Here’s some organ music that is often associated with spooky stories, scary movies, and other such things. It’s one of my favorites, and a fun video for Halloween.
This piece was written by Johann Sebastion Bach, who was quite the organ player. He wrote it in the early 1700s, but nobody knows exactly when — probably between about 1705 and 1720 (He lived from 1685 to 1750).
When I was in school one of my professors said Bach had written it as a Christmas song for his children. Today this seems really odd considering its current association with Halloween. Times do change!
This video includes just the “Toccata” section at the beginning of a longer piece called “Toccata and Fugue in D-minor.” That name will require at least a partial explanation, which I’ll get to.
One thing that’s interesting about this piece is that, if you listen carefully, you can hear the beginnings of Jazz, Blues, and Rock and Roll in some of Bach’s more unusual combination of notes (what we call “chords”). Maybe if Bach had lived in a different time he would have been a Blues man or a Rock and Roller. Keep reading to find out why.
So what does that name mean?
First, toccata comes from the Italian toccare, meaning “to touch.” Being derived from Italian, toccota is pronounced pretty much the way it’s spelled: toe-COT-ah.
When we see tocatta attached to a musical score, it’s intended to tell us that the piece will be fast moving and require a deft touch on the keyboard. In other words, it’s going to be fairly hard to play. If you are just starting with keyboards, this piece is not a good place to start.
I would explain the “fugue” part (pronounced like “few” with a “g” on the end: fewg) except it would go way too far into music theory. Since this video only includes the first part of the piece, the toccata, not the fugue, I’ll take the easy way out. I’ll just say that the fugue involves a certain style or way of writing and playing the music and leave it at that.
The “D-minor” part tells us two things.
First, it tells us that the music is going to be centered around the note D, rather than some other lower note (C, for example) or a higher note (E, for example).
If did we play this music centered around another note (i.e., in another key), it would sound essentially the same, just a bit higher or lower than the way it’s played here. Unless we got carried away with the key change, very few people would notice the difference.
That isn’t to say that the key in which a song is played doesn’t matter. It makes a big difference when you have several musicians playing together. If several musicians are playing together, and one musician tries to play the song in D while another tries to play the song in E, it’s going to sound really strange. Everybody has to play in the same key.
That explains the “D” part. What about the second part, the “minor” part?
Well, there are lots of ways to play several other notes alongside D and make them sound good together. There is one set of notes we can play together that will make D sound nice, but sad, like funeral music. That’s called a minor chord, in this case, D-minor.
Of course, if we play D-minor fast enough – toccata, for example – everybody will forget that D-minor is sad, and and the song will be happy. You’d be surprised how many fast, upbeat songs are written in sad, minor keys.
So there we have the name: Toccata and Fugue in D-minor.
I suggested earlier that Bach might have been, at heart, a Blues man, or a Rock and Roller. We can tell that from the way he assembled groups of notes, all played at the same time, into what we call “chords.”
Some chords sound just fine by themselves. Some chords sound a little weird by themselves, but sound really good when they serve as transitions between other chords. Having that right transition is really important.
This piece opens with a flourish of notes, followed by another, similar flourish an octave lower, followed again by another similar flourish another octave lower.
Then the organist steps on the pedal to create a chord, and adds strokes on the keyboard to create a rather strange sounding chord. This particular chord is called a “diminished seventh” chord.
That diminished seventh chord leaves the listener hanging, feeling a bit unsettled, until Bach changes that combination of notes slightly and it becomes the main D minor chord around which the song was composed. Then, even though that diminished seventh chord has resolved to a sad D-minor chord, we are all relieved and feel happy.
It’s probably odd chords like this diminished seventh that makes this piece seem so appropriate for Halloween. These days, Halloween is really a celebration for children, and a lot of children are sort of creeped out by these odd chords. As they get older kids tend to take more interest in these unusual chords.
After Bach died, almost nobody had any interest in these unusual combinations of notes. Almost nobody wrote music like that. Not Mozart. Not Beethoven. Not Tchaikovsky. Nobody. For 150 years.
Then, African-American musicians, largely self-taught, redeveloped these odd chord combinations on their own. Their music came to be called “The Blues.”
By the early 1900s those blues combinations were adopted by Jazz musicians who, again, were predominantly African American. Two decades later that style of music had become so popular that the 1920s were known as “The Jazz Age.” By the 1940s the blues combinations were added to the more driving beat from jazz to create Rhythm and Blues, or “R&B.”
Later still, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, R&B was picked up and developed in another direction by white rock and roll musicians like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
In fact, Rock and Roll musicians somewhat inadvertently contributed to the destruction of segregation in the USA.
Having learned from black musicians, segregation seemed ridiculous to musicians like Elvis Presley and the Beatles. These prominent musicians simply refused to play for segregated audiences. If concert promoters wanted to make money and music fans wanted to hear the music live, they had stand up to the authorities who tried to enforce segregation. And they did. All for a handful of notes like a diminished seventh followed by a D-minor.
In any case, it’s a pretty good bet that Bach would have gotten a kick out of Rock and Roll, though some of the lyrics would have been too risque for him (Bach mostly wrote religious music).
If you don’t know what to listen for, these Bach/blues chord combinations are hard to identify. However, if you watch YouTube videos of the Beatles singing their own songs live, you can often see how the music goes together, so it becomes clearer how their unusual chord combinations pop up in the guitar parts and, more prominently, in their harmonies.
For example, in this video, as John Lennon is singing the lead, toward the end of the verse Paul McCartney will walk up to the microphone and cut in with interesting and untraditional harmonies. The harmonies will often form part of an unusual chord like a sixth, a seventh, a suspended chord, or a diminished (or even a diminished seventh), then resolve to more conventional major chord. That’s fairly characteristic of the Beatles.
Having seen the Beatles in action, if you now go back to the Tocatta and Fugue, you may be able to hear the same sorts of unusual note combinations. This ability to follow in the footsteps of Bach is one thing that made the Beatles such stand out composers in their day.
Now that we have traveled from Bach to the Beatles in around 1,000 words, be safe, enjoy your Halloween, and don’t eat too much candy.
Copyright 2019 by Toni Pfau. All rights reserved.
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