1052R
i read something today that forced me to reconstruct the history within it as my new favorite instance of what the kids today call “game recognizing game.” both game entities in my new favorite recognition instance happen to be johann sebastian bach, because bach is and was unparalleled. JSB is the only one, past or present, that could go head to head with his own particular mind. this thought brings me comfort.
historians and musicologists today presume bach wrote a violin concerto so difficult to perform that it led to it not being preserved by [lack of] virtue of there simply not being many around able to keep playing it. late in his life, historians and musicologists today presume, he’d recover this concerto and repurpose it as a harpsichord-centered piece, thus making it more accessible. this ended up becoming the 1052. the reconstruction of the presumed original violin version is known today as 1052R. surely, bach was so painfully aware of the magnitude of his snapping with the original 1052 that he refused to let it die. the previous sentence is my personal reconstruction of the history within the hypothesis.
i like to think about him often. i think about him writing the minor, lesser pieces in his repertoire because i like thinking about how, in contrast, his bigger, grander pieces feel in terms of showmanship. i like to imagine him symbolically waving away the tails of a period-and-culture-inaccurate frac before sitting down at his clavier stool—a gesture that could only mean “Time To Break Out The Big Guns”—in order to write works like the 1004, the 582, the 997, the mass, the passions, the offering, the variations, as opposed to writing something like the WTC prelude N°1 tucked in bed in his nightgown by candlelight. this is why i speak of showmanship; the c major prelude is one of the most perfect portraits of western music sensibilities—it just happens to be subtle about it. both the lesser pieces and the grander pieces required of him the same amount of skill, albeit with different subsets and configurations of it. these are, again, my reconstructions of a particular history.
history does something funny to us: it reveals, it stuns us, and we let it seize us. it offers something, so we let it wrap itself around our perception of its narratives in such a way that it leaves room for only one conjecture to be conjured. reading about the conception of the offering is a great example of this: it is impossible to finish that story without thinking of bach as what the same kids that’d classify him as “game” would call a “baller.” we like to think of bach as a baller. we like building him up as one. when i finally went to see a live performance of the 582, the organist told the audience a bach-biographical baller story i’d never heard before, and it seemed to me we'll never exhaust those kinds of stories revolving around him—our perception of him. we like to think of his pilgrimage to buxtehude’s door as a baller move. i like to think of his body of work as the biggest flex on his contemporaries. this only inflates the image of bach the showman. this is the biggest reconstruction of all.
bach loved god. bach feared god. this is as far away as we can get from a reconstruction of his persona; it being the closest we can get to a fact, it leaves us with more of a reproduction. whether devotion and showmanship can coexist in a mortal is not what i wanna argue. i wanna argue that historians and musicologists throughout centuries have pretty much determined the presence of one of these traits in him, and not so much the other. i don’t want to argue whether we should reconstruct him possessing the latter trait or not. i just know we do. i also know this inevitably makes him, fortunately or not, a baller.
