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

Sometimes, it is just noise, in the obvious sense: one thinks of the
‘Schreckensfanfare’ at the start of the finale to his ninth symphony, or his obsession
with sustained trills. There’s an irony here in that traditionally, in both Classical and
Baroque styles, trills were used to emphasise tonal function by making the important
cadences even more self-evident. Here, however, when the texture reaches a certain
level of saturation, they become the harmonic equivalent of white noise (Ex.5.9)—
notice how this point of maximum acoustic chaos is succeeded by a passage of
absolute clarity.
But not all this noise is ‘noisy’. Consider the following passage for example—
apparently one of the purest and most straightforward in his entire oeuvre (Ex.5.10).
But the voicing of the texture, with its wide separation of the hands and closely spaced
chords near the bottom of the keyboard, is anything but Classical, introducing an
element of resistance into this most pellucid of themes:
At other times it is a sort of information overload which creates the noise.
Ex.5.11 is, of course, from the movement which even his greatest admirers found hard
to take. It is a fugue—exceptionally logical, considered from a linear point of view.
But each line appears to be elbowing the other for space, as they cross and recross each
350