Bach : "Note grouping" and accents

[m1469]

I have been wanting to discuss this for awhile now and have been thinking about this subject for several years.

It seems to me there are 2 main schools of thought :

Roughly...

1.  Downbeat of every measure should hold a strong beat and is a "beginning"

2.  Often "note grouping" carries over into, or resolves in, the following measure or on the beginning of a beat and should not be accented.

For example :

Bach invention no 1; pianistically and musically speaking, how would you phrase or "group" the first 12 notes ?  I am not talking about discerning motive and counter motive.

I would think of the "D" on the downbeat of mm 2 as a resolution, and therefore should not be accented, and the following entry of the motive as a new beginning.


m1469 Fox

[pianonut]

if you visualize violins taking the parts, you won't over-accent.  you know how the bow hits the first note (but not too much) and starts the whole thing - it's not bombastic, but just starts the phrase with a little momentum.  then, in my understanding, you just follow through (looking at the line and not separate little phrasings only).  this is hard for beginning students to picture.  i think for beginning students, it's OK to learn how to phrase smaller units - but once you understand the smaller units - as a teacher you can do what my teacher does and draw a larger phrase line over the whole.  then the student sees that they should not use rubato so much...  but, keep the things rolling.     

[m1469]

Hmmm... thanks pianonut.  I am not talking about how to technically achieve proper accenting but more, what note-grouping is stylistically appropriate.  There are seemingly two main schools of thought on this.

m1469

[bernhard]

Hmmm... thanks pianonut.  I am not talking about how to technically achieve proper accenting but more, what note-grouping is stylistically appropriate.  There are seemingly two main schools of thought on this.

m1469

This is an amazingly interesting question. And the truth of the matter is that no one really knows (hence the professors are all at each other throats): Bach did not leave any unambiguous directions.

The late Rosalyn Tureck (a fine exponent of the art of being at professor's throats, being a professor herself) used to say that everything is in the score but we do not see it.

I will come back here later (I need to organise my thoughts). But for the moment I will say this. Just like European society in the 1600s was highly and explicitly based in hierarchy, so is Baroque music in general and Bach's music in particular. So, yes, the metric rhythm is very important (accenting the first beat of a bar), but it is only one hierarchical level. So just like Bach writes melody in counterpoint, there is also rhythm counterpoint going on, and different hierarchy of accents are layered on top of each other sometimes in direct opposition.

As a consequence the true expressive means in Bach (and Baroque music in general) is not in dynamics or tempo, or agogics (as it is the case with most romantic music) but in articulation. Bach's will be effective at a wide range of tempos, dynamic treatments and rhythmic variation (e.g. Jacques Loussier, Swingle singers or Camerata Brazil), but will not tolerate articulation mistakes.

Perhaps the most thought provoking collection of essays I ever read on this subject is

Nikolaus Harnoncourt "Baroque music today: Music as speech" (Amadeus).

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[lostinidlewonder]

Note Groups(notes attached by the tail?) reffers to accents yes, when you play the first note of these groups you should be dropping onto it. Of course we know it is routine to lift the hand and drop it onto the first note of the beginning of the legato ties, and we should push off on the last note of a legato tie. Bach uses legato ties to make notes longer, but not higlight a phrase of notes to show when you should lift the hands and drop. So how Bach does this can be indirectly discovered through SINGING phrases of his music. When you physically need to take a breath or you feel that what you are singing has started something new, that is when you have to lift the hand and drop it down again to give a SLIGHT accent to the next note. Its not like a > accent probably a weaker _ tenuto would be the idea, give a little length to the note, not so much strike and accent it.

Often underneath the imaginary legato ties(which lighlight the phrasing, breath of the music) we have hand position shifts (where we cannot play the group of notes anymore without moving the hand). If this is not controlled it encourages accents of the crossed over finger/thumb which draws the hand up or down the keyboard we should be careful in thinking that we have to accent every single note which happens on a hand shift because it will definatly mutate the music if you do this. If the hand shifts one has to ask, is it still singing the same voice as what it was before it shifted or is it all of a sudden singing something different or echoing again what it just played thus requiring the accent?

Bach's music wasn't written for the piano, and he had no idea of the piano really, maybe he did when he looked at the Clavichord, but I don't think he imagined the sound/reach of the modern piano we have today when he wrote. But that means we have to look at how he wrote for the Harpichord and the Clavichord. How on those instruments do we express accents, climaxes etc. We do that through detachment of notes (Lh before Rh instead of togther) and playing dotted quavers over semi quavers for instance. Detachment of notes highlights the bass more even if there is no true accent of notes(striking the notes louder). Of course you had to do that on a Harpsichord because there was no other way to create an illusion of volume.

Bach invention no 1; pianistically and musically speaking, how would you phrase or "group" the first 12 notes ?

Predominantly this Invention is semiquavers played against quavers. So an understanding that the quavers are all played as individual notes, not as a part of a legato group, is very important. When you play any quavers you should be pushing off each one and dropping back onto the next and when you play any semiquaver they should be played with a legato touch.

So the first 12 notes in the RH (including the 1st semi quaver of bar 2) should be played like this:

semiquavers, CDE FDEC (played in one breath giving F slight length careful not to play CDE breath FDEC phrasing)

then quavers,  G C BAB C (all played with individual drops and pushes off. Careful that when you play the first note the G that it is connected to the semiquavers played before. That is, FDEC then the G has to be phrased, FDEC G not FDEC breath G, there should be no break in sound when you strike the G with the 4th.)

The semiquaver D has to be struck as if it where a quaver but you have to controll it so that moving into the next phrase isn't disturbed. I find that if you play in Bar 2 without very slight length given to the A (3rd semiquaver in bar  2) the first note D doens't sound individual enough, it becomes a part of the group. So if the D is hoping to stand out played like a quaver(struck, not played with legato touch) then to contrast it we should make a slightly longer sound in the A. If we give length to the G it disrupts the flow of the piece so the A is the next note to give some legnth so that the shortened D is highlighted and thus the phrasing respected and highlighed more.



Accenting also can deal with finding the natural beat of the piece you play. For instance take the Prelude No 2 Bk1. One may think that there is only two accent notes per bar, that is every time the RH plays its highest note and the Lh plays together with it its lowest. So in Bar one, RH we have C(octaveup)EDE C(middle)EDE then again CEDE CEDE. Accents should be on the C(octaveup) then the C(middle). So there is actually double the amount of beats to bring out.

This totally affects what the groups of notes feel like on the hand, it is much different if you neglect these accents rather than create them and the accents themselves form an understanding as to what chords changes (two per bar; the very top and very bottom of the groups) are actually important to hear. With further more investigation you will find anomalies within the music which calls for something different, for example see Bar 14. the Rh calls for these notes. GBAB  EBAB  and then again GBAB EBAB. In this case you would accent the G and then E, instead of the top and bottom of the groups.

 How do you find beat accents out? It has to be through listening and trying to discover it yourself! Or of course you can listen to great recordings of it, but that doesn't do much but improve your parrot skills.