JS Bach, the Art of Fugue

Another one of these clean-up days. After a night of toxins with Iffi, I feel clean and it’s a shame the house doesn’t look it. B, finally. B-licious, b-lovely…
Fugues…all those interlocking parts and how to take them apart. I’d love to write like this one day. What to say, really. The music for putting things in their rightful place. Music for Winter. Something too stately to relate to the sunshine that's coming outside.

I like very much the way Bach called this the art of fugue; maybe it’s something to do with all of those dry harmony lessons as a teenager that I built up an inbred-dislike of Bach. I would also argue that his flute pieces never grabbed me. What was I looking for in their stead? What did I get from Debussy or Faure that I liked better? Is it something to do with growing up, and those free-flowing bubbles and ripples of “loveliness” seeming to be not freedom now, but indecision instead?

Something happened that bizarre and horrible summer of 2005 where I started doing sudoku puzzles. All the distractions of “I think…I feel…” which had previously helped and chided me where necessary suddenly could only leave me weeping on a sofa, or lurching around St Pauls at three in the morning going out for more wine (the fabulous Tasties…probably best approached when one is drunk, I fear). Instead, putting numbers in a box in the right place at the right time seemed to help, and since then it seems to have become an aesthetic of mine. And I did love the high-rise offices I saw around Broadmead on those new walks to work (the one I loved best has gone, but I got a photo of it before the wrecking ball came along), and I watched the traffic lights closer and I half-closed my eyes and imagined the cars as animals instead, and little by little I stretched out comfortably into these feelings and sights and loved more vocally than I had done previously the sights of repetition and clean lines. I went to the Tate Modern at some point in this time and saw a Sol Le Witt picture, instructions on how to draw a triangle. And I love Magritte, always will, and know it’s for the clean lines he does. Mondrian and Bridget Riley began to feature clearer in my head, and I suddenly got it. Freed up, I think, of scorn and ridicule about the plasticy things I loved dearly, I felt full of it, feel full of it.

That’s not to say that there isn’t passion or depth in there, nor contrast or blood. The tones from the bottom of the cello are amazing, almost like a bassoon. Not that I can in any way call myself “a violinist”, but since starting to learn it myself, I see this kind of music so much clearer too. I see how a minuscule shake in the wrist at a crucial point can ruin or redeem a note, and how one can bend and stretch the sound , and what an emotional instrument it is – that is sobs almost. Pious.

Somewhere between buying a Usborne dictionary of science (which explains in glorious diagrams how mid 1980s computers work) and imaging a future prosperity, my own flat and three motherboards from wherever I can find them mounted on the wall; I have learned to love Bach and understand the resolutions working themselves out like paperweights.