Every Winter, I Think of Bach
Every winter afternoon, around 4:30 or whenever it’s just before the golden hour, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos float through my mind. The pretty violins and woodwinds and brass weave their melodies effortlessly and the cold bite of winter reminds me of the memory I have of the first time I heard them 25 or so years ago.
The memory is one set at an after school orchestra rehearsal for some regional honors orchestra program I was in. Mom was running a little late picking me up that day because the school hosting the rehearsal was somewhere on the far edge of the Salt Lake valley, rather than at my own elementary school. Plus, it was well into rush hour. The rehearsal was over and everyone — save, perhaps, for a few lowly building staff and hard-working teachers — had already left. It was just me and my little violin waiting to be picked up.
Among the many pieces we were working in that rehearsal was an arrangement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, somewhat reduced in difficulty to match our humble skill level. We had just listened to a recording of a few movements and sight read the piece. Having never heard the Concertos (or anything else by J.S. Bach) before, I fell in love immediately. Bach, as I would continue adoring over the years, has this inimitable ability to weave melodies, countermelodies, and rhythm with striking orchestration, and it made perfect sense to my little brain on some base level. And when I heard that recording for the first time, I knew I’d never be the same.
After rehearsal, in my wintry solitude, I remember holding my little black plastic-molded violin case in one hand and my folder of sheet music in the other while slowly meandering back and forth in front of the school. Eventually I shifted everything to my left hand and so I’d free up a hand to pull out my sheet music and look at the piece once more. I remember how profoundly it struck me. It was one of the first “real” pieces of classical music I’d played thus far. It was also one of the first pieces I’d played with minor key movements within it, which clicked with me immediately (and which perhaps made the Concertos so striking to begin with).
I continued my slow back and forth pacing grinding the salt into the ground with my shoes as I kept reading and re-reading the music, moving my fingers along with it. The whited landscape around me — the mostly overcast clouds had parted just slightly enough to allow the retiring sun to shine its through its pale orange evening tones, casting dreamy hues off the dirtied snow piles and scattered snow salt on the sidewalk and faculty-only parking lot — reminded me of the stark beauty of the minor key movements I had played just moments before.
The most fantastic parts of the Brandenburg Concertos, to me at least, were the minor movements. They were slower than their major key counterparts and they reminded me of winter. After all, the cold wind was why I was moving slower — only pacing and not running around like I certainly would have been were it warmer. All of life moved at a slower pace when it was cold, making everything also feel more deliberate, the same way those movements sounded. And as much as I enjoyed the fast-paced challenge of the major-keyed Allegro movements the Concertos are famous for, it’s the minor movements that really impressed themselves upon me that day and that made me excited to spend the week practicing them and return for the next rehearsal to hear everything again with the entire orchestra.
I think the slow movements bored most of the other kids in orchestra; after all, it’s quite difficult to impress upon a room of fifth- and sixth-grade minds the nuance of a good Andante movement. They weren’t exactly thrilling to me either, at the time, but the minor chords still resonated with me. Just as life moved a little more slowly and deliberately during winter, so, too, did the slower movements allow me to more deliberately hear how each chord sounded individually along with the entire progression. The combination of the slower pace and indescribably pleasant minor key just made my brain vibrate with wordless happiness. These slower movements allowed me to understand the true beauty not just of that composition, but of classical music at large for the first time in my life, and it was nothing short of thrilling.
There isn’t anything terribly profound about this memory; it’s more just a memory that I enjoy thinking about each winter season. To this day, I still listen to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos multiple times every winter. I’m also a notorious fan of most minor-key classical pieces. Their stark beauty always gives me that same experience — equal parts transcendentally mathematic and almost religiously sublime — and I’ll always love Bach for introducing me to something so perfect.
