Parallel Fifths in Bach

I recently made two posts on Instagram about ‘parallel fifths’ in Bach’s music. For whatever reason, these posts did better than most of my ‘content,’ but it was the tone of the comments that struck me: my intentions had been misread.

Comments like, ‘Now I’ve lost an idol’ or ‘Bach was also human’ made for most of the reactions, but a good deal of comments were people rushing to insist I misread the notes, or, through convoluted and painful arguments, that my examples don’t ‘count’ as parallel fifths.

One particular counterpoint professor even consulted his copy of the Gesellschaft, and wrote me excitedly to tell me I was incorrect. Too bad for him, the Gesellschaft is guilty of that very same incredulity: editors of the Gesellschaft often ‘corrected’ stemmings or rewrote notes entirely in order to avoid the appearance of parallel fifths in Bach’s music. They too saw ‘mistakes.’

Either reaction, ‘Oh no! Bach made a mistake!’ or, ‘No, this doesn’t count as a mistake…’ are symptoms of dilemma that doesn’t really exist: We created it.

Let’s be clear, Bach wrote plenty of parallel fifths. Your counterpoint teacher would dock you for penning the very same fifths, but when Bach writes, there is no miscalculation: he has heard them and permitted them.1 The issue isn’t that Bach made mistakes, the issue lies with our rules and what we consider mistakes.

The question I was trying to raise— too subtle a thing for an Instagram post — is ‘what did Bach consider a Rule?’ or, ‘did Bach adhere to any dogmas?’ (Nothing, and no, would be my responses.)

From the New Bach Reader, we learn that Bach was not ‘so theoretically minded that he would heed the pedantic attempts of his contemporaries to establish music as a branch of rhetoric.’ (P. 18) Bach’s son, C.P.E. famously claimed that J.S. was, ‘like myself or any true musician, no lover of dry mathematical stuff.’

Today, we demand the simplicity of a hard and fast rule. We want to find ways to explain such a miraculous output, but the principles which guided Bach are more subtle— perhaps too subtle for us today. The difference between our modern minds and Bach’s is too great. He could never have conceived of a ‘rule’ as we do.

Art gets made, rules follow. Bach’s music was written, and voice-leading studies, roman numeral analysis, and terms like ‘countersubject’ follow.2