Present All Along, Beneath and Upholding

A note sounds. Then it sounds again. But everything has changed. Not only is the note colored by a different resonance the second time around, but featureless time has been marked with the beginnings of a grid. The one note at the start defined only a before and an after. The second discloses a pulse. In accordance with this pulse, a third sound appears, but up a step, encouraging the accompaniment — which has not drawn attention to itself so far — to move conversely down.

That’s the first paragraph from an essay, Back to Bach: Two books examine the composer’s life and art by Paul Griffiths in the Feb/Mar 2007 issue of BookForum.

Here is most of the last paragraph from the piece:

Transcendence is here, in how, as time proceeds, eternity is always present — how, in that gorgeous aria from Cantata no. 115, the shadow of a fall reappears again and again; how, in the D Minor Chaconne, the keynote is forever being revisited, with whatever feelings of homecoming or hopeless inevitability; and how, in the Goldberg Variations, the opening dance is there again at the end, “as if nothing has happened” (Geck) or as if it had been present all along, beneath and upholding “a world of sound unfamiliar and unrepeatable” (Williams).

A note sounds. Then it sounds again. But everything has changed.

“The second [note] discloses a pulse.” From thence we proceed in search of transcendence.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/