Bach and the Patterns of Invention

Laurence Dreyfus

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780674238299
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica classica

In this major new interpretation of the music of J. S. Bach, we gain a striking picture of the composer as a unique critic of his age. By reading Bach's music "against the grain" of contemporaries such as Vivaldi and Telemann, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach's approach to musical invention in a variety of genres posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics."Invention"—the word Bach and his contemporaries used for the musical idea that is behind or that generates a composition—emerges as an invaluable key in Dreyfus's analysis. Looking at important pieces in a range of genres, including concertos, sonatas, fugues, and vocal works, he focuses on the fascinating construction of the invention, the core musical subject, and then shows how Bach disposes, elaborates, and decorates it in structuring his composition. Bach and the Patterns of Invention brings us fresh understanding of Bach's working methods, and how they differed from those of the other leading composers of his day. We also learn here about Bach's unusual appropriations of French and Italian styles—and about the elevation of various genres far above their conventional status.Challenging the restrictive lenses commonly encountered in both historical musicology and theoretical analysis, Dreyfus provocatively suggests an approach to Bach that understands him as an eighteenth-century thinker and at the same time as a composer whose music continues to speak to us today.

1

What Is an Invention?

Sometime in 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach, Capellmeister to his Serene Highness the Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen, inscribed the title page to a small handwritten volume of keyboard pieces which were to be understood as a

Straightforward Instruction, in which amateurs of the keyboard, and especially the eager ones, are shown a clear way not only (1) of learning to play cleanly in two voices, but also, after further progress, (2) of dealing correctly and satisfactorily with three obbligato parts; at the same time not only getting good inventions, but developing the same satisfactorily, and above all arriving at a cantabile manner in playing, all the while acquiring a strong foretaste of composition.¹

The fifteen pieces for two voices that followed (BWV 772–786) were arranged in ascending order by key and were each labeled an Inventio. The works were not, in fact, newly composed, for they had already been entered in the Clavierbüchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, a musical notebook for Bach’s eldest son, in which Johann Sebastian and the twelve-year-old Wilhelm Friedemann jointly copied this set of two-part imitative works sometime between the autumn of 1722 and the end of winter, 1723.² In the Clavierbüchlein, however, Bach had entitled each work a Praeambulum—originally an organist’s extemporized introduction to an ensemble work, now commonly referring to a short prelude. For his “Straight-forward Instruction,” then, Bach apparently changed the title of these pieces from Praeambulum to Inventio to stress their pedagogical value: they were designed not only to encourage the pupil’s facility on the keyboard, he tells us, but also to serve as models for good “inventions” and their subsequent development.

Bach’s use of the word “invention” may seem confusing unless one realizes that it did not name a recognized musical genre, but rather was a term borrowed from rhetoric used colloquially to designate the essential thematic idea underlying a musical composition. Bach’s title-page, in other words, understands “invention” as a conventional metaphor for the idea behind a piece, a musical subject whose discovery precedes full-scale composition. It is important to realize that this sense of invention (inventio in Latin, heuresis in Greek, Erfindung in German), along with a whole range of related meanings, must be recovered from a time when rhetoric, much like etymology and natural philosophy, was a modeling science par excellence. That is, one must return to a time before the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when critical theory abandoned rhetoric in favor of aesthetics, replacing the perfectible art of invention with the godlike realm of creativity. As late as Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste (1759), one reads that “the first and leading quality of genius is invention.”³ By the time of Kant’s third Critique (1790), on the other hand, the paradigm has shifted so that “creative imagination is the true source of genius and the basis of originality.”

According to the traditional usage, invention denoted not only the subject matter of an oration, but also a mechanism for discovering good ideas. An orator had at his disposal an entire array of such tools—called the “topics of invention”—and with these topics one devised or “invented” a fruitful subject for a discourse. One basic technique of invention was to study the works of reputable authors both to develop good taste and to spur one’s own ingenuity, what Johann Mattheson called the locus exemplorum.⁴ In keeping with this pedagogical belief, Bach’s “Straightforward Instruction” not only provides suitable examples of “good inventions” but also demonstrates how they can be properly developed (“auch selbige wohl durchzuführen”). This important notion of development or realization, moreover, implies that a successful invention must be more than a static, well-crafted object, but instead like a mechanism that triggers further elaborative thought from which a whole piece of music is shaped. This is why Bach alludes to invention as “a foretaste of composition”: by crafting a workable idea, one unlocks the door to a complete musical work.

From a variety of evidence it is clear that Bach, in keeping with many of his German contemporaries, considered “invention” a fundamental concept underlying both the training and the activity of a composer. Johann Nikolaus Forkel—whose information stemmed from correspondence with the composer’s two eldest sons—tells how Bach’s pupils had to master thoroughbass and voice-leading in four-part chorales before trying to write down their own ideas: “He also made his pupils aim at such excellencies in their exercises; and, till they had attained a high degree of perfection in them, he did not think it advisable to let them attempt inventions of their own. Their sense of purity, order, and connection in the parts must first have been sharpened on the inventions of others, and have become in a manner habitual to them, before he thought them capable of giving these qualities to their own inventions.” Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, moreover, reports that his father considered invention a talent that must manifest itself early on in a youth’s training: “As for the invention of ideas, my late father demanded this ability from the very beginning, and whoever had none he advised to stay away from composition altogether.”⁵ This belief in a talent for invention, though, did not mean that Bach minimized the role of arduous study in the pursuit of inventions. A “Straightforward Instruction” in “getting good inventions” is proof that he put stock in a rigorous approach to composition, as was his reported answer to those who asked him how he mastered the art of music: “I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far.”⁶ While there was undeniably some false modesty in this confession, one can also read it as a tribute to the exacting demands of craftsmanship, a skill requiring certain natural talents, but one demanding nurture and self-improvement as well. Bach’s attitude was probably not far removed from Johann Mattheson’s, who writes in the Vollkommener Capellmeister (1739) that “though invention . . . is not easily taught nor learned . . . still, when necessary, many a person can be helped and be pointed in a direction which will assist his innate gifts and with which he would be on the right path.”⁷

As a methodical activity, invention belongs to the so-called “divisions” of rhetoric which hark back to Cicero and which were well known in early eighteenth-century Germany—at least in their schematic outline—to anyone with even a modest classical education. According to Cicero’s De Inventione, there are five stages in creating an oration: (1) invention (inventio); (2) arrangement (dispositio); (3) style (elocutio); (4) memory (memoria); and (5) delivery (pronuntiatio or actio). Cicero explains them as follows in De Oratore: “[An orator] must first hit upon what to say; then manage and marshal his discoveries [inventa], not merely in orderly fashion, but with a discriminating eye for the exact weight, as it were, of each argument; next go on to array them in the adornments of style; after that keep them guarded in his memory; and in the end deliver them with effect and charm.”⁸ One can easily see in this classic formulation the obvious affinities between inventing and delivering a speech and composing and performing a piece of music, although it was not entirely obvious, even to humanists, to what extent the analogy between music and oratory should hold. Seventeenth-century German music theory, for example, took over the idea of the divisions of oratory but reduced their number from five to three. Christoph Bernhard, a pupil of Heinrich Schütz, writes that “there otherwise belong to Composition three things: Inventio (Discovery), Elaboratio (Amplification), and Executio (Realization or Performance), which display a rather close relationship with oratory or rhetoric.”⁹

This three-part division hints at a more idiomatic understanding of invention and rhetoric as grasped by musicians, who—within the realm of composition—by and large confined themselves to the binary distinction between discovery of musical ideas, on the one hand, and their arrangement or elaboration, on the other. (Cicero underscores this distinction when he defines invention as “the discovery of valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one’s cause plausible,” while arrangement is the “distribution of arguments thus discovered in the proper order.”)¹⁰ Johann David Heinichen, for example, writes that “it is not ever enough that a composer writes down a naturally occurring, good invention expressing the words and pleasing the good taste of intelligent listeners. It also requires an artist to work out [these inventions] at the right occasion according to the rules and to prove that he possesses knowledge and good taste.”¹¹ Johann Mattheson also expresses this sentiment when he writes: “Many a person supposes, if he has perhaps a small supply of inventions, then he is well off as a composer. This is by no means correct, and nothing is achieved by invention alone, although it certainly comprises about half the matter.”¹² Johann Adolph Scheibe, too, conceives of invention as a distinctly musical (and hence less formally rhetorical) category when he writes that invention “is a capacity [Eigenschaft] of the composer . . . to think musically” and identifies it further with the main theme (Hauptsatz) of a musical work “in which the invention is expressed.” This main theme, according to Scheibe, from which the subsequent material “necessarily arises,” must be distinguished from the rest of the piece, which is mostly “elaboration and belongs to the [consideration of the] style [Schreibart].”¹³ Bach therefore places himself squarely in this tradition when his title page to the “Straightforward Instruction” distinguishes between “not only . . . getting good inventions, but developing the same satisfactorily.”

Given this historical support for the concept of invention, can one use this idea today as a critical tool with which to understand Bach? Taking this question as my point of departure, I argue that one can. What is at stake here is not so much a return to the terminology of historical rhetoric or musical theory but rather a fresh approach to musical structure and affect that tries to make historical sense of Bach as a composer and thinker. Instead of restricting invention to a purely analytical category—although it will be revealing to see how far this particular usage can be extended—I have in mind the formulation of a critical outlook that will help shed light on Bach’s extraordinary historical and aesthetic achievement, an achievement that differs both in quality and in kind from that of his contemporaries. The problem here is a pervasive one within the study of the arts, no less within historical musicology and musical analysis: the fact that contemporary scholarship, for all its accomplishments and methodological sophistication, so often becomes reticent when it comes to capturing some semblance of a profound musical experience. Both music history and analysis, it is probably fair to say, are well equipped to provide a kind of refuge from the problem of aesthetic understanding, despite the fact that everyone who contributes to these disciplines does so presumably out of a shared conviction in the aesthetic value of the music studied. Although the brute facts of Bach’s towering greatness within the canon of European art music are easily asserted, it is a far more complex matter to allow these facts to play a role within a sober and scholarly mode of discourse. The challenge lies therefore in developing a critical language in which this greatness can be transmitted while at the same time trying to say something other than what is already intuited when performing and listening to this music. In this book, I suggest that developing the idea of “invention” and its myriad patterns provides a new way forward to meet this challenge.

My aim in this opening chapter is to set the stage for the later methodological discussions and then to offer a kind of sample analysis which demonstrates what one kind of invention might look like. I begin by suggesting how one might rescue the idea of Bachian invention from the danger of too intellectualized a reading and then propose that analyzing inventions as structured repetitions reveals aspects of the composer’s thinking that are not otherwise apparent. I conclude by explaining how this first foray into an analysis of invention interacts with the kinds of critical reflections developed in the later chapters.

Since invention arose as an operative concept of rhetoric, it is important to clarify to what extent Bach could have understood invention in a strictly rhetorical sense, subscribing, as some writers seem to do, to the arcane Latin topics that animated literary and forensic rhetoric. Since Johann Mattheson, more than any other writer of his generation, made a special point of championing the general validity of rhetorical principles in music, and went so far (in his late writings) as to suggest that musical composition was an explicit ars inveniendi, it is useful to detail his views as a kind of benchmark against which to imagine Bach’s own. In the first place, it is important to note that even Christoph Bernhard, an important seventeenth-century codifier of musical-rhetorical figures, had not submitted music to a strict rhetorical method but had merely observed “a rather close relationship” (eine ziemliche nahe Verwandschafft) between the two realms. Music and rhetoric are analogous, but not synonymous. By the time of the Vollkommener Capellmeister (1739), on the other hand, Mattheson was unable to decide whether music could be better understood via rhetoric, or whether music in fact possessed substantive rhetorical properties. To be sure, there was no such thing as a unified theory of rhetoric to draw on, so he had to pick and choose.

Mattheson began by conflating the fivefold Ciceronian model with Christoph Bernhard’s threefold division. In this way he could retain categories that corresponded most obviously to musical activities.¹⁴ Consider Figure 1.1. As can be seen, Mattheson has rejected Cicero’s nomenclature of elocution and pronunciation in favor of the more obviously musical categories of decoration (that is, ornamentation) and execution (that is, performance). Cicero’s “elocution” (“arraying the adornments of style”) is reformulated as “decoration,” referring to musical ornaments which “depend more on the skill and sound judgment of a singer or player than on the actual prescription of the composer.”¹⁵ Mattheson has also eliminated memoria, which is naturally irrelevant to a composer who commits his ideas to paper. The third category, elaboratio, stemmed from Bernhard, but its function was already implied in Cicero’s idea of disposition. Apparently, Mattheson thought it worthwhile to distinguish between two distinct aspects of disposition: on the one hand, his new, restricted category of disposition refers to the order of events and overall schematic plan for a composition, “almost,” he says, “the way one contrives and designs a building and makes a plan or design in order to show where a room, a parlor, a chamber, etc., should go.”¹⁶ Elaboration, on the other hand, “roughly twice as easy,” was a more routine process of “filling in” through typical methods of amplifying the bas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• 1 What Is an Invention?
• 2 Composing against the Grain
• 3 The Ideal Ritornello
• 4 The Status of a Genre
• 5 Matters of Kind
• 6 Figments of the Organicist Imagination
• 7 On Bach’s Style
• 8 Bach as Critic of Enlightenment
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index of Works by Bach
• General Index