Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

Film 8B #4 for Foundations of Cultural Awareness 101

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Amazing!

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Notes from my class: The toccata is the first part of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Notice that the music keeps starting and stopping, almost as if Bach is coming up with ideas and then setting them aside. Notice too that the organ has multiple keyboards, and that the organist changes from one keyboard to another (see #1). The organ is made up of hundreds of pipes of different shapes and sizes, some made out of wood and other made up of metal. This gives them different pitches, volumes, and timbres. The organist controls what pipes are played by pulling out or pushing in the stops that surround the keyboards. By setting stops for different keyboards the organist can select how loud or soft, how bright or dark, how light or heavy he wants the organ to sound. For this toccata, Bach keeps the organist's hands so busy that he needs an assistant to run the stops for him. (In Bach's day, the organist would also have needed a boy to pump the bellows that sent air through the pipes. Now they are run by an electric motor.) At the beginning of the fugue (#2), the subject is introduced in a single voice. A second voice then comes in (#3) and states the subject at a higher pitch. While the second voice plays the subject, the first voice plays something else, called a countersubject, that creates harmonic polyphony, or counterpoint, with the subject. The two voices play with each other for a few bars, and then a third voice enters (#4). The three voices play together long enough that we begin to think that this is going to be all there is, but then a fourth voice enters in the low bass pedals (#5). As an organist Bach was famous for his pedal work, and his works demand great facility with the feet. By the end of the exposition we are in the major key (#6). We start out with a short reference to the subject, but then it disappears altogether, and we run through a number of episodes (#7). The subject comes back for a moment (#8), and we might think we are at the recapitulation, but Bach does not follow through and there are more episodes. During all of this, notice how many times the organist and his assistant change keyboards and stops. As a young man Bach studied Vivaldi's concertos and acquired a taste for the contrast between the large and small groups of the orchestra and for the various instruments. Here Bach imitates that contrast in his organ. Soon we can see the organist's assistant pulling out stops (#9), and we can guess that something is in the air. We also hear the key heading for home. The recapitulation begins (#10), but now the voices don't wait politely for each voice to finish their turn at the subject. Instead, they pile up on top of each other in a style called stretto, which means "worried." The whole effect from here on out will be to drive the music to a dramatic ending. Fingers and feet are flying; we see the assistant pulling out the biggest stops (#11), the ones that will bring to bear the longest, lowest, and most powerful pipes in the organ. This is in preparation for a virtuosic pedal solo (#12). Bach also uses the pedal to repeat the tonic note over and over again (#13)-this is called a pedal tone-creating what seems like an irresistible force that drives all the disparate elements of the fugue towards an inevitable conclusion. Just when you think it's over (#14) Bach sounds a surprising chord (called a deceptive cadence) that deprives us of the ending, and Bach returns to the toccata style with more scales, arpeggios, and wild-sounding chords. This has the same effect as a cadenza in an operatic aria or concerto. It sounds improvisational and is the most virtuosic playing in piece. Finally it crashes to an end, a wild and almost frightening revelation of Bach's Dionysian side.