Bach in excelsis

For string Quartet


Commentary
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Commentary


The wasteland that was chamber music in Spain in my student years has fortunately been forgotten in recent decades, in which this subject has been treated with special dedication in the new curricula, from the very beginning of the professional degree and to the very term of the superior. Suffice it to remember that a practice as essential in the training of any string instrumentalist as the string quartet could not be carried out within the previous regulations (that of the disastrous "1966 plan"), since the teaching of Chamber Music was excluded of the studies corresponding to the higher grade of viola, since it was circumscribed to those of violin, cello and piano. This made it unfeasible for quality chamber music groups of a professional nature to emerge, and hence the sad panorama that this repertoire suffered in our country for decades.
But already from the first years of the new century, groups of young instrumentalists began to emerge who, possessing excellent technique and great training, began to occupy the space, empty for decades, of the string quartet with a stable character. The Casals Quartet (founded in 1997) and the Quiroga Quartet (founded in 2003) are undoubtedly the most representative and those with the greatest international projection, and many others have appeared along with them, struggling to make their way between inbreeding and the mental laziness of our musical life.

It is with the members of the Quiroga Quartet that I have had a very fluid relationship and great friendship for many years, reinforced by the teaching collaborations that they have provided on several occasions to the chamber music activity of the National Youth Orchestra of Spain in my time as its artistic director. And thinking of them I wrote Bach in excelsis, whose first notes were written down in October 2016 at the Domus Municipalis de Bragança, and whose composition occupied me from that moment until November 2017, when I finished it in Madrid after "walking" it around Limpias (Cantabria), Zaragoza, Pilas (Seville), Montaut de Villéreal and Oloron-Sainte-Marie (France), with a few weeks interruption in the winter of that year to attend to the composition of El juego del Cíclope, for harp and trombone.
Bach in excelsis looks at the Bach that is in the highest with the deepest respect and the greatest admiration, and especially at two preludes and fugues from the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier that deeply marked me in piano studies, first, and harpsichord after which I did at the end of the '70s, before fully deciding on composition. These are Preludes and Fugues No. 3 and 4, in C# major and minor respectively, and on which the four sections of my quartet are based, sometimes literally, almost always very freely.
In this way, in the first section the notes of the melody of Prelude No. 4 serve as cantus firmus in long notes on which different ornamental turns of an improvisational nature take place.

The second section provides a strong contrast by moving to a fast tempo and a scherzante character, recreating the central rhythmic section of Prelude No. 3.

In the third section, at a tempo indicated as Extremely slow, the subject of Fugue No. 3 is exposed in long notes on the first violin in the first intervention (of a homophonic nature), and distributed among the rest of the quartet in the following ones, in an increasingly intense ornamental variation.

Finally, the fourth section (Prestissimo) is posed as a fugato in which the subject and the two countersubjects of Fugue No. 4 soon appear, especially evident at the end of the work.

The set of these four sections is reworked two more times, each one longer and with a progressive enrichment of rhythmic, melodic and harmonic material, in what ends up being a contrapuntal work of increasing complexity that, in turn, wants to be my modest tribute to the greatest figure in the History of Music.
Bach in excelsis is dedicated to the Quiroga Quartet, and has not yet been premiered at the time of writing this comment (July 2021).

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