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Life

January 24, 1969
Synthesizing Johann S. Bach SWITCHED-ON BACH
By Richard Freedman

Baroque composers were notably less uptight than later musicians about what particular instrumental form their works should take. Bach, Vivaldi and Handel were professionals, willing to alter specific instrumental timbre to fit the forces available at any given performance as long as the grand architectural design of the work remained intact. They had no romantic illusions about the inviolable integrity of their scoring.
Thus Bach arranged many of Vivaidi's compositions for what jazz musicians would call different combos, and transcribed his own works as well. To this day no one is positive what instrument he had in mind when he wrote his last, towering masterpiece, The Art of the Fugue. Is it for harpsichord, organ or string orchestra? It has been performed by all three with equal success and one feels its grandeur would sustain even a performance on kazoo and banjo.

All this is by way of introducing-and justifying-a record whose title and campy cover seem designed to send purists wild, but which I think is one of the most startlingly successful "classical" records in years.
Switched-On Bach (Columbia MS7191) consists of 10 of Bach's most fa- miliar short works played on an electronic synthesizer. Synthesizers have been around in one form or another since the 1930s, but the current vogue for electronic music has led to infinite refinements of a gadget previously re- stricted to furnishing ominous bleeps for science-fiction movies.

Here, three of the sprightly Two-Part Inventions, two preludes and fugues from The Well- Tempered Clavier and the great chorales Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring and Sleepers Awake are played on a Moog Synthesizer by the young physicist-musician Walter Carlos, abetted by musicologist Benjamin Folkmnan and produced by Trans-Electronic Music Productions, Inc.

The synthesizer can provide just about any pitch that is desired, and for any duration. It is played with hands and feet, like an organ, but the sound is produced by a complex hookup of oscillators, filters, gen- by simple air passing through pipes. After the shock of hear such un- Bachian noises in this LP, one notices how marvelously the synthesizer sep- arates the complex strands of his polyphony (stereo helps, too), making exquisitely clear what is often murky when performed by mere humans. It has the effect of cleaning up a painting by an old master.

Thus, in the E-flat Major Prelude and Fugue from Book I of The Well- Tempered Clavier, the synthesizer produces a sound at once majestic and pellucid, although the basic timbre is that of a particularly nasal Salvation Army band. In some ways it resembles those notorious Stokowski transcriptions of the 1930s, but there is a stricter regard here for Bach's tempi (except for an anachronistic ritard at the end), and the synthesizer is diabolically clever at imitating genuinely baroque trumpets, oboes and harpsichords.

All stops are pulled out for the Third Brandenburg Concerto, which Bach scored for strings and harpsichord continno. The first movement is big and brassy, but the delicate balance between solo and tutti instruments which is at the heart of the concerto grosso style is retained. The second movement is an enigma: Bach provided only two chords which the ensemble was to improvise on. Most modern performers are shy about this and just play the chords.

 

 

Not Carlos. His virtuoso improvisation really shows that the synthe- sizer can do. Great whooshes of sound, aquatic burblings and tweeting birds mingle with Chinese wood blocks and water tortures. An occasional science fiction banshee shrieks and gibbers through an iron foundry, where one expects to find Edgar Varese, the pioneer of much of this, tinkering on his Ionisation. Yet, surprisingly, it is all kept within the spirit, if not the letter, of baroque laws of improvisation. It must be heard not to be believed.
Does Bach need it? Obviously not, and I'm not sure the record will hold up as well under repeated hearings as more standard interpretations. But neither is Bach hurt by it as he is hurt, I think, by the jazzy distortions of the Swingle Singers.

Essentially, Switched-On Bach is a great teaching device designed to clue in the electronic generation to the contrapuntal glories of Bach. It is done with such taste and imagination that the most hidebound purist (I am one) can only applaud.

Mr. Freedman, an author and critic, teaches English at Simmon College.