Feiyan Yang

Professor David Cannata

MUST 3796-004

12 February 2019

Assignment 1

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most famous composers of all time. Many of Bach's works

are known for their elegant melodies, splendid harmonies and textbook-level compositional

techniques. As a flute player, I have learned and appreciated Bach's flute partita and some of his

sonatas, but it is clear that in addition to these works, Bach's concertos for other instruments and his

choral works are also outstanding. Among all his authoritative works, the ones that I am going to

talk about here are Christ lag in Todes Banden, Magnificat, and Brandenburg Concerto No.3 in G major. Bach

gave the three pieces their own characteristics. He wrote similar orchestration and musical form in

his cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden and Magnificat. The distinctive melodies he composed for each

piece were all quite impressive. I had a good time during the process of finding similarities and

differences between his works, and I guess it is all these details that make Bach’s works become

people’s everlasting favorite.

As a composer of the Baroque period, Bach maintained strict order on musical form and

structure in his works. Although the forms in his music have some subtle differences from the

musical forms we are familiar with now, they provided fundamental concepts for latter compositions

and became the prototypes for future musical forms. For example, in Bach’s work Christ lag in Todes

Banden, BWV 4, the musical structure was derived from hymn stanzas for religious ceremonies and

festivals. Bach composed this chorale cantata for Easter. It based on Martin Luther’s hymn for

Easter in the Lutheran church. Except the Sinfonia at the beginning of the music, the remaining

seven sections corresponded to each of Luther’s hymn. Bach reproduced the same compositional
idea in his other work Magnificat. The music consists of eleven movements for the text of Luke 1:46–

55, concluded by a twelfth doxology movement. On the other hand, Bach also showed his

spectacular ability of constructing music in Brandenburg Concerto No.3 in G major. In the third

movement we could even find a typical binary form, though it would appear more frequently in the

classical period.

Plenty much of music from the Baroque period and earlier times had unclear tonal center or did

not follow specific musical rules for key changing. From the perspective of tonality and harmony,

Bach did make his works different from later romantic and classical ones. For example, later

composers wrote keys in each movement with unique tonal relationship in song cycles or

symphonies. However, Bach chose to write all movements in his Christ lag in Todes Banden in the

same key. In his Magnificat, Bach surprised us by composing only three movements on tonic in his

twelve-movement biblical canticle. He tried something more regular in the Brandenburg Concerto No.3.

He initiated the music with G major in the first movement, then followed traditional rules making

the second movement in e minor, and finally reintroduced the original key in the third movement.

The reason for Bach’s alternating tonal personality was probably due to the instrumental

development back in the days. Though the immature and incompletely formed music theory of the

Baroque period may account for part of the reason, but it may also because the instruments at that

time were not as sophisticated as they are today, and the definition of tuning and pitch was not

unified either.

Despite the tonal character of his work, Bach also built stunning melodies for each piece. In

Brandenburg Concerto No.3, he set up the music in contrapuntal style, let different melodies play

synchronously to create inconspicuous bounding between musical phrases. He manifolded various

melody styles. In the first movement, he introduced a melody with elegant leaps and smooth speed,

while in the third movement he wrote another melody with stepwise fast-moving notes. The active
and slightly nervous atmosphere especially reflected the violin parts. As for melody in Christ lag in

Todesbanden, Bach composed the hymn relied on Victimae paschali laudes, the sequence for Easter.

He manipulated the singers shared same melodies with musical instruments. For example, in the end

of Versus I, he constructed a long four-part fugue in motet style. He duplicated the voices with all

instruments, reinforced the middle voices and lower voices with the viola parts. Different from the

former two, in his Magnificat, Bach announced the soprano to put forward the first motive with

entertaining, cheerful moving notes. The upcoming second motive is in the tenor part and has

similar style as the first one. Bach's melody style is gorgeous, bright and elegant, and his ability to put

the melodies together to form an exceeding musical picture is even more admirable.

While the music of the Baroque period is undeniably not as rich and turbulent in its feelings as

the music of the later romantic period, we can still clearly distinguish the sentimental changes in

Bach's music. The emotional resonance that music brings to us is usually based on volume, timbre,

harmony and melody, and Bach controlled our emotions by changing orchestration, tonality, chords,

rhythm, and speed in his music. Bach seldom arranged large ensembles for his musical works, on the

contrary, his instrumentation usually asked for small group of musicians, such as the small sting

ensemble and basso continuo for Brandenburg Concerto No.3. Though, Bach create polyphonic texture

and musical discrimination by using dissonance and adding violin improvisation. In Bach’s Magnificat

and Christ lag in Todesbanden, he arrayed specific instrumentation both in the voices and the orchestra

for each movement along with changing time signatures and key signatures. For the Magnificat he

organized the music for a five-part chorus and a tutti orchestra. However, all these people did not

play throughout the whole piece. We could discover that he required less people to perform when

the movement was in a minor key and vise versa.

Through the analysis of the above works, I learned Bach's rigor in musical forms, flexible

modifications in the harmonization and instrumentation, and once again experienced the beauty of
his melody. Learning Bach's work is an inevitable task for every musician. To me, the beginning was

boring and confusing. When I first came into contact with Bach's work, the flute partita looked like

a bunch of floating notes, but as I deepened my understanding of music and the richness of music

theory and musical history, the more I learned that Bach's music was never as easy to play as it

seemed.
 Works Cited

Bach, Johann Sebastian. Christ lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4. 1707.

Brandenburg Concerto in G Major, BWV 1048. 1721.

Magnificat BWV 243a. 1733.