Swing on ''13th Invention'' N° 1

Premise: Everybody is (and shall!) be free to play whatever (s)he likes in whatever manner (s)he likes!

Swing & Baroque Music: hmmm... well.... swing has not been invented by XX c. music; it was widely and consistently used in Baroque music, simply under another name; the "purists" (a term with which I strongly disagree) know it under the name of inégalité and it is described in many (most?) musical tracts and instrumental methods since the end of XVII c. to the second half of XVIII c.

Some consider it a specific French feature, and it maybe originated from France, but quickly spread to all Europe. As a very late and extreme example, I heard once a mechanical "music box" made in Nürnberg on the turn of XVIII / XIX c. playing the ouverture from Le Nozze di Figaro with quite a heavy inégalité on the quavers.

So, I don't see (and most "purists" would not see) anything strange in applying "swing/inégalité" to Bach music. Perhaps, as Baroque music was all about variety, a mechanical application of it would result boring after the second musical phrase, but this is of course a (more than reasonable!) limitation of the playback mechanism, rather than of the inégalité concept.

To my taste, the 60% ratio you used sounds a little bit too heavy: something in the range 55-57% would sound to me more nonchalant (it. sprezzatura, another very important concept for Baroque style). But of course there is much of subjective in this; for instance, if I remember correctly, Dom Bedos de Celles in the fourth part of his L’Art du facteur d’orgues, dedicated to mechanical organs, defines and employs quite heavy inégalités.

So, inégalité at last!!!! Thanks!

M.

P.S.: More comments on other aspects of your rendition will follow shortly...

" If Johann Sebastian Bach happens to meet some good [put your favorite genre here]...":

Oh well, this is like opening a bee-hive, but I'll try to say all I have to say on that and then I'll shut down.

Let me for the sake of the argument put aside for a moment the basic objection that, with "if"s and "but"s, one goes not very far and let me follow the assumption.

If Bach (or Monteverdi, or Dufay, or whoever) had known the XX c. genres..., ...he would had lived in the XX c.! He would have known a different musical environment, with different instruments, different musical languages and styles, a different tradition to look back at, and so on. Nobody could tell which kind of music he would have written (maybe, he would have become a software programmer or an astronaut!), but, for sure, he would have written different music!

But in fact, Bach lived in that time, knew those musical instruments and those musical languages, styles and that tradition and eventually wrote that music. All parts hold together.

Now, taking that 'musical whole', slicing it and taking some parts of it (in this case, the written notes) while rejecting all the other parts is without any doubt a legitimate operation: music did always rely (also) on re-visitations, re-arrangements and so on (something that the modern Lords of the Copyright utterly forgot! and which Bach himself practised repeatedly).

What I believe not to be legitimate is claiming that the result of such an operation is "Bach" (or "Monteverdi" or "Dufay"): "this is (possibly) what Bach would have written if...": absolutely not! The result, in the best cases, is Bach-Busoni or Bach-Bahrami, but it cannot be claimed to be "Bach".

The only actual Bach (or Monteverdi or Dufay) was that one; the fact that part of that whole is now lost probably forever is sad, but it cannot be an excuse, if one is interested in it (which is not a necessity, granted) for not trying to recovering what can be recovered and putting it in practice again (even with all the dangers and the incertitudes of the process).

So, adding a rhythmic section, experimenting with patches and sounds, re-arranging, etc. is totally legitimate (and anybody saying the contrary goes against centuries (millennia?) of musical practice) and may yield valuable results, which however are new results, not the "restitution" of previous results. To put it simply: there is no "modernisation", there is only new music.

Thanks,

M.