honestly I was expecting the article to discuss tuning/temperament! Has anybody listened to Bach or Chopin's preludes played on a well tempered piano? To me it feels as if those pieces were written to take advantage of the different purities/impurities of certain intervals in each key.

gjm11 6y ago
There's a recording of the WTC by Richard Egarr that uses the tuning system derived by Bradley Lehman from the squiggles on the cover-page of the WTC manuscript. (See http://www.larips.com/ http://www.larips.com/ for more about that.) It sounds pretty good to me, though I'm far from being an expert. (Caveat: Some but not all listeners, of whom I am one, hear an annoying mains-hum-like sound on the Egarr CDs. I don't know whether it's a thing that affects some CDs but not others, or whether it's filtered out by some reproduction equipment but not all, or what.)
3131s 6y ago
Composers did take advantage of the interesting properties of earlier temperaments. With a non-equal temperament each key signature has a characteristic tonality due to its particular series of intervals, and a key that is 'far away' from the home key that an instrument is tuned for can have harsher sounding intervals. Equal temperaments like 12-TET were favored at least in part because they opened up possibilities for romantic era composers interested in exploring new ideas in modal harmony and more elaborate song structures.
peterkos 6y ago
In a similar vein, singing to a more "natural" tuning (i.e. quarter-comma mean tone) is insanely more comfortable. Adam Newley and 12Tone on youtube have excellent videos that explore this topic further!

stereo 6y ago

If you've never heard Bach performed on period instruments, you're in for a treat. Here's a performance of the third Brandenburg concerto by the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSHLlidrZh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSHLlidrZh8 Compared to "normal" instruments, you'll hear something that's a lot lighter, less monumental, more fun, a bit faster especially in the third movement. I was lucky enough to see them live a few times, and it's really great to hear how much they listen to each other, how much work has gone into their performance, and how much fun they're having, with big smiles and happy looks.

ekrebs 6y ago
Here’s another link that shows the musicians. You’re right they are having a blast. Thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole this morning. https://youtu.be/pdsyNwUoON0 https://youtu.be/pdsyNwUoON0
tim333 6y ago
I was recently rather taken by the opening of the St John Passion by Sukuki https://youtu.be/SiKgrevzT-g https://youtu.be/SiKgrevzT-g
- idoubtit 6y ago
  The director's name is Masaaki Suzuki.
  - tim333 6y ago
    Oops - typo
lordleft 6y ago
You've honed in on why I love listening to Bach on period instruments; it's kind of a musical analogue to folks who are really into some niche of CS, propelled purely by love and obsession. That passion comes through in the music.
dvcrn 6y ago

_n_b_ 6y ago

Related, the standard pitch for an orchestra has also changed over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#History_of_pitch_standards_in_Western_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#History_of_pitch...

quijoteuniv 6y ago

Great tittle for an article! :)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dwheeler 6y ago

A follow-up article should be, "What did older Beethoven sound like to the older Beethoven?" (provides recording of silence)

tim333 6y ago
He could probably hear it in his head to an extent.
- rectang 6y ago
  Naturally he could, but the feedback loop was broken, so he wasn't able to refine his compositions as effectively. A lot of late period Beethoven has aspects which are "off" somehow. But the fact that Beethoven produced something which was even coherent under those conditions is just mind boggling.
  - senderista 6y ago
    The arrangement may sound off occasionally (great conductors like Mahler or Mendelssohn couldn’t always get their orchestration right the first time either), but the music itself certainly didn’t suffer. Yes, late Beethoven is often just weird, but not in any amateurish way.
    - rectang 6y ago
      I don't hear it so much in arrangement, but in things like harmonic rhythm or harmonies. So that means we disagree, because harmonic rhythm is an aspect of the "music" by anybody's definition. I wrote about a couple examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104132 I don't think "amateurish" is a good word. It's more of an extremely accomplished work but needing an additional round of editing. Stuff which would have been obvious to Beethoven had he actually been able to hear it, but since he never got the chance to, it never got corrected.
      - senderista 6y ago

dwheeler 6y ago

This is very cool. There's similar work that reveals how Byzantine choral work sounded in the Hagia Sophia, which I find to be beautiful in an unearthly way: http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/hear-the-sound-of-the-hagia-sophia-recreated-in-authentic-byzantine-chant.html http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/hear-the-sound-of-the-hag...

rabidonrails 6y ago

Reminds me of this excellent video with Ben Zander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2S-OjTb4nU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2S-OjTb4nU Especially at this part: https://youtu.be/b2S-OjTb4nU?t=233 https://youtu.be/b2S-OjTb4nU?t=233

lordleft 6y ago

I love listening to Bach on period music. I especially enjoy the sound of the harpsichord.

rectang 6y ago

Listening on period instuments can be revelatory. The first movement of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata, which is murky on a modern piano, is comparatively clearer on the fortepiano. The fortepiano has much faster and more pronounced decay (in the Attack-Decay-Sustain-Release ADSR formulation) and weaker bass, but that punchiness works well for the Waldstein as it makes it easier to hear the rhythm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fhmm_hfZAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fhmm_hfZAo As a complement to period instruments, I found that Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos also made me listen to Bach in a new light. Physical low-register instruments do not speak all that clearly — not even today, and not in Bach's time either. Compare a string bass with an electric bass — or even more starkly, a synthesizer bass! The bass register in Switched-On Bach has much cleaner, more identifiable pitch than Bach would have heard from a period ensemble playing one of the Brandenburg Concerti. But is one actually more "true" to Bach than the other? My feeling is that what Bach heard in his head were closer to a synthesizer version than a baroque chamber ensemble version. Because even though a good composer strives to write for a medium and compensate for the strengths and weaknesses of actual instruments, the essence of Bach is counterpoint and harmony, not orchestration.

Freak_NL 6y ago
Wendy Carlos is a well-known name (mostly for the Clockwork Orange soundtrack I think), but her recordings are not as accessible as they ought to be. That is, there are no (legal) digital downloads or streaming options for her oeuvre, and the CD's and records have been out of print for years. I only recently discovered Switched-On Bach (and the other three albums that followed: Switched-On Bach II, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, and Switched-On Brandenburgs), and you are right; these are really interesting performances of such well-known classical works. Worth exploring! And for a light classical snack: she created a 'sequel' to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals with 'Weird Al' Yankovic in 1989!
- gregsadetsky 6y ago
  Side 1 of Switched on Bach on IA: https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach2 https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach2 Side 2: https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach1 https://archive.org/details/SwitchedOnBach1 I also (weirdly?) found them hosted on the site of the Computer History Museum: Side 1 https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/sound-recording/2016/05/102695358-04-01-acc.mp3 https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/sound-r... Side 2 https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/sound-recording/2016/05/102695358-04-02-acc.mp3 https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/sound-r... An incredible masterpiece.

edgarvaldes 6y ago

Why is Bach more prevalent in HN discussions than, say, Mozart or Beethoven?

asimpletune 6y ago
Wild guess here, obviously I don’t know what everyone is thinking, but Bach’s music was very beautiful in an almost mathematical sense. Compositions where the right and left hand are exactly the same but delayed by a bar or two, pieces that are the same played forwards and backwards, etc... Bach was a true genius, as were Mozart and Beethoven, but I think the symmetry of Bach’s music around the axis of time and harmony could be why he’s more prevalent on HN.
lwb 6y ago
In my experience, Bach appeals more to analytical and mathematical types because the music relies less on dramatic swells and romantic melodies, and more on complex, baroque counterpoint that requires multiple listens to truly unravel. That and it makes people feel smart.

teilo 6y ago

I visited Thomaskirche a few years ago. Please tell me they are going to release multi-channel impulse response files which represent the work they have done on this project! That would allow us to simulate this historic space at home. Aural archeology!

vagab0nd 6y ago

No one has mentioned the crab canon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU