How many years does it take for a musician to master the music of Johann Sebastian Bach? This isn’t the start to a joke, but the answer to the question can be a bit amusing considering that, for Chris Thile, there’s no such defined number of years or fixed amount of time.
It’s an apropos viewpoint for the GRAMMY-winning mandolinist, composer, vocalist, and collaborator to have, given that Thile is reviving a Bach-related pursuit he began more than 12 years ago. In January 2013, Thile recorded three of the six works that make up Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. That August, he released Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 1. The logical question following the record’s release and enthusiastic public praise was, “When would volume 2 arrive?”
There’s no disputing the abundance of professional endeavors and musical collaborations that Thile dove into since then, recording with the likes of Yo-Yo Ma, Brad Mehldau, Edgar Meyer, Punch Brothers, and Nickel Creek; winning a MacArthur “Genius” Grant; hosting Live From Here; releasing other solo albums; and even creating a new musical variety show with Claire Coffee, The Energy Curfew Music Hour, which just released its second season on Audible. The extended wait has been understandable. Still, it became difficult not to wonder if Bach’s sonatas and partitas would ever see completion in Thile’s extensive and stylistically diverse discography. Thankfully, Thile renders the other half of the collection on a new solo recording, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2, released November 7.
The undertaking sounds simple enough: record the remaining two partitas and one sonata. However, Thile embraces Bach’s work with a completely different aim from the first volume. Vol. 1 stayed true to Bach’s written intentions as much as possible. Now, Thile has allowed himself to consider his inner desires for what he feels the music needs – particularly where his music-making process is concerned.
The result is music that is not only pristinely performed, but also offers moments that occur naturally as Thile puts each piece together. Whether that means the ethereal decay of an individual harmonic, harnessed and expanded to ignite a particular feeling between movements I and II of Partita No. 3 in E major, or listeners’ ears traveling from one place to another as a piece blends audio from two completely different settings – like a concert hall, public park, or Blackberry Farm. Vol. 2 is an enlightening peek into Chris Thile’s mind and a bit of a walk in his shoes. In fact, he goes so far as to say that the process of learning Bach’s music is eternal, ongoing, and personal to every musician.
“It’s never done,” he says. “I think you could keep living and growing with Bach forever. But god, what a rewarding process!”
Chris Thile spoke to BGS on a call from Ann Arbor, Michigan, amid a cluster of solo tour dates. He reflects on the different ways musicians become inspired to explore Bach’s music, some of the very subtle but unrelenting dissatisfaction he encountered during the recording process, how practicing Bach is like practicing yoga, and much more:
Given the profundity you view Bach’s music as having, how did you negotiate its iconic place in music history with your desire to explore the possibilities you feel when listening to it, learning it, and making it part of yourself?
Chris Thile: I think that almost every ambitious musician’s relationship with Bach begins when someone tells them they should check it out, you know? Some of us just encounter it in the wild and have a major moment with it, but for me, my grandmas on my mom’s side – my grandma and my step-grandma – they both are excellent pianists and taught piano, performed a bunch, and both are gigantic Bach fans. When they realized their little mandolin-playing, bluegrass grandson was pretty serious about music, they were like, “Well, this boy needs to know about Bach!”
Sometimes it takes an expert to tell you that something is amazing and that you should see what’s there in it for you. And, sometimes, you’re just intrinsically aware of the thing’s value. I think mine was kind of both that helped. Having these women in my life who were so important to me tell me that this guy was really, really good helped [foster curiosity].
When [my grandma Sal] sat me down with Bach, it was with Glenn Gould’s second recording of The Goldberg Variations. She was also underlining that Gould’s performances of the music were more notable. That, I think, impressed itself on me, too; that we don’t have recordings of Bach playing Bach. So someone makes those for us or we make them for ourselves. Then it introduces this other music-making entity into the equation.
That’s a big and very long transition going from “Bach, the Almighty” to Bach, a human being whose music I am interested in having a real relationship with. And by “real relationship,” I mean a two-way, back-and-forth conversation. Yes, the text is fixed, but you can still have a living, growing relationship with it. And it takes a long time to learn how to do that. I think it’s lovely to have people giving you advice along the way.
You’ve said that practicing Bach “is like practicing yoga” and that it’s something you do everywhere you can. What does that mean for you?
Being someone who plays Bach and being someone who does yoga, I did want to figure out a way that the recording could represent that [connection] – the living, changing, growing, aspect of being someone who interacts with this music regularly. That these pieces could go from one place to another, potentially mid-movement. And then realizing that would also potentially mirror my experience of playing the pieces.
Because it’s not like I’m only playing them in my workspace. I might play them at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and then a couple months later be at a Hampton Inn in Carbondale, Illinois. Or, it’s just too nice outside and I gotta practice outside today. So, multiple locations ended up serving two ends: wanting to be able to utilize the studio and [all that’s] possible when you’re recording music, to trying to figure out a way to sonically represent that life of practicing Bach.
Did you have a lot of thoughts on Bach going through your mind even while planning Season 2 of the Energy Curfew Music Hour?
Yeah! That was all happening concurrently. Every now and then, Punch Brothers would be in a practice room and I’d show my bandmates something, [asking,] “What do you think of this random thing I’m trying to do with the C major Fuga?” Just trying to get a read on people and playing a little bit of it on the side, to see if I can gauge a natural reaction to it and see if that gives me any ideas for future shenanigans. And it definitely did.
You’ve said that once you hear something in your head and enjoy it, you have to chase it until your ears tell you differently. That making peace with that aspect of your musicianship “is actually kinda the B story of this whole record.” What does it mean for you to “make peace” with this facet of your artistic spirit?
I am compelled to make this music. I don’t always understand the nuts and bolts of why I think it’s important to do it. First and foremost, I love the music. I love hearing other people play it. I love it on the page, I love the physical sensation of playing it, and I love the sound of me playing it.
But then, as is my custom, I’m voice memo-ing myself playing [the sonatas and partitas]. I heard the voice memos back and did not like how it sounded. There was something insincere about it. It was very, very strange, like something reflexive. It was almost the sensation of seeing video of me back and having some sort of physical mannerism that I was unaware of and not liking it. Or like, hearing the tone of my voice on a recording and thinking, “That’s what I sound like?” I think we’ve all had that sensation before.
So it was really disorienting and vexing, my perception of what was happening: the music that was actually being made was so off and somehow struck me as inauthentic and non-additive – and like regurgitation. So I had to do something.
The thought struck me, “I’m not ready to make this record.” The way I approach making music has changed over the last 12 years. I went back into this music thinking that my methods from when I was 31-32 were gonna be great and yield a good result. I just like to get my hands dirtier these days. The musician that I am takes everything down to the studs and blends it with everything else that’s swirling around in my musical life. That’s what I do. That’s how I make music. It’s how I write music and it’s how I approach performing any other music besides Bach. I think my reverence and awe that I hold [Bach’s] work in was preventing me from actually engaging with the music the way that I do with every other piece of music in my life.
It was scary for me, because I’m not any less reverent of what Bach did. I don’t love it any less. I don’t think it needs to be different. But when it’s me playing it, it has to go through my process, like everything else does, or else it doesn’t sound sincere and doesn’t sound authentic. That was an almost painful realization to have, and to have to basically scrap an approach and build a whole new approach to working on this music. But again, it wasn’t a new approach. It was just applying everything I know about music to Bach for the first time.
What was your intention when you decided to record in different settings – New York City’s Reservoir Studios and Tomkins Square Park, Tennessee’s Blackberry Farm, and Farrell Recital Hall at Murray State University – as well as choosing to merge audio together?
The different locations thing was part of the initial impulse, in terms of turning the thing into an actual record. It was a fairly radical move – to go from just recording in a nice studio or nice hall and getting a great sound and letting that be the sound and playing the music.
There were two reasons to do it: One of them is that, increasingly, I feel if you’re going to make a record, you should utilize the studio as an instrument. You should make sure that you’re using the medium. I guess it’s not a “should.” You can utilize the medium. For me, I’ve made a lot of archival records where really it’s just, “This is what happened in the room. Enjoy!” But I’ve realized about myself that often, when I’m listening to an archival recording, I have FOMO or something. I wish I were there, because clearly this happened in a room just like this and imagine if you had been there when it happened.
Whereas, I don’t have that when I’m listening to something that’s really taking advantage of the tremendous tool that the recording studio can be. For example, a record like Radiohead’s Kid A, where it’s something that can’t happen live. If you had been there in the room, it would have been really interesting to hear them discover the sounds. But then the flight that performance takes in the hands of a great engineer, who’s been set free in terms of exercising their own creativity in the mix environment, or artists who are very hands-on during that part of the process.
Again, it’s like a performance that’s happening over the course of months, even years at times. What happens live in the room is part of it. And then what happens in the editing booth is part of it, and what happens in the mixing room is part of it. If you’re going to make a record, it’s just interesting to note the difference. You can use the studio as an instrument or it can merely be the camera with which you’re taking the snapshot of where you’re at with a piece of music at a given time. I wanted to mess around with the former on this album.
The more I listened to something like that in my head, the more I liked it. The more committed to it I became, the more I considered, “[What if I] allow myself to record these things in multiple locations and even stitch performances together from from very tangibly different environments?” Really, sort of leaning into the surrealism of it. Now you’re in a studio and now you’re in a corner of Tomkins Square Park in the East Village. If I’ve allowed myself to do something like that, then what wouldn’t I allow myself to do?
Track 10, the first movement of Partita No. 3 in E major, I. Preludio, ends with nearly 13 seconds of ominous, rising, distorted feedback that pivots right into the clean first notes of movement II. Loure. What role is that very intentional ending meant to play?
It wasn’t something I knew that I needed until I had everything quote-unquote “done.” And then it was like, these moments in this medium need a little extra something. To give the [Partita No. 3 in E Major II.] Loure this kind of psychodrama towards the end of it was important to me. And then to prepare that [piece] with that crazy delay loop, grabbing that last harmonic [in the first movement, Preludio] was also important to me. So I asked my mixing engineer, Joseph Lorge, to find something. Bless him, I love what he found. That is almost like the harbinger of what’s going to happen on the Loure. What happens during the Loure was really important to me, artistically. But then I wanted there to be some sort of trumpet call like, “Hey, look out. Something’s coming.”
What stands out as something unique about making Bach’s music more your own this time around, especially knowing this is a solo endeavor?
There’s so much in today’s society about “Be yourself!” “Follow your dreams!” I’m talking about how important it is for me to have a two-way conversation with this music and not just revere Bach to the point that I’m taking myself out of the equation as a creator.
But we are so “Me, me, me, me” now. “This is me, just deal with it.” It can be really interesting to consider, “What happens when you expose yourself to the taste of other people?” It’s ultimately going to happen anyway, but what if there’s a practical concern? Can you go through that kind of exercise? It’s one of the reasons I love being in bands. In Punch Brothers, for instance, I need [all four of my bandmates] to be as happy with the music as I am. It’s not done until then. When I make music by myself, I have to figure out ways to trick myself into considering more than just me while I’m doing it.
[However,] you do have to make sure that you’re pleasing the only ears that you actually have any control over pleasing, which are your own. That’s first and foremost. But yeah, you’re always looking for any way to give shape to the very nebulous process of creating something from nothing.
What do you think musicians and composers of today can learn from Bach’s approach to music that would bring today’s songs, performances, and practice mentality closer to the timeless, ever-insightful, and continually inspiring nature of Bach’s work?
One thing that I keep trying to learn from Bach, just as someone who does try and write music or make it all the time, is how much of his art was happening anonymously. He had his professional duties – as he was a court composer and then he was a church composer – so there were those things, where he was writing music for very definite purposes with very definite deadlines. A ton of it was really theoretical and him working on the craft without any promise of getting a reaction out of his fellow humans – really his own curiosity and work ethic and desire to know and discover.
So I’m constantly thinking about, “Are people going to like this? Is it going to help me grow my audience? Is it going to help me make rent? Pay the mortgage?” Of course, [Bach] had those kinds of concerns. I think human beings in the early 1700s were not immune to ego. It’s not like Bach didn’t care what people thought of him – I’m sure he did. But I’m also sure that [thought process] took a very different form in those days and I think being able to make music – just for the love of it and with the patience that it takes to really explore your materials – is a thing that I at least keep trying to learn from Bach.
Photo Credit: Josh Goleman
