Death through Music // Sofya

I have never experienced anyone’s death. Fortunately none of my relatives or friends have died and I have neither seen nor felt people dying.

Before listening to the fourteenth and last fugue in Bach‘s incomplete The Art of the Fugue, published posthumously in 1751(*), I could understand, but never experience, someone’s death. And then with this fugue—a fugue commonly called Bach’s “Unfinished Fugue,” as he died before finishing it—I felt what it is to die. 

One line flows into another while playing in counterpoint with other lines, tracing curves, swirls, stairs, mirrors, and geometrical forms. In about eight minutes the fugue takes the listener into Bach’s world, into his fantasies and dreams, or maybe his lived events. But it all remains abstract and musical. If you concentrate and let the music with its melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, take you, then you are no longer you, but the music you are supposedly listening to—this is what Bach and all great musicians do if you let them (there is a becoming-bird in Messiaen, a becoming-earth in Stravinsky, a becoming-sea in Debussy…). And then, while you are lost in the ecstasy into which the fugue has driven you, all of a sudden it all breaks. It all falls down like into an abyss, leaving you high above the earth without wings. It is no longer there. Bach is no longer there. Bach is dead.

(*) BWV 1080, Fuga a 3 Soggetti, in Fretwork’s performance for consort of viols: