<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica">Mark Anson-Cartwright wrote</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 17px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br></span></div><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 17px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica">I'd like to recommend a publication that would most readily be called a work of historical musicology, one that engages with theory in a compelling way, namely, Laurence Dreyfus's _Bach and the Patterns of Invention_ (Harvard University Press, 1996). The first chapter, in particular--"What Is an Invention?"--should be essential reading for any student doing analytical work on Bach.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 17px; "><br></div> <br></blockquote><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 17px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica">I would like to add that, apart from its merits, Dreyfus's book offers an illustrative negative example of a kind of one-sidedness that often mars musical discussion. I am referring to authors who, </font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; ">arguing for the musical aspect they are </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; ">concerned with,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; "> combine such arguments with the unjustified dismissal of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; "> complementary aspects, which may lie outside their expertise. Such arguments seem to manifest excessive confidence that their limited purview matches the multidimensional richness of music such as Bach's.</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica">Dreyfus's book is characterized by the strong antagonism he sees between his "mechanist" approach and the "organicist" Schenkerian approach and by the concomitant attempts to downplay the significance of harmony and voice-leading. While this tendency is most clearly evident in his explicit anti-Schenkerian essay in chapter 6, its symptoms are already evident in chapter 1.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 17px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica">In ch. 6, Dreyfus argues against the Urlinie concept on the basis that it "seems counterintuitive to imagine that the work that went into the invertible permutations was not *the primary* motor behind the deepest structure of the piece </font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; ">[C-minor Fugue from WTC I]</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; ">" (p. 178, my emphasis). This is one of several passages in which Dreyfus seems to fail to consider the possibility that "mechanist" and "organicist" viewpoints might offer complementary illumination for Bach's art (a consideration I think is extremely pertinent for its nature). Dreyfus's argument is a bit similar as if we tried to dismiss the significance of syntactic construction in a poem by arguing that the work that went into the rhyme scheme is *primary*.</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 17px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica">Chapter 1 includes similar more or less unfruitful attempts to determine whether "mechanist" or voice-leading considerations are *primary* for each compositional decision. Discussing C-major Invention, Dreyfus explains (p. 14) that "the adjustments in the treble in m. 8 therefore resulted neither from artistic whimsy nor from a desire for variation but from a need to replace the result of a faulty transformation." Leaving aside that his preceding discussion about this "mechanist" explanation is itself hard to make sense of, I would question whether we should, in general, assume that each of Bach's compositional solutions "results from" from a single factor. Rather, they tend to fulfill several functions at once, and this is essential to his contrapuntal genius. While t</font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; ">he adjustment in question – the transpositional level of the thematic figure at the latter half of m. 8 – may improve local verticalities (Dreyfus's explanation), it also enabled Bach to build a stepwise ascending voice-leading progression (G–A–B–C–D) towards the ^2 (albeit, not the Urlinie ^2), in parallel with the opening C–D–E ascent towards the ^3.</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 17px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica">There are also several details in Dreyfus's book that suggest that his attempts to downplay the significance harmony and voice leading may partially stem from his defective command of these aspects. For example, his Example 1.3 (p. 16) includes a reduction in which the beginning D of the left-hand statement of the theme figure in m. 5 is reduced out and the passing E shown instead, despite the significance of the D as the root of the V7/V and despite the lucid parallelism and registral connection between this statement and the one that establishes the tonic in m. 1.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica"><br></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica">Olli Väisälä</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica">Sibelius Academy</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica"><a href="mailto:ovaisala@siba.fi">ovaisala@siba.fi</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Helvetica"><br></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 17px; "><br></div></body></html>