The Cello Suites, by Eric Siblin (2009)

If you only read one book on Bach the rest of the year, give this one a try. I missed it when it came out four years ago and serendipitously found it in a library search for something else, checked it out, and couldn't put it down.

Subtitled, "J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece," The Cello Suites carries off well what's famously difficult to do: write 300-plus pages about music, engagingly, for an intelligent lay audience. Check it out!

Siblin wrote rock concert reviews for the Montreal Gazette and happened to catch the cellist Laurence Lesser play Bach cello suites in 2000, 250 years after Bach's death. Siblin said he was listening to someone he'd never heard of play music he "knew nothing about." But he was tremendously moved by the music, did plenty of top-notch research and wrote this, his first book. I found it a refreshing middle ground between gushing Bach-worship writing and overly musicological and technical Bach writing, of which there is no end. Siblin incorporates Bach's history, the mysteries of his archives, scattered among his surviving sons, the original manuscript of the profound six Cello Suites in Bach's hand still missing and probably lost forever due to the ink he used; there's also a parallel history of Pablo Casals, who resurrected the Suites and lived 96 years, through exile from Franco's Spain. Prior to Casals's championing the Suites, they were thought of as overly-mathematical "exercises" for the cello, which, I confess, I still find difficult to understand.

I probably heard someone playing the Prelude from the G major Suite on radio KUSC in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, and thought it transcendent. I bought the music and read the bass clef as if it was written in treble and worked out, measure by measure, the fingerings for my Stratocaster. To this day I am stunned by every single measure in all 36 sections of the six Suites: given the economy of the cello, the voice-leading, melodic invention, thematic development, range of emotional register, and sheer bravura in even the slow movements - I make hundreds of mistakes; these pieces are deceptively difficult and yet a source of never-ending joy to even attempt to play! - seems like a miracle to me. Siblin, who plays guitar, writes about learning the G major Prelude with a tone of wonderment that hits home with me, and resonates with the experiences of my fellow rock guitarists who've tried to take on Bach.

Siblin does something I never tried: he takes cello lessons! For awhile. Hat's off to him for even trying!

What a delightful book; his love for the Cello Suites is infectious and the reader will probably feel a strong need to watch some of the Suites played live on You Tube, or even go out and buy one of the very many versions. I own Yo Yo Ma's version, but have listened to many from the library, and Rostropovich really floored me, I recall. Siblin tells us that Janos Starker probably holds the record with five different recordings of the Suites. Because the source was Anna Magdalena's copy and she didn't know bowing techniques or dynamics for the cello (or an arcane five-string cello-like thing that Bach may have written the Suites for, just one of many  Siblin relates), so, as Siblin writes, "The Cello Suites are a blank slate, a Rorschach test that allow cellists to put their own stamp on Bach and interpret the music as they see fit - or as they think Bach would have wanted his music played."

I felt a twinge of vindication when Siblin noted how, early in the Gigue from the 3rd Suite, there's a section that could've been written by Jimmy Page: "It is a bold, churning phrase that would not be out of place on a Gibson Les Paul wielded by, say, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. Bach's audience, two centuries before the electric guitar was invented, could not have heard the notes in remotely the same way. Historical faithfulness has its limits."

In this, Siblin makes the case that those who insist Bach only be played on "period" instruments to ensure "authenticity" have their place, but their viewpoint is by no means the "one true correct one." On the contrary, Siblin seems the ecumenical Bach listener, and enjoys (or notes with amusement) versions of Bach played on xylophone, or African salsa-style Bach. He mentions Procul Harem and Walter/Wendy Carlos....and Glenn Gould, who actually liked the Swingle Sisters' early 1960s 8-voice chorus, and who had two best-sellers, singing Bach (Bach's Greatest Hits and Going Baroque), swinging the 8th notes. Siblin tells us the Swingle Singers covered some of the cello Suites, which I really must go out of my way to hear now. Glenn Gould is quoted about the Swingles, "When I first heard them I felt like lying on the floor and kicking my heels, that's how good I thought they were."

In addition to Zeppelinesque metal, Siblin hears in Bach's solo Cello Suites: jazz-funk riffs, a country fiddler in a beer hall cranking out tunes, sudden explosions of seemingly impossible polyphony on a four-stringed instrument in which chords must be arpeggiated, sections of almost Philip Glass-ian proto-minimalism, and the doleful expression of deep sorrow of death, probably of his first wife Maria Barbara. There are wonderful stretches of phenomenological-impressionistic observations about the listening of music that I found impressive in Siblin's writing, amid the discussions of Bach's lifelong quest to find a better-paying job, Casals rising to become a world leader in the peace movement in the 20th century, and the peccadilloes of backwater German royalty, among other things.

The ecumenical Siblin: "When I hear violinist Lara St. John play the solo violin works to the rhythms of the tabla, I can't help but want to hear the Cello Suites in a similar setting. 'MarimBach,' Bach To Africa, and Jacques Loussier all turn my crank a great deal."

A formal device that Siblin used I found delightful: he writes six basic chapters, one for each Suite, and divides those chapters up by starting with an epigraph of quotes about each of the formal dance-movements Bach used, for example: Prelude, Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Minuet, Gavotte, and Gigue. Examples: for the Sarabande section of Suite number four, we get a quote from James Talbot in 1690 regarding the character of a Sarabande: "Apt to move the Passions and to disturb the tranquility of the Mind." Jules Ecorcheville on a Courante: "The transformations of the courante might be compared to the frolicking of a fish who plunges, disappears, and returns again to the surface of the water." Dimitri Markevitch says of the Gigue: "Produces an almost satanic effect with its repetitions of similar motifs." (And yet I see no parental warning stickers on the CD for Matt Haimovitz's version of the six solo Cello Suites. Did the God Squad mess up?)

Going back to the Prelude of the first Suite, Siblin gives his impression of the feeling of movement at the beginning, then notes that Robert Johnson, the seminal blues guitarist, seems to share something with the beginning of this Prelude, and that Bach's broken chords could power a rock anthem, and once again he cites Led Zeppelin. I wish I could have explained to Siblin that, indeed: those first chords that Bach uses (you've all heard them: see/hear below) ARE the basis of blues and rock: they're the I-IV-V progression that forms almost all blues tunes and exerted a tremendous influence on rock and roll. Here: this progression seems to be in the musical DNA of every Western listener; we get it like mother's milk.  Pause the recording after the third broken chord, then notice that you expect a return to the main chord, and indeed, Bach provides it before going off in a long strandentwining unfurling of seemingly foreordained and perpetually mobile pumping out of 16ths notes, before finally ending with an incredible build-up, climax, and gesticulated G major chord. (Bach had 20 children.)

                                      Nova Scotian Denise Djokic elegantly playing 
                                      through the G major Prelude
                                         

Yes, there is the occult-mathematical kabbalistic Bach in Siblin's book too, but not too much. (Those of who who geeked out on this aspect of Bach as related in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach won't find the same buzz here.) In kabbalah his name, J. S. Bach, adds up to 41, and there are 41 measures in this first Prelude; he was known to encode his last name in sequences. In German the B stands for B-flat, while the H represents B. Out of this quasi-chromatic sequence he spun motifs and combinations that flowed like a brook on the first days of a German Spring.

All in all, Siblin's book has a catchy melody and a rhythm I can dance to - like a Gigue that "ends in an atmosphere of optimism and cheerfulness," as Dimitri Markevitch said - and I give it a ten...or a 14, which is "Bach"'s value in gematria, and 14 was the number of fugues based on a single theme that Bach was writing when he died.

The Cello Suites seems an underrated book to me.

11-11-11: Worldwide Heavy Metal Day!

Here's a cultural trend: simply pull a day or month out of your butt and proclaim it's National What I'm Interested In Day! Or note well that a pulchritudinous and brainy babe named Cara Santa Maria over at Huffington Post has proclaimed November "Sexuality Month." Apparently by fiat. Note: I'm not complaining, just observing.

You go ahead and try it: do you own a business that's hurting in this endless recession? Hey! Get out the word that December is not only Christmas and Hanukkah and any number of originally pagan Winter Solstice post-harvest days of celebration...but it's Change Your Automobile Oil Day too! Other lube experts will nod in agreement, and you never know, it might go viral. Next March 10th is Used and Antique Furniture Appreciation Day, so go out to your local shops, folks! Make a night of it! Numerology reigns supreme on 11-11-11, and I've read of one small business owner who plans to open his store at 11:11AM today. Other couples chose the day to get married. Lest we forget: the Great War's armistice was at 11AM on 11-11-1918...

Some people at Viacom-owned TV channel VH-1 a few months ago decided that the upcoming 11-11-11 would be Heavy Metal Day. Nothing but metal today, folks!

Sure, it's a crass corporate promotional ploy dreamed up by marketing guys, but I like metal, and if you think I'll let this go well man you've got another thing comin'. The end of Daylight Savings Time arrived earlier this week, so now it starts to get dark at 5PM here in the San Francisco Bay Area. The weather has been cold, more rain is coming, baseball is over...now is the time I usually play a lot of baroque music: Vivaldi, Handel, Scarlatti, Corelli, Tartini, Telemann, Zelenka, Couperin, but especially the deity Johann Sebastian Bach. I've long associated the shorter, colder winter months with baroque music. I listen to all kinds of music, but since my early twenties I've associated Bach and the 17th century boys with what we call "winter" in California. But for 11-11-11 it's all screaming metal for me. By the end of today I will have listened to my favorite Megadeth. I think I'll pull out UFO's seminal Strangers In The Night CD. Where's that Voivod? Hell, maybe even Black Sabbath's first record...I will probably not be listening to a band that sounds like the singer is a cross between Cookie Monster and Sam Kinison, but that's just me. I'm more about the firebreathing virtuoso guitarists. C'est la vie and de gustibus non est disputandum. Or however that stuff goes.

                                         Paul Gilbert, one of the great virtuosos of metal. He has a geek's sense of
                                         humor and is a teacher of great renown. He painted those f-holes on, I'm
                                         pretty sure of it.

A Few Words on Metal Books for Geeks 
Apparently to some, it's sounds odd when I assert that a good chunk of metal has been heavily influenced by baroque music, but if you want exhaustive proof see Professor Robert Walser's book Running With the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal. Walser - a PhD in Musicology - shows elaborate comparisons between solos by Ozzy Osbourne's fiery guitarist Randy Rhoads and the innovative Edward Van Halen and arpeggiated progressions from the likes of Vivaldi and Bach. Walser's book is probably the geekiest book on metal I've seen, but there are a few more books on metal for geeks I'd like to mention.

Sound of the Beast: A Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal by Ian Christe gives a pretty good survey of the history of metal, and does a terrific job of showing how, starting in the 1980s, the metal universe went supernova, with genres splintering off like chaotic flying shrapnel all over the place: thrash metal, speed metal, death metal, black metal, progressive metal, Nu-Metal, shred metal. The book is copyright 2003 and metal is still evolving, mutating, and experimenting and cross-pollinating with other forms of music, so we must always see the word "complete" in a title as a bit of premature gesticulation. Nonetheless, Christe is one of the best writers on metal. His scope is encyclopedic, he writes well, he's not afraid to be opinionated, and he's a terrific, incurable list-maker, which is fun.

Deena Weinstein, Professor of Sociology at DePaul University in Chicago, has gone into nth printings of her Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture, which rivals Walser's book in its intellectual approach, which is deeply sociological, steeped in her Simmel, and she draws on postmodern texts such as Dick Hebdige's influential Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Weinstein appreciates metal deeply, at one time wore a black leather jacket to her lectures (maybe still does), and has given a reading of the music and cultural style of metal an analytical depth that will be a challenge to any subsequent writers coming at it from this angle. Not an easy read, but a delight to metal intellectuals.

Mean Deviation: Four Decades of Progressive Heavy Metal, by Jeff Wagner, arrived earlier this year and was the best book on music in any style that I've read during calendar 2011. Wagner had been listening and writing about metal for a dedicated small following in Metal Maniacs magazine for a long time; he got out of the magazine biz and holed up in a rural house in the American south, and wrote this engrossing book. Wagner is the sort of writer who knows and loves his subject so well that it's infectious. I could see Musicology professors enjoying this book, if only to get a clue about this rich and deep and odd area of music. The supernovae of different metal genres I noted in Christe's book? Wagner amplifies greatly on much of Christe; these two books seem wonderfully complementary. Wagner is most interested in the metal bands that continued to "progress" and try new things. I was enchanted reading about bands I hadn't known anything about, like Opeth or Celtic Frost, and how they evolved. Often the players just practiced so much that 13 months after their last record, suddenly they sound like a different band: odd time signatures, a faster and more melodic lead guitarist, abrupt tempo changes, etc. Or suddenly the band fell in love with old Pink Floyd records and now the music reflects their influence. One learns not only who the Big Four of Thrash are, but who are the Big Three of Prog-Rock? A: Dream Theater, Fate's Warning, and Queensryche. Which I did not know until I read Wagner.

For the ultimate conversation starter among metal heads, you must see Joel McIver's The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists. McIver, the most prolific writer in metal - and a high-quality writer he is too, a real digger-ant who does his research and wears out lots of shoe leather in getting interviews - knows how to get metal heads arguing about who's the best. He knows that "best" is subjective, so he says at the beginning of the book what his criteria is. It still seemed too arbitrary to me why Rhoads, Van Halen and Malmsteen were "hard rock" and not metal, but nevermind all that. As the book - copiously illustrated - counts down from 100 to numero uno, the articles on each player get longer. I have not met one metal head who agrees with McIver's selection for #1, but I have complete respect for McIver's metal esthetics. This is a fun, well-informed book.

Will 11-11 "Stick"As Metal Day?
Maybe. Did Secretary's Day stick? I don't know, but probably in the world of secretaries it did, somewhat. Corporations have a lot of power, but I tend to think these holidays/memorials that "stick" come from something indigenous; they are in the soil and bread where the folk live and eat and breathe. I'm glad that a cartoonist's idea of Sadie Hawkins caught on, or my first date would've happened much later. I'll go off here and speculate that a new holiday/memorial that sticks only does so because of the software of the day's idea runs compatibly on the hardware of the culture's paideuma. My guess is that 11-11 will probably live on, at least for a few years, as Metal Day. After all, there are a LOT of metal heads, from 15 year old girls who listen to Motley Crue to 55 year olds in Dockers who imagine they are world-class shredder John Petrucci in some other world.

The Ironists among the metaloids have re-named the day Nigel Tufnel Day, after the Christopher Guest character from the immortal Spinal Tap, who had an amp made that will go up to 11, one better than his rivals' ten. Others think the late metal god Ronnie James Dio was the embodiment of the sign of 11, with his index and pinky fingers-raised "devil's horns" sign, which Dio once explained he got from his Italian grandmother, who imported it from the old country: it was the malocchio, or Evil Eye, that was being thwarted by such a gesture. Apparently the Evil Eye goes back to classical Greece. There is a funny dissenter towards this Day of Metal, John Serba of the Grand Rapids Press.

My friend Brian Shields is a metal head par excellence, and his avant leanings are on display HERE.

Shields is also an adept punster and wordsmith, and he never told about this piece (that I remember), but I found it accidentally. I end this blogspew for Metal Day with Shields's "Less Successful Heavy Metal Wedding-Tribute Bands" HERE.

Here's the Kronos Quartet playing Hendrix's "Purple Haze."

Paul Gilbert (metal) playing JS Bach, the Prelude in D, from The Well-Tempered Clavier:

Megadeth: Dave Mustaine on vocals and lead guitar; Marty Friedman (flannel shirt), the master of odd intervals and exotic scales in metal, doing most of the lead breaks. He's incredibly articulate, operatic, firebreathing, and has an impeccable vibrato. Friedman shreds in Hungarian minor, with diminished 7th arpeggios flying by, and the Phrygian major scale adds to the esoteric theme of the song, about the famous Hangar 18 of conspiracy theory lore. Unadulterated metal from Megadeth's best lineup: