Bach and Basketball

I thought about it, and decided that YouTube can survive one more playing of the Pièce d'Orgue, and that a few people who read these pages might enjoy hearing it, so here is the link.

Bach was of course German. As was customary, he normally gave tempo indications (when he did, which was rarely) in the international musical language of Italian. But here, he not only provides a French title, but French tempo indications: Très vitement, then gravement, then Lentement.

It seems to me that this Pièce is a shining example of a principle that I wrote about here, the use of pre-existing models as a guide to improvisation and composition. There were few more assiduous students of the best in contemporary music than Bach, from his childhood nights of slipping his uncle's musical scores out so that he could copy them out by candlelight on through to the end of his life. He knew the work of other German composers; he also knew the Italians such as Frescobaldi and Vivaldi – and the French masters such as Louis and François Couperin.

“But if I copy [insert name]'s music, I will sound like him!” No, you won't. No matter how hard you try, you will eventually sound like yourself, but yourself having learned from others. And this Pièce d'Orgue demonstrates it. No one would confuse this work with Couperin; it is clearly Bach – but he has entirely mastered the French style. For example, the gravement which forms the magnificent heart of the Pièce is much like a Couperin Plein Jeu, and that offers an interpretative entry for the modern performer that I do not think most people have noticed. I sought to have just a little bit of the flexibility that one would find in Couperin (I experimented with more, even playing around with adding French ornamentation!), but mostly strove for the immense grandeur of this aspect of the French organists, in its way superior to anything else in the organ repertoire.

As he did so often, Bach showed us how it could be done, but set such a high standard that it continues to be daunting. I can (to some degree) imitate Howells (as I described in the essay linked above), but Bach? Absolutely not. And he would have expected even the least of his students to do so, to be able to improvise on a chorale in the manner of the Orgelbüchlein, or “preludize” or improvise fugues in the manner of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Me? Not even close.

Perhaps if I keep playing his music, some of it might rub off.

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I wrote at the end of Sunday's essay:

… tomorrow Duke is in the national championship game. For old times' sake, I might stay up late and listen to it on the radio. That will indeed be like old times, when I was in junior high and high school, upstairs in my bedroom listening to ACC Basketball on my transistor radio.

Well... not quite like old times. I found that big-time sports broadcasting has changed in the years I have been away from it. As I searched the AM radio dial for the game (and did not find it!) I recalled that the last time I listened to a Duke game on the radio was the year that Nolan Smith graduated, I think it was 2011 or 2012, when they lost in the tournament, with Smith playing a magnificent game (as always) but not getting much help from his teammates. That was just three or four years ago.

And in 2010, I was able to watch the Duke vs. Butler national title game on computer the following day at the public library, with “March Madness on Demand” (TM), which was free.

That was the last time I actually saw the Blue Devils.

I think that MMOD (TM) is no longer free – though in truth, I didn't bother to even check on it this year. I know it went to “cable verification” in about 2011 or 2012 – you had to prove that you were a registered user of a cable TV service that was broadcasting the games, or pay a fee of about $4 per game. If one scratched the surface, it wasn't free even in 2010, for one had to give CBS Sportsline.com a large amount of personal information to access it. For any major sporting event such as the NCAA championship game, it appears that there is no longer free access. We do not have a television, but if we did, we would have needed a cable package (for a monthly fee). Or I could have gone to a sports bar – and paid $5 or $6 for a glass of cranberry juice or a soft drink.

We don't have internet service at home, or I could have (for free) followed a “game-tracker” which gives a written play-by-play account of the game and statistics. Even that includes the inevitable Commercial Messages, and it is a poor substitute.

So... the best I could do was to listen to a Fox sports talk show, where two broadcasters imitating the loudest and most obnoxious guys in the bar bantered about Sports, occasionally mentioning the Game. “We're watching the Duke-Wisconsin game to keep you up to date – Oh look at that dunk!!!! Frank the Tank!!!! [a Wisconsin player].” I note in retrospect that they talked quite a bit about the Game during the middle of it, but less and less as it drew down to the final minutes. In the final half-hour of the game, there was probably a total of two minutes of Game-time, mostly in the form “1:23 left, Duke on top by 4” and then back to an interminable discussion of the relative merits of the Yankees and Mets, and the fan's reactions to someone named “A-Rod” – why that would matter is something that of course “everyone” knows. And after every five minutes or so of “broadcast,” five minutes or more of Commercial Messages.

Next time – if there is a next time – I will wait until the next day and read about it.

And it is worth my adding the “if.” I remember the last time that UCLA won the title, the last of a long string of them under John Wooden (and this one with his successor), as the fans celebrated at the end, the broadcaster Al McGuire commented “They had better enjoy this one. It is going to be a long time before there is another.” At Duke, Coach K is getting old. After he retires, I expect it will be a long, long time before they make it to another Final Four.