Among the numerous attributes, if not unique facets, of St. James is its deep affinity with the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. From the earliest months of my music ministry at SJC, which commenced in the autumn of 2004, I have been keenly aware that Bach's organ music speaks with extraordinary power to our congregation, inducing me to not only include it regularly as part of the fairly eclectic mix comprising solo organ music at our services, but, evenmoreso, as the "anchor" of our organ recital series entitled Bach and Beyond (which will resume as soon as our situation permits).
Far from falling into a state of suspended animation consequent to the exile from our church building imposed last summer by a structural matter, Bach's keyboard music has been occupying even more extensive a role in the succession of weekly keyboard voluntaries at our worship services. While that great master wrote extensively for the organ, he also wrote a substantial amount for windless keyboard ("clavier", from the Latin "clavus" = "key") instruments, which in his day were the cembalo (harpsichord), and the very personal clavichord, a more immediate ancestor of the piano, designed for private music- making - -an instrument that had a very special place in Bach's heart.
When our exile began, we probably were not anticipating the length of time we would be barred from the buildings at the corner of Main and Taconic in Gt. Barrington. Thus, my initial foray into Bach clavier pieces bore the anticipation of getting through a few of his two- and three-part "inventions" and several of his smaller clavier preludes and fugues. Finding how effective these pieces have been proving in our circumstances, as I write this about ten months after the "Fall of the Wall", I have now presented all thirty of the Inventions, along with the full set of eighteen "lesser" preludes and fugues, and am on the eve of embarking on a traversal of Bach's epic set of forty-eight preludes and fugues, known as "The Well Tempered Clavier" -- the principal focus of this article, to be sure.
Bach's stated purpose in writing the WTC stands paradoxically to the historic, Olympic position of "The Forty-eight" as among the greatest and most sublime creations of art. If we are to take Bach at face value, we would merely believe that he wrote these pieces, each displaying so unique, individual a character, to demonstrate the possibility of writing in all twelve major and minor keys (for which there was really no precedent), made that much more attractive by "equal temperament", a recently- developed system of tuning which reconciled the theoretically impossible problem of tuning absolutely pure intervals on keyboards that lacked a sufficient number of keys between octaves: in older tuning systems, the more sharps or flats in a chord, the less in tune it would sound. Thus, a tonality such as C-sharp major, with seven sharps, would sound so hideously out-of-tune that it would be avoided. One irony of "equal temperament" is that through squeezing, expanding, shaving, adding, and other tuning-wrench-wrought tweakings, any chord in any key would be out of tune, but not so egregiously as in the past, and, thus, tolerable though not perfectly in tune. Equal temperament has prevailed in keyboard tuning for well over two centuries, so we tend to be quite inured to it.
Bach being Bach, so prosaic a nominal purpose is akin to, say, describing an area of ineffable, breathtaking natural beauty only by its latitudinal and longitudinal bearings. Consider all that makes a piece of music great, and then multiply it exponentially -- you then are closer to what Bach achieved in the WTC. Consider this music, as with all great music that touches us spiritually, a "window on the Divine". Indeed, it is for this primary reason that Bach has become so intrinsic a part of our music ministry at St. James.
Experiencing Bach can be like experiencing a flower, which can enter our awareness on numerous levels, from the macro- to microscopic, along with a spectrum ranging from the purely objective to thoroughly subjective. Of the many aspects of this music, you might wish to take special note of how Bach builds an entire piece from a single or a few small motivic "cells". With the fugues, these ideas are presented imitatively and tend to be part of a broad "arch" form in which the ideas are introduced, developed, and recapitulated.
As with any "Window on the Divine", the more completely the beholder is able to immerse her/himself, the deeper and more pervasive -- the richer -- the encounter. Yet, as tends to be with such Godly beauty, we primarily need only to "open our pores and let it in," allowing God to speak to us as God will, through God's ineffable beauty.