Bach and the Patterns of Invention

by Laurence Dreyfus

In this major new interpretation of the music of J. S. Bach, we gain a striking picture of the composer as a unique critic of his age. By reading Bach’s music “against the grain” of contemporaries such as Vivaldi and Telemann, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach’s approach to musical invention in a variety of genres posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics.

“Invention”―the word Bach and his contemporaries used for the musical idea that is behind or that generates a composition―emerges as an invaluable key in Dreyfus’s analysis. Looking at important pieces in a range of genres, including concertos, sonatas, fugues, and vocal works, he focuses on the fascinating construction of the invention, the core musical subject, and then shows how Bach disposes, elaborates, and decorates it in structuring his composition. Bach and the Patterns of Invention brings us fresh understanding of Bach’s working methods, and how they differed from those of the other leading composers of his day. We also learn here about Bach’s unusual appropriations of French and Italian styles―and about the elevation of various genres far above their conventional status.

Challenging the restrictive lenses commonly encountered in both historical musicology and theoretical analysis, Dreyfus provocatively suggests an approach to Bach that understands him as an eighteenth-century thinker and at the same time as a composer whose music continues to speak to us today.

Genres: Music, History

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1997

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite good; somewhat technical; very polemical. Different from what I expected.

I had imagined this would be a dense study of motivic patterning in Bach's works, saturated with analytical vignettes of particular compositions. There are a few of those, quite arid for the most part, with a quaintly '90s use of David Lewin's all-caps Fortran-style notation for motivic manipulations (not transformations; Dreyfus' tools are not so precise, and the formalist garb fits him ill). But most of the text is a series of learned, opinionated essays, inveighing left and right against the Schenkerians, style theorists, anti-intentionalists...

Dreyfus defends an interesting position of intentionalist, "mechanist" criticism according to which the proper task of analysis is to reconstruct the composer's hypothetical procedures of construction. I have considerable disagreements with this, but it has strengths: it's boldly unfashionable, down-to-earth in its aims, and capable of engaging with musical narrative as a meaningful flow without reducing it to semantic meaning, to a string of signifiers. Dreyfus is a spirited advocate, and for professional musicologists and theorists—even non-Bach specialists—the book is absolutely worth reading.

[Josh Brown]

75% of this book was way over my head, so I'm not rating it. I think I got the general idea but that's about it.