This summer (2024), I am returning to the six sonatas and partitas for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach, with a particular eye to my performances of the the cycle at Tremenheere, in July, August and September (LINK )

This of course, is NOT part of the cycle, but, for me, incredibly important for my understanding of it.

Over the next few days, I will post some thoughts about this central work for e

The first ‘Double’ of the B Minor Partita BWV 1002

very violinist: there will be nothing comprehensive or encyclopaedic, just offcuts from the workbench.  There’s no really logical place to begin or end, so I will just start where I finished last night’s (or rather this early morning’s practice), with this movement from the first ‘partita’.

I have a tendency to talk too much about ‘doubles’. In all honesty, this constant rabbiting comes a slight frustration at the lack of imagination with which they are discussed and approached. There are four in the cycle, raising the  basic four – movement dance suite (Allemande, Corrente, Sarabanda, Tempo di Bourée) of the first partita to, apparently, eight. Of course, Bach refuses to leave the form alone: this four movement structure can be found, unadorned, in, for instance, in ever one of the six solo suites by Johann Westhoff, which I am sure Bach knew, and very likely, had played. But in the next partita, he extends the form with the addition of a fifth fast dance – the Ciaconna – which more or less matches the scale of the four movements precending it. In the Third Partita, he smashes it out of all recogntion – with a giant Preludio, then Gavotte en Rondeu, two Menuets, Bourée, and just about succeeds in restoring normalcy with a sui generis (though not in quality) Giga to finish.

But back to doubles. Phillips 1858 New World of English Words includes the following:

Doubleth , a term in hunting; when a Hare keeps in plain fields, and chafeth about to deceive the hounds, it is faid, he Doubleth

I find it much easier, to say what I feel that ‘doubles’ are not: they are not variations, and they are not divisions. These are the two notions usually pinned to them by violinists coming from the post- or pre-Bach perspectives respectively. I find both possible definitions reductive.

Perhaps the simplest way to observe the form is that it literally ‘doubles’. A binary-form movement AB, is now ABAB. It is double the length. But wait a minute, let’s remember the aspect of doubling, or rather doubling and choice, which is already explicit in baroque dance. Because of the repeats, the first movement is already AaBb, with the option of AB AaB (the most common middle ground for ‘post romantic’ players), or even ABb. I have even (on record) released a movement of Telemann as AaBbb. Which means that not only is there the choice, at the least complex of ABAB, but of more complex combinations, where questions of aesthetics, of taste, become enmeshed with ethics. Would it be permissible, right, or wrong to play AaBbAB, or even ABAaBb. These options or perilous questions become all the more exiting, when we ask, what is the purpose, and the identity, even the hierarchy (relative to the dance titled section) of the ‘double’. Perhaps this is where the deceiving hare above becomes a useful model: is the double akin to misdirection?

I will return to this them later today, as I dig into the Partita deeper: but lets remember – in Italian, ‘partita’ means ‘game’ or ‘match’. There is something inherently sporting (which of course, for the 18th century meant hunting) about the form, so feints and dummies are, if you will excuse the terrible mixed metaphor … par for the course. So we’ll leave the hare coursing on the ‘good walk spoiled’ and return to the question later. Here’s Bach at his most sublimely playful, and doubling…

I had a fortuitous introduction to the idea of the doubles. I need to go back many years, to when I was 13 years old and a very young member of the wonderful Essex Youth Orchestra. I was already obsessed with Bach at this point, but mainly with the contrapuntal movements. On the orchestra courses, which happened between Christmas and New Year, there would be informal chamber concerts in the evenings, which included skits and very rough-and-ready performances by students and tutors. On one of these, the violinist Nikki Hutchings stood up with a friend ( I am sorry, I cannot remember their name), and said:

‘We’ve been told that you can play the doubles in the B minor Partita at the same time as the linked dance movements’

Which they then proceeded to do, with whoops of delight at the bizarre entanglements, misfits and concordances that result. I was struck dumb: I had never thought that one piece of music, could occupy the same space as another, and the idea stuck.

June 25th – after conversation with a composer

Last night, the composer Nigel Clarke was with us for supper, and late in the evening, conversation drifted to music, and to Bach. Something useful emerged, which is germane to the discussion of doubles, of ‘nested’ ideas and structures. We were listening to the B Minor Prelude and Fugue above, and as the extraordinary fugue filled the room, the question of mystery and familiarity surfaced. There were two stages to the mini-discussion: firstly, that in this fugue, the composer sings back and forth from almost-alien counterpoints and harmonic feints, to Italianate sequences, invariably based on the ‘Brandenburg Concerto’ figure (da da Daaa). The binary is between the strange and the sui generis, danger and

Nigel Clarke’s notebook transcription of Adesto dolori meo by Alexander Utendal (1543/45 – 1581)

reassurance. But then the question of ‘shared music’ came up, and he showed me work he is doing around the wonderful Adesto dolori meo, by the Flemish composer, Alexander Utendal – music from the mid-1500s. He noted:

‘It is unearthly, even strange, but at the same time, so familiar that I am not even sure that I can say what about it is music, is composing’

How is this relevant? Here’s the thing. Music, on level is nothing but sound. The Italian for ‘to play’ ‘ jouer’ ‘spielen’ is ‘suonare’, which makes that explicit. Music is a ‘sounding’. And of course, some of that ‘Sounding’, like a bell being struck is just what happens when sound is made. And some of it, like the matrix of a crystal, is what happens when sound is made as part of a familiar, quotidien shape or structure – like a walk from a t0 b. What is truly fascinating about Bach’s doubles, is that first of all he presents the most apparent invention, albeit withing the strictures of a dance form (an Allemande, a Sarabande), and then the Double, which removes the dance characteristics, and with them 90% of the melodic profile, leaving what might be read as pure form, pure sound. The mystery is that as the purer form is revealed, the music seems to become more complex, even more elaborate, though in point of fact, things are being stripped away, a process of distillation is in process. What is revealed can be read as a possible original, primordial face of the familiar, whilst also appearing as en extraordinary elaboration.