March 22, 2009: The music is in the making

As I had hoped, Frank French's performance of the first volume of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier on March 8 informed me of at least some of the subtle differences in the sonorities of the different keys when he performed the second volume this afternoon.  However, what this exhaustive account of the second 24 of the full set of 48 preludes and fugues achieved that was more important was a reinforcement of my appreciation that a fugue has less to do with a formal structure than with a particular approach to an imitative process.  Thus, my own composition teacher used to prefer to speak of fuguing as a process you acquire from performing the products of related processes, rather than by following structural guidelines and constraints.  In this same light I see from my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary that "prelude" can be used as a verb, meaning that one takes the same process-based approach to composition and performance.  In more pretentious language one might say that neither "prelude" nor "fugue" constitutes a particularly legitimate ontological category, although one can recognize "family resemblances" of particular preludes to other preludes and similarly for fugues.  (At least one of the preludes in the second volume actually bears a very strong family resemblance to one of Bach's two-part inventions.)  The lesson, as I see it, is that music is fundamentally far more verb-based than noun-based:  The music is in the making rather than in the note-bearing objects involved in that making.  Whether or not Bach intended these 48 preludes and fugues to be heard in a concert setting, such an occasion enhances our understanding of that "making," even if only intuitively;  and, as a result, we become better listeners of a wider repertoire of preludes and fugues that stretches into present-day composition.