Johann Sebastian Bach - booksnow.scholarsportal.info

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAJOR AND MINOR.I3Ianomaly of having two different scales, made up the scalea b c d e f g* a, for both kinds of movement. ^°^Bach's minor scale has no distinctive bearing on hispractice, but it serves to explain his attitude towardsthe two opposing systems. When, as organist at Weimar,he first displayed his full mastery over the chorale,Mattheson and Buttstedt were disputing about the raisond'etre of the ecclesiastical modes, and his success andachievements served as the tragi-comic death-knell totheirquarrel. When Fux, in his Gradiis, several years later,attributed a fundamental importance to the church modes,the opposition of so eminent a man to the modern reformcould not fail to have a certain effect ;chiefly of Catholic church music.but Fux was thinkingIn the Protestant church,the old system of modes could only find the protection itdeserved through a Protestant musician, and this it found,in part, through Bach. In the principles of composition, asin chorale treatment, he had achieved a position whereall contrasts were reconciled ; he kept to the historicallydeveloped and fundamental principle of major and minorscales, and used the church modes as a kind of subsidiarykeys. He obtained from them the full wealth of modulationwhich they afford, but always kept them subordinate tothe simpler radical feeling of major and minor.^*^' Theconsciousness that the beauty of many of the old choralemelodies would be much impaired by forcing them to submitto the laws of modulation prescribed by the " harmonic "system was to Bach only a secondary consideration. Hefelt that the art ideas which had taken form in thesehymns carried in them, by reason of their having beennurtured for centuries in the bosom of the church, an2"*'Lingke, Die Sitze der Musicalischen Haupt-Sätze, p. 16 ff.— Lingke laidthis scale, invented by him, before the Society for Musical Sciences in Leipzigin 1744, and all the members approved of it (see Mizler, Musikalische Bibliothek,Vol. IIL, p 360). Bach had not become a member at that time.^^ In consequence of this, Kirnberger (Kunst des reinen Satzes, L, p. 103)says: " In the music of the present day, we not only have twenty-four differentkeys, each with a definite character of its own, but we can retain beside themthe modes of the ancients. Hence arises an immense variety of harmony andmodulation."K 2