Listening to Bach and Handel: A Comparative Critique by Joseph P. Swain

Abstract

Reviewed by: Listening to Bach and Handel: A Comparative Critique by Joseph P. Swain Alexis VanZalen Listening to Bach and Handel: A Comparative Critique. By Joseph P. Swain. (Monographs in Musicology, no. 18.) Hillsdale, N Y: Pendragon Press, 2018. [596 p. ISBN 9781576473139 (hardback), $72.] Bibliography, index. [End Page 555] Joseph P. Swain describes his Listening to Bach and Handel: A Comparative Critique as a book written not for musicologists but "especially for those who love the music of Bach and Handel" (p. vii). He similarly explains that he is not primarily concerned with "informing listeners about composers' lives, their ways of creating the music, and the societies in which they lived" but seeks to "[draw] attention mainly to musical sounds and their interrelations." Such a work of "traditional criticism," Swain believes, will deepen listeners' appreciation and love of the music (pp. vii–viii). This goal shapes each of the most significant characteristics of his book. Swain's primary goal of focusing on musical sounds leads to a rich collection of detailed descriptions of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, which forms the heart of his monograph. The ten central chapters present most of the main genres and compositional techniques found in the works of the two composers, and in them Swain both highlights interesting moments and explains common compositional procedures. Though lengthy, these descriptions successfully illuminate the nuances that create beauty in each piece—effective text painting here, unique harmonic progressions there, surprising treatments of standard compositional devices, and more. Concerning the second movement of Bach's Concerto for Harpsichord in F Minor, BWV 1056, he writes for example: The first measure of melody presents a metrically square, boilerplate melodic sequence. The downbeat of measure two must surely sound the A-flat4 in the main melody and F3 in the bass, and so they do, but no sooner have they done so than the right hand leaps the octave and then, in a flurry of ornamentation, continues to play out the expected F minor and E-flat major harmonies while conjuring another looser melodic sequence, this time ascending, in somewhat less time than the original. There is nothing on the immediate levels of Baroque music more organized and predictable than the sequence; the charm of this moment and many others like it in the movement arises from the explicit contradiction of order and play, or rather, a playfulness that fulfills the demands of order. (p. 274) After similarly expounding on cantilenas by Handel, Swain concludes that they "teach that truly great things can come of small details of the music . . . and deep appreciation can come of listening to those details" (p. 282). The statement superbly represents both Swain's approach to the musical output of Bach and Handel and the tenor of his writing. But while Swain succeeds in showcasing details of the pieces he discusses, he struggles to craft a convincing larger argument or to achieve his second goal for the book, to "[present] a new conception of the Baroque style, unified by the aesthetic of music drama and founded on specific technical principles of the musical language of the late seventeenth century in Europe" (p. x). Of course, most accounts of Western music history do emphasize the development of opera at the start of the baroque period and do highlight how musicians from the Florentine Camerata to Johann Mattheson worked to move the passions of their listeners. Swain elaborates on the importance of opera, however, in some unusual ways. For example, he presents the motor rhythm found in many of Bach's and Handel's works as an extension of the walking [End Page 556] bass lines that often accompanied strophic arias by Monteverdi (pp. 123–30). In his view, both techniques provide the continuity necessary to "build a pleasing musical structure" (p. 123). More importantly, in this and other discussions, Swain betrays a lack of appreciation for the aesthetic of the early seventeenth century and only limited familiarity with scholarship on the period. For example, he asserts that "the only reasons to tolerate long stretches of recitative," which he thinks does not have much continuity or musical structure, "are semantic: the meanings...