I’ve recently reread Peter Williams’s little collection of articles Playing the Organ Works of Bach after probably twenty-five or more years. There are doubtless many important points to be returned to in this set of case studies; as with much else in Williams’s writing, a great deal is continually being said with remarkable succinctness, and practically every paragraph, if not every sentence, poses a question or thought likely to send one off in search of more information, examples, or simply time and space to ponder its implications.
The value for me at the moment, however – not being a great player or scholar of Bach in particular – may lie in some of Williams’s general (and repeated) observations and exhortations. Foremost among these must be his constant call to look at the music, the notes on the page, before doing anything else – speculating about symbolism or other ‘meaning’, worrying about the details of the music’s realization in performance, whatever. The composer’s intentions, Williams says – and he clearly believes that the way a piece of music is put together is foremost among these intentions, which is to say that music is primarily about itself, only secondarily, if at all, about anything else – will be clear enough to anyone who cares to look for them, and it is the player’s business then to convey these intentions as clearly as possible. If, in search of insight, one is to look at anything other than the piece of music at hand, then it should be other music somehow related to it: indeed however much one might learn from studying the piece at hand, one cannot fully understand it, he might say, without such context.
When it does come to realizing a piece in performance, Williams advocates over and over, at least for many of the Bach works he treats in this collection, a registrational and temporal restraint in keeping with the subtlety he sees in them, so as to allow the fine control of articulation (‘to be clear, marked, varied and meaningful’) essential to bringing out their motivic bases – which seems to be the underlying theme of this whole collection of articles.
This restraint, this concern for the composer’s intentions, he warns, may be at odds with the expectations of the modern listener (including oneself), who likely expects to be thrilled or moved, led on a particular journey, in a way that may be quite foreign to the reasons a piece was written and the uses to which it was originally put. In the case of Bach, the primary use may not always have been performance (certainly in the case of a great deal of early keyboard music – though perhaps less so the organ – at least public performance in the modern sense was not), and the organ may be at best only an incidentally useful medium for sounding music that as it were has its own independent existence.
A concern for the text and its structure, and restraint and clarity in its presentation, might sum up my entire approach as both an organist and a typographer today. If I cannot match Williams’s eye for analysis of a musical text (though as a liturgical musician I spend a great deal of time wrestling with sung text and its implications for musical setting and realization), I hope that I am coming to examine and learn from the behavior of the available and chosen media of presentation (organs and their wind, tone colors, and pipe speech; typefaces, perhaps under various formatting, printing, and reading conditions; both all too rarely really successful) vis-à-