J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

It was quick-witted of Bach to identify the chord, resolve it correctly, and supply a
suitable cadence—but whether we ourselves could do this or not, we all know the itch
Bach insisted upon scratching.
Why this overwhelming, almost instinctive drive toward grammatical
completion? It is tempting to invoke a Schenkerian kind of quasi-organic transmission
of musical energy—there is a sense in which a movement as a whole could be said to
come into focus with its conclusion. If awareness of long-term tonal closure exists in
only the most attenuated manner, and is better thought of as a function of
compositional ideology and practice than of direct perception, 10 there can be little
doubt of the visceral dissatisfaction felt when a movement trails off into thin air. 11
In order to be performable at all, therefore, unfinished movements need to be
completed; and so posterity remains dubiously grateful to the composers and scholars
who have rendered them thus playable. Completions raise knotty problems of artistic
‘ethics’. The single regulative principle Lydia Goehr advanced as governing musical
practice over the last two hundred years, the ‘work-concept’, is actually a double
principle, privileging both the work itself and the composer. 12 This dual locus of
authority has meant that what W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley called the ‘fallacy’
of authorial intention has been the hallmark of intellectual respectability in musical
10 See N. Cook, ‘The perception of large-scale tonal closure’, Music Perception 5/2 (Winter 1987),
197-206, and B. Edlund, ‘Tonal closure: Fact and/or fiction’, Third triennial ESCOM conference:
Proceedings, 140-144.
11 Psychological studies concerning the perception of musical closure include K. Swartz, K. Kreilick,
E. Hantz, and W. Kananen, ‘Neural responses to melodic and harmonic closure: An event-relatedpotential
study’, Music Perception 15/1 (Fall 1997), 69-98; E. Marvin, ‘Research on tonal
perception and memory: what implications for music theory pedagogy?’ Journal of Music Theory
Pedagogy 9 (1995), 31-70; A. Sadek, ‘The nature of flexibility of musical closure’, Bulletin of the
Council for Research in Music Education 119 (Winter 1993-1994), 122-126; and B. Rosner and E.
Narmour, ‘Harmonic closure: music theory and perception’, Music Perception 9/3 (Spring 1992),
383-411. R. Eberlein and J. Fricke’s Kadenzwahrnehmung und Kadenzgeschichte: Ein Beitrag zu
einer Grammatik der Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1992) combines experiments in music
perception with a historical approach to cadential morphology. P. McCreless, ‘The hermeneutic
sentence and other literary models for tonal closure’, Indiana Theory Review 12 (Spring-Fall 1991),
35-73, explores parallels between the semiotic approaches of Barthes and Schenker.
12 The imaginary museum of musical works (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). It would be possible to
conceive of a musical culture that was oriented purely towards the works themselves, while taking
little account of the composers thereof. Something like this is true of Irish traditional music, built
around a stable corpus of tunes, where (in some circles) awareness of individual authorship is
actively discouraged.
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