Goldberg Pedal Slip and Bariolage
Preludes #11 and #12: variations on variations...
With this post, the Preludes for bitKlavier album series is complete. The full album will come out early 2024, in tandem with the bitKlavier Commissions album, on Bandcamp (well, maybe), vinyl, and then all the usual streaming sites (and along with a new version of bitKlavier itself!). I am writing about the last two preludes together in this post, for reasons that will become clear.
My earliest musical memory: a recording (vinyl!) of the J.S. Bach Gavotte from the E-major Partita for Unaccompanied Violin, in my parents house. I remember where I was at the time, staring at the hifi speaker, riveted; I was probably two years old, just a year from starting violin myself. The recording was most likely Henryk Szeryng, because of the vinyl I found some years later when I was allowed to operate the turntable, and his playing became important to me as a young violinist, with its clarity and seeming “objective” quality:
Another oft-played piece in the house: the Bach Goldberg Variations, sometimes on record, and sometimes live, on the piano or harpsichord in the house (I remember years later my sister performing the complete set in that same living room; also, Goldberg was my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, making this feel all the more in the family). This vinyl of Glenn Gould was in the house:
Both these pieces were inspirations for the last two preludes. The theme from the Goldberg Variations became a starting point for a tune for Hardanger d’Amore:
Fiddle version of Goldberg Slip, from the album Fifty Five:
It is a variation on the Goldberg Variations then, but rather than being a variation on the bass line—which is what the Bach variations are based on—it is a variation on the melody itself, where the 3/4 sarabande time signature becomes a 9/8 rolling meter, a kind of slow slip jig.
Prelude #11—Goldberg Pedal Slip—is yet another variation, this time for bitKlavier, and based on the fiddle tune. Well, at least initially it was made for bitKlavier, with some dynamic tuning to keep it in the open just-tuning that I play with on the Hardanger d’Amore. I also created some additional variations of the bitKlavier preparations themselves, where the meter itself can be shaped in various asymmetrical ways, inspired by the traditional Norwegian telespringar:
These metric variations on the prelude remain interesting to me, and pianists keen to explore them will find the bitKlavier gallery includes different settings to do just that. But, as with a couple of the other preludes, this one also proved to work quite nicely on the acoustic piano. here is Adam playing it, followed by the sheet music:
Prelude 11: Goldberg Pedal Slip, performed by Adam Sliwinski
Back to the E-major Partita and my first musical memory… One of my favorite parts of that piece is in the first movement—the prelude, of course!—where the beautiful string crossing bariolage patterns are so disorienting, both for the listener (who hears them a particular way) and the player (who likely feels them in another way):
or:
or:
We think of J.S. Bach as an efficient composer—every note is essential, carefully placed as part of a deep architectural plan. And yet... over and over in his music we encounter these self indulgent, repetitive passages of bariolage, where the fiddler (or cellist) wanks away with impressive flying string crossings, or even in his keyboard music we find these extended sequential passages where the pianist just spins out a pattern over and over again for no apparent reason (think of the Presto in the C-minor Prelude of Book I of the Well Tempered Klavier). What’s the point? Of course there are lots of answers, though most usually depend on some circular notion that Bach is, well, great, so, well, naturally these passages are part of some grand plan. For me, however, the point is pretty simple: these passages are just so damn fun to play! After all the hard-earned intricate passage-work that precedes them, it’s just so pleasurable to let the arm do its thing—you get in a kind of zone, as you might with minimalist music. And it’s really quite depressing to imagine Bach’s music without these passages. My own Bariolage is a similarly self-indulgent homage to Bach and the bariolage, and I think it’s pretty fun to play too.
Here’s Adam playing it:
Prelude #12: Bariolage, performed by Adam Sliwinski
bitKlavier plays a role in accentuating the bariolage quality, where some notes launch little riffs that layer on top of one another and on top of what the performer plays. In the opening, the high E’s get repeated and layered, sometimes a bit roughly depending on the timing of the performance (bitKlavier is ruthlessly metronomic, while the player is not, fortunately). In measure 3, the high F launches a trill-like pattern, with the F alternating with a G above:
This is enabled by a key-specific set of Synchronic preparations in bitKlavier, each key launching a slightly different little riff, which layers on top of the player and whatever riffs are already riffing; a bit time consuming to setup, but actually quite simple:
This sort of layering continues throughout, and if you want to hear the bariolage phrase that corresponds (roughly) to the Bach bariolage sections linked in the above videos, jump to about 50 seconds into Adam’s recording.
Here’s the sheet music and bitKlavier gallery for this one:
I created a version of Bariolage for the wonderful trio Longleash:
The video is particularly instructive, making visible the relationship between the musician and machine.
(If you care to listen beyond this movement in this video, after Bariolage is another movement, Keening Machine, where the telespringar dance meters (described earlier) are a loose inspiration, and bitKlavier is programmed to help the ensemble feel the asymmetrical meter in concrete ways.)
Complete materials for that trio are here.
What would Bach made of bitKlavier? He was quite into his instruments, whether it be the organ, clavichord, lautenwerck, or the 5-string cello piccolo (for which the last of the Cello Suites was written). And of course tuning was a driving force behind his work (the Well-Tempered Klavier being a prime case in point), so I can well imagine that the tuning capabilities of bitKlavier would have appealed. More generally, it’s clear that instruments were not particularly standardized in his time: personal, idiosyncratic, contested, dynamic, evolving. I feel like we may be returning to a time like that, where the nature and design of instruments themselves are part of the creative process, and not considered fixed, non-negotiable, completed objects (Ableton Live might be a widely used example to consider). There is power to standardization, but it can also be suffocating, and it’s wonderful to let our imagination breathe a bit when it comes to the instruments we love.