CLEVELAND MUSIC ACADEMY-SUMMER COURSE 2005-
By Richard Aaron
Dancing with J.S. Bach and a Cello
by Anna Wittstruck, Ph.D. candidate in musicology, Stanford University
Introduction
“Monophonic music wherein a man has created a dance of God.” That is how Wilfrid
Mellers, in his book, Bach and the Dance of God, describes the Six Suites for
Unaccompanied Violoncello by J.S. Bach.1 This pithy yet provocative preamble
comprises several of the important threads one may consider when studying and
performing this repertoire. Firstly, while these instrumental works, composed around
1720 during Bach’s uniquely secularized tenure at Cöthen, contrast against the
composer’s awesome output of sacred vocal music, they remain connected to the idea
that Bach was fundamentally a religious composer.2 Secondly, Bach wrote these suites
for an unaccompanied, single-voice instrument, whose historical role was one
relegated to supporting bass. Not only was Bach the first non-cellist composer to give
the cello its first big break as a lead actor and soloist; his ‘monophonic’ compositions
are masterfully contrapuntal. Thus Bach’s imposed compositional constraints –
writing implied harmony for a solo voice – and his idiomatic technical demands and
empowerment of the instrument prompt us still to marvel over a single man’s
creation, and view this music as sustaining, canonical, and transcendent.
But there is more: there is dance. Central to the study and performance of the Bach
cello suites is the import of Baroque social dances, from which the suites derive their
form. German composers during the Baroque era were great synthesizers of style:
virtuosity from Italy, and from France, dance. Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied
Violoncello were modeled after the suites of Froberger, who had compiled and stylized
staple court dances disseminated across the German principalities from the ballrooms
and courts of Louis XIV: the Allemande, Sarabande, Courante, and Gigue. With these
dances, as well as an optional Prelude, Froberger forged the framework for the
German Baroque instrumental suite. Yet, Froberger’s suite movements, and
consequently Bach’s, were written as concert works – not as music for dance. While
the French court musicians accompanying dancers would have picked musical
selections quasi-randomly from an assortment – not bearing any particular tonal
relationship to one another, nor a particular order, Froberger provided musical
coherence to the suite by putting all of the dance movements in the same key and in
CLEVELAND MUSIC ACADEMY-SUMMER COURSE 2005-
By Richard Aaron
a consistent order. With Froberger, and furthered by Bach (who, in addition to
including Preludes, also inserted galant movements into his suites), these dances
became vehicles for musical exploration; stylized, ornamented, and contemplative.
How then do the vestiges of Baroque social dance inflect and inform our listening,
interpretation, and performance of what are actually stylized concert pieces? What
might these original French dances tell us about the music? How might they provide
a critical dimension to an embodied understanding of musical gesture, and are they
pedagogically useful to performance of the suites? As cellists, do we dance when we
play?
Objective
By exploring Baroque conceptions of gesture, dance, and idiomatic writing, one may
imagine how musical and physical gestures may have converged for Bach when
composing his six suites for unaccompanied violoncello, and how this may inform
future performance.
1.See Mellers, Wilfrid, Bach and the Dance of God, London: Faber and Faber
Limited, 1980, 15.
2.Richard Taruskin reminds us in his Oxford History of Music opus that, while
a disproportionate amount of Bach scholarship and present day performance
has privileged Bach’s instrumental writing, our consequent image of a secular
composer must always be tempered by the awesome mass of Bach’s sacred
output. This reconciliation of the sacred and secular in Bach is Mellers’ main
project, as he finds ways to frame the Suites as connected to Bach’s spiritual
works.
