‘A minor Grave: On Hollow Ground’
It was a privilege to perform at Spring Studio in the last weeks of this studios’ existence on Spring Street (read the NYTimes article here,) and I’m very grateful to Minvera Durham for opening her doors for this concert. I loved also performing in a drawing studio, and the resulting metaphor of thereby giving my audience a window into my own studio as a violinist, every day, with this project. Spring Studio has a truly authentic feel - from the dusty stairs to the warm bright lights who took the night off from a career of illuminating models, lending their focus instead to my journey for the evening. I saw some familiar faces in the audience, from a couple friends who are in competition to earn the ‘most Bach pop-ups’ attendance award, to new friends I met from my Highline performance on Friday. It was a beautiful night and I was grateful for the lively Q & A afterwards.
Movement of the day: A minor Sonata No. 2 BWV 1003 Grave
At first glance, there are many similarities between the G minor Sonata No. 1 Adagio and the A minor Sonata No. 2 Grave. Why did Bach begin his set of six with the G minor Sonata?
As I shifted my work towards the A minor Sonata these past few days, possible answers to this question began to emerge; thanks I think to the process of living through the cycle in order, cumulatively.
So far, Bach has begun the first movements of both the G minor Sonata and the B minor Partita with fully spelled out root position chords, both of which containing the Fifth on the bottom.
This creates a strong center of gravity, a feeling of completeness, a gesture from which to unfold the rest of the movements. The A minor Sonata too begins with a tonic chord, however, its’ spelling yields a completely different color: an octave on the bottom, the fifth in the very top voice.
This A minor chord feels almost hollow. Bach then spells out an extremely strange and dissonant seventh, and falling from this top F, filigree floating through space looks for its resolution. The resolutions that Bach provides in this A minor Grave in comparison to the G minor Sonata, with all its dissonance, seem delicate, intimate, and even unsatisfying in comparison. Gone are the large sweeping chords every half measure from the G minor Sonata, which in comparison to the A minor now feels to me grander and swifter (taking also into consideration the cut time Fugue). While the G minor Sonata seems to be marked bold letters and exclamation points, the A minor feels lonelier, with a dull pain, in no-man’s land.
Let us look specifically at the G Minor Adagio. Bach writes a very clear first statement, beginning and ending with a G minor chord: and immediately after, here is one of the few rests in this entire cycle ( I am not counting movements which begin with rests, of which there are many. However, even in the Ciaconna as we move from Minor to Major to Minor sections, where performers have inserted interpretive fermatas, rests even, Bach does not insert one moment of silence). To me, this looks very deliberately like an opening statement, ending with a clear (albeit small) edge of silence, perhaps even with a “!” This sets up also a new voice to enter after the breathe (or rest). Bach has a clear pulse: a large pendulum swinging from chord to chord every second beat, and a dichotomy between the “orchestra’s” chords, and the thirty-second note slurred notes - the ‘melody’ responding this first statement with a searching question.
Therefore, the progression to the A minor Sonata, so close to the D minor Partita where the Ciaconna lives, feels like a very intimate shift from the first two works in the set. The G minor Sonata with its almost bravura-like character (in comparison), a perfect introduction for what is to come later (foreshadowing the two grand C major pedal tone episodes with its compact G minor fugue D pedal episode) and the fully expanded and ornate B minor Partita, we have made our further inwards with the start of the A minor Sonata. Even the end of the A minor Grave hardly feels resolved - the first phrase’s return seems almost like one defeated question after the next with each beat, thirty-second notes rising searchingly, two ever-more dissonant trills, which ultimately disintegrate into the same eerie and hollow octave with which the movement began.
The fugue emerges from this haze trying to spell out harmonic ground, to give some satisfaction to the ambiguous ending of the Grave, spelling out 5-1, but it feels almost like a sighing appoggiatura. More on the A minor fugue tomorrow!
Performance: Sonata No. 1 in G minor BWV 1001
Sonata No. 2 in A minor BWV 1003
Grave (movement of the day)
Partita No. 2 in D minor BWV 1004
