This work was revised in 2021.
Farewell to Bach is a palimpsest, a work written on top of another existing work, in this case the Contrapunctus XIX, the last and incomplete triple fugue in J. S. Bach's The Art of the Fugue. Created in 1998 and significantly updated in 2021, this has been my latest addition – and probably the last – to a series of chamber works based on Bach's swan song. It was commissioned by the Scotia Festival of Music in partnership with the CBC and the Nova Scotia Arts Council for Tafelmusik, Canada's preeminent Baroque orchestra for a premiere at the 1998 Scotia Festival where both Tafelmusik and I were artists in residence. It was the first time Tafelmusik commissioned a work by a living composer, so making the connection with Bach in my work was a logical thread for this commission. There is also a more personal reason for this choice. The piece is a posthumous dedication to my late father who was then in his late seventies. It is a summation of my feelings about him and the incredible influence he has had on my development as an artist and a human being. Metaphorically, the Bach fugues represent the foundation upon which I have build and against which I have defined myself: they represent my father. This transference is not inappropriate, inasmuch Bach has been a point of strong artistic parentage for me from which I was beginning to move away by the twilight years of the 20th Century in search of a new paradigm for my musical thinking. In this sense, Farewell to Bach was indeed a farewell to the master who, more than any other composer in history, has left his indelible mark on the musical era we generally identify as "western music."
The best intellectual metaphor I can find for Farewell to Bach is that of a 3D chess board or rather two related superimposed games on two different chess boards. The master game on the bottom board is by the musical master himself whose Art of the Fugue represents the apogee of Baroque counterpoint. The top chess board has many more squares and more chess pieces (more queens, bishops, horses, etc.) but they all move according to the same rules as in the bottom board; in other words, all instrumental lines respect the basic rationale of late 18th Century counterpoint. For those who understand these rules and how Bach exhausts them in this contrapuntal masterpiece, my quest must sound like a hopelessly impossible exercise. The only way to even get close to making this possible was to slow down the original material of Contrapunctus XIX and keep the solo instruments with my music either moving at a faster time scale and with more dexterous motion (the board with more squares and pieces in my chess metaphor) or "cherry pick" notes from the bottom board but in a way that results in different ("phantom") melodic lines that, on account of how they are construed, they cannot contradict the Bach original. Even though the fundamental rules of the game are adhered to on the top board, I wanted my music to develop along different motivic/thematic tangents and cultural/stylistic references that are independent of the thematic material of Bach's music: same rules, but different dialects and strategies.
Farewell to Bach was not just a cerebral challenge for me. My main compositional goal was to coax out of this masterwork of musical abstraction the hidden beauty and emotion which hides in it and which is usually overlooked in favor of focusing on the purely intellectual accomplishment. The slowing down of the tempo of the original music, allows this beauty to be highlighted by the additional instrumental lines and release its scent. Basking in this aura of beauty while working on Farewell to Bach has been a gift to me, one of the most satisfying composing experiences of my adult life, particularly during my 2021 revisiting of this composition, its final and proper summation.
Throughout Farewell to Bach, the string orchestra plays the Bach original with only minor modifications. In the first section the fugue is preserved intact. After the exposition, the woodwinds enter discreetly by threading together melodies and motivic material out of the existing notes of the fugue: the new music is born out from the fugue itself and learns 'how to walk' by selectively sampling existing information from the original material but coalescing it into its own language. (Micro-rhythmic variations in the solo lines and painstakingly selected articulations are metaphorically translated as culturally different but consistent body language and accents.) Gradually, the added music becomes more independent, introducing additional musical information, but always within the strict guidelines of common practice harmony and counterpoint. While it sings along with the fugue, it does not actually participate in its structure, imposing instead a motivic structure of its own which is unrelated to the thematic content of the original. The second section is dominated by the two solo violins who play hyper-virtuosic parts juxtaposed on the Bach material. Melodically, rhythmically, and stylistically, they are far more independent from the Bach original than any of the material in the first section. The pervading principle here is "cultural counterpoint," an idea that had occupied my mind relentlessly in the mid-1980s when, as a budding composer, I was trying to discover my own musical identity beyond my formal institutional training. The material for the solo violins draws its inspiration from a diversity of cultures, among them: Celtic fiddle music, middle eastern folk, klezmer, imperial British music and even jazz. On the surface, the relationship between the two superimposed layers is tenuous and occasionally contradictory, but at a deeper level it is symbiotic and more unified than it appears on the surface. The traditional rules of counterpoint have been expanded to accommodate these radically different ways of thinking about melody, harmony, and rhythm, but this expansion is accomplished by reinterpreting rather than rejecting the rules. The Bach fugue has been tampered with in two spots: first by stating the second subject twice the first time it appears and, further along, by repeating two measures four times to prepare the listener for a dramatic and easily discernable "Beethovenesque" climax. The fugue in the third section of Contrapunctus XIX has been left incomplete by Bach at the point where he was beginning to combine the subjects of all three fugues into a single masterful contrapuntal summation. I stopped the quotation a few measures earlier, at the half cadence, where the interruption is more intuitive, ending the piece with a short concluding statement of my own. This third fugue is a signature piece based on the B-A-C-H motif. As with the previous two fugues of Contrapunctus XIX, the Bach material is initially presented by the string orchestra alone. The woodwinds return starting with a lamenting statement of my own initials, C. H., and evoking the spirit of the first fugue while gradually leading towards a climax with only the Bach material, and with a circumspect absence of any musical statements from me. My concluding statement at the very end consists of stretti on the B-A-C-H subject and of reiterations of my own motivic material on top of the second fugue. It ends with a peaceful cadence by the entire ensemble with an afterimage of lingering and ambivalent high string harmonics at the very end.
