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

and it is the least comfortable bit of harmony in the whole fugue. The upper voices
move in parallel sixths; but these are not the easygoing galant sixths of a quasi-fugal
trio sonata by Quantz or Fasch. Friedemann here shows himself as a composer who
‘thinks through his fingers’: the upper parts make no rhythmic sense by themselves,
and only through the composite movement of continued semiquavers does the texture
cohere. 65 Its harmonic rhythm is even more elusive. The root movement would appear
to be the perfectly normal progression: I-vi-ii-V (-I), but at every point the listener is
given barely enough information to make this out. The crucial bass A (vi) appears
only at the last moment before ii, which is initially represented only by its seventh in
the bass. The V that follows is obscured by the presence of an A in the alto: a
suspension? If so, it is introduced with a bare minimum of preparation (insufficient
for some ears, perhaps). Or is the chord V9? Or vii7? This ambiguity of harmonic
progression gives the passage a curiously unstable sense of being ‘off-balance’, a
feeling maintained by the fragmentary exchanges of the following two bars, until
relative normalcy returns in bar 8. At times this sort of writing (of which there is
plenty in these fugues) seems fidgety and awkward, uncomfortably close to being
simply ungrammatical; at times it seems to have a slippery, fragile attractiveness of its
own.
65 This true of many passages in J. S. Bach as well, of course, but seldom in such an intricate manner.
67