De-Googling Bach

Counterpointing Bach’s Rules of the Road With American Populist Music

Commonwealth Orchestra Outreach Project Blog #4

I had fun this week playing with the Google Doodle to create Bach harmonies from simple melodies. Looking through some of the articles about the process of melding AI and the principles of counterpoint was interesting too, like this comprehensive Slate article by Alissa Barna and a response to the doodle in a nicely thought-out article in Medium by Daniel Tompkins, a PhD in music theory & engineer at Microsoft: Google’s Bach AI .

These, and many other articles, lean toward explaining and critiquing the process, with some critical snark about the lack of success of A.I. to correctly follow the rules of counterpoint. For me though, while some tunes that were created by musicians and non-musicians alike were rife with crossed voicings, parallel intervals, weird rhythms and wild leaps, and some were actually pretty nifty, you still have the old conundrum of the ratio of monkeys to typewriters to Shakespeare. No machine, no matter how well programmed and no matter how smart, can recreate Bach’s genius.

To prove that point, I doodled Ein Feste Burg — one of the most familiar Bach chorales. 

II couldn’t write it in accurately — the doodle doesn’t allow pick-up notes. But since the doodle seems to exist outside the flow of meter and uses beats as placemarkers rather than to form metric logic, it didn’t seem to matter. The doodle came back with something not dissimilar to the original, but decidedly without the mojo. You’d think this would be a perfect chance to strut its stuff, but I guess Ein Feste Burg was not one of the 360 tunes used to load the computer (she said, arms crossed and foot tapping).

Then I definitely went on a wild hair. I put in the two measures of that little pop blues from 1941, Blues In the Night (My Momma Done Told Me), by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, to see what would happen. The two measures were from the train whistle part of the chorus — “a whoo-ee, a whoo-ee” where the melody jumps a tritone and slides to the fifth, then back to the fourth on the second “whistle”. It follows the same motive as the opening to Bernstein’s “Maria.”

The original motive has a pick-up eighth notes leading to a triplet figure. I couldn’t notate the triplet in the doodle so I was stuck with 8th notes. I wanted to see what it would do if I forced a pick-up, so I made the 8th note pick up at the end of the first measure. Then hit “harmonize” and let it go to town. The AI doodle went nuts! It couldn’t parse the pick-up so it wrote a bunch of notes to lead into my motive.  So I could share it, I wrote it into my notation program, imported as a png graphic below.

As you can see, it looks pretty weird — if you can play it on the piano, it sounds strange. It in no way resembles Bach, but it also sounds nothing like Blues in the Night. I was pretty blown away.

Then I had a little a-hah moment as I set about brewing a cup of tea (necessary after one’s mind is blown). Flatted notes — blue notes — thirds, fifths, sixths, are immediately recognizable in all of our populist literature: the Blues, Rhythm and Blues, Jazz, Rock and Roll, and not a just a little bit of the American Songbook. Why does a blues lick make Bach roll over in his grave? A-hah!

Because the rules are different.

There is a two-hundred-and-fifty year span of evolution between Bach’s rules of counterpoint and today. Most of the fundamental building blocks of the music most associated with American populism were established by 1940, with some added twists and shouts during the development of Rock and Roll. As the rules changed, the one group of Americans probably most responsible for that evolution were African Americans, starting way back with the blues-y chants they used to keep their sanity while working the fields in antebellum times.

Mind you, there is not much similarity between a field chant and Blues in the Night. Field shouts, chants, and call-and-response hollers are very modal. The blues songs that came from Tin Pan Alley are very diatonic. In other words, they follow the rules of European-based composition that we comp. students sweated over in Conservatory, but with a twist. Most of the rules of counterpoint loosened up (a lot) in the 20th century — both in art music and the quickly evolving populist forms. Our popular music, especially in the first half of the 20th century, bears more in common with Classicism (think: Mozart) than the Baroque, but even while it adheres to the good old six-two-five-one harmonic structure that is now almost part of our musical DNA, popular music follows its own logic that separates it from Classicism. Baroque counterpoint, then, is just a whisper in the harmonic structure. An important whisper, yes, but faded back.

And much of the logic has to do with the contributions to our music by African Americans, Latinos, and immigrants of many stripes. The blue notes of field chants, the cross rhythms of sambas, and the chant-like modalities of Appalachian folk tunes have all evolved into this plethora of music that we call ours, and from there it continues to evolve. The Indy music of the Cranberries today is not that much of a far cry from Jimmie Rodgers — it comes down to added layers, complex harmonies, and a lot of mechanical processing in most cases. It’s not much of a leap to understand that different cultures have different takes on music, but what I want you, beloved readers, to consider is how evolution happens.

Of course, by breaking the rules.

It’s a no-brainer that 20th century American populist music is in (cognitive) dissonance with Baroque counterpoint, so one wonders why we even bother with something like the Bach Google Doodle. I have a few words on that in a bit, but my point now is that if we’re taking a field chant and evolving it into a popular song, or a modal folk tune and evolving it into a top Indy hit, then why can’t we take that basic DNA of all that music and turn it into a new form of Classicism?

Tease, coerce or cajole populist music into a new contrapuntal set of rules? Hmm …

That in no way detracts from Bach’s contribution! If he were suddenly alive today, after a cultural adjustment period, he would be amazed at the variety of music available to us and I believe he’d be into it. He was a gigging jazzer, you know. Between writing cantatas for his Sunday gig, he was playing in coffee houses — Baroque cocktail harpsichord if you will. He was using material available to him and combining it with his own improvisatory brilliance. Composers throughout history know that the sign of genius is the ability to steal music and make it new again (without getting sued).

So what if our music doesn’t fit into the strictures of Baroque counterpoint? The Google Doodle was fun, and music making should be fun and presented in ways that allow people to explore. I had a delightful Saturday afternoon fooling around with the doodle and rewriting my efforts into Sibelius. For the novice, I can see that this could make the mysterious process of writing music a little less mysterious (although no less complicated, as we saw from the results) — sort of like science exploratoriums. Music is a science, so there should be music exploratoriums, don’t you think?

However, if there is anything to be gained by Google putting out these fun little apps, there must be two understandings.

 One is that Bach left us a huge legacy upon which everything in our current musical culture hangs. Much of our entire musical knowledge, from the point of view of our Western culture schooled music, stems from his transformative works. I get misty-eyed whenever one of my students grasps the almost metaphysical significance of the Circle of Fifths and realizes that without Bach the primordial Truth about the Physics of Music would not be in our wheelhouse.

Secondly, given that we are now traveled 250 more years down that road and we are a different culture in a different time and a different people, the way music must continue to evolve hangs upon who we are now in all our colorful diversity. Schooled is a matter of tradition and how it is presented. It makes me think of Sioux Shamans studying 10 or more years to become powerful healers — about the same amount of time it takes to go through Tufts Medical school.

In any event, cultural transformation is happening here and now whether we like it or not, so let’s go along for the ride. But just because we stop resisting cultural change in no way requires us to trash the good old ways. In fact, we rely upon that wisdom to keep us honest about our art. And that goes back to Aristotle.

Here are a couple listening choices for you. First, a fabulous version of Blues in the Night, compliments of Ella Fitzgerald

Then, you can hear some of the same flatted blue notes in Movement I of William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony. It’s a great work and you don’t have to look too hard to see the classical structure inherent in the music.