Dr. Ressler — already fighting gnostic tendencies — must have loved discovering in Bach two paired strands, four phrase-building blocks, a sixty-four-codon catalog. Bach had a habit of imbedding mystic numbers in his compositions; these ones happen to correspond to the number-game nature imbeds in its own. But this coincidence was the least of the qualities that made this music Ressler's best metaphor for the living gene.
I begin to hear, too late, how the Base's symmetry ripples through the piece, unfolding ever-higher structures, levels of pattern, fractal self-resemblances. Having made my layman's survey of the synthesis his science was after, I begin to hear in this encyclopedia of transcription, translation, and self-replication something of the catalog he carried around inside of himself for a quarter century.
Like the master molecule and its living scaffolding, the Goldberg schema is a self-spun hierarchy. First: the transcription of the Base into each variation, even those transposed to relative minor, is faithful, either note for note or harmony for harmony. Oh, it strays from its source, sometimes implying the sarabande while straining to leave it, sometimes filling out the step with jarring accidentals. At times it too becomes a new thing, a new theme, overhauled for all its treading water. But the basic sarabande bass, its thirty-two-note journey, completely informs each child, in turn thirty-two bar-equivalents long. The code is universal throughout creation.
The variations unfold a second level of emerging pattern. Every third variation is a canon, a strict imitation of staggered voices. "Row Row Row Your Boat" self-replication taken to terminal degree. In the first canon, the duplicating voice begins on the same pitch a measure later. In the second canon, the interval between voices is a second: the replication begins one tone higher than the original. The third canon is a canon at the third, and so on through every interval of the major scale plus one — the same scale the theme is built upon. Two canons occur in inversion: whatever happens in the first voice is mirrored upside down in the second. A rising interval is answered by equivalent fall. But in all the canons the situation is the same; the melody harmonizes not with another tune but with itself, a replica of its immediate past and future.
The second voice in every canon is determined: the template first voice right-shifted, transcribed into new scalar position. Two copies twist about each other with helical precision, at ever-increasing steps, coding for their own continuation. Some of the canons are content to be canonicaclass="underline" the template is still audible when the replication arrives. Others push the form's limits, holding a note away from falling into a single voice or mapping out intervals so dissonant that each constrained part seems to insist on its own, discrete decisions — strict, deterministic contrapuntalism forcing freedom.
In each canon but one, strict imitation takes place over a third, persistent, unifying voice across the widening intervals. The second level of order enfolds the first: underneath each canon, the original Base matrix continues to churn. Canons at every scalar interval arch across the work like a giant backbone. But at each vertebra, the canonic lines are tied into position by the spinal cord of a theme that released them, the last to anticipate what spreading skeletons swirl around it. In the final canon — the replication at the ninth, the interval beyond the octave — the imitative voices draw up into their tag the contour of the Base itself.
That much, already a tour de force of both conception and execution, would have easily engaged Ressler the scientist and pattern-seeker. But the primary structure of informing theme and the secondary emergence of canons at increasing intervals does not yet account for his lifelong devotion to the piece. A third level of structure, emerging after a week of my nonstop listening, hints at the successive layers of fascination peeling from the piece, bringing the man constantly back to listen, to make his next discovery.
I have just come to hear how the variations group locally, how they arrive in threes, triplet codons together spelling out a fundamental word of human experience. The third of each set is a canon, as the second level of ordering dictates. But after the first triplet set, a regular rotation also generates the form, color, and scope of the other two members of the triplet. The first of each codon is a dance, strikingly rhythmic or in a unique musical form. These moments of clarity are followed by brilliant duets, outbursts of virtuosic display, two-manual arabesques tearing across the keys. Dance, arabesque, canon: the variations produce a triangulation of feeling, sensing, and thinking that could only have arisen from a three-chambered arrangement of body, soul, and mind in perfect coordination. Harmony consists of propositions about harmony.
The dance variations explore a variety of musical genres: a complete, compact fugue without episodes. An outrageous French overture, that most stylized of Baroque puff pieces, opening with a vertical flourish in the jungle of surrounding counterpoint and proceeding with eighteenth-century aristocratic optimism. A vigorous, syncopated alia breve. A four-voice stretto-fit of well-being over before you can say hallelujah. Two transcendent adagios, one in poignant, resigned major, the other a heart-stabbing minor where every pitch in the chromatic scale puts in an appearance, the two together an unendurable duet of deliverance wedded to dissonance, promise unwinding in pain.
Each of these formal dances is built upon clear renditions of the Base. The difficulty of satisfying the constraints of variation within the bravura of overture or the rigor of fugue is considerable. But more disconcerting than the technical accomplishment is the plan. Take the variation number and divide by three. If the remainder is 1/3, the piece is a formal genre or dance; 2/3, and it's a toccata. No remainder, and the piece is a canon built on the interval given by the quotient.
Each dance stands in utter emotional contrast to the previous canon. And each is followed by a two-manual tear that draws the ear up in a second reversal of decision upon appeal. This constant broadening of technical and emotional contrast must have taken Ressler years to train for: each variation is so arranged to throw off the spell of the previous, and before the ear has time enough to savor any crystallization of mood, a reaction at once pitches the listener into new tempi, meters, and melodic figures probing radically opposing kernels of feeling, pulling open the full complexity of the piece, the inexhaustible variety extracted from the modest four-by-four-by-four sarabande. Each variation asserts its own myth, its own melody, its lack of precedent. Yet underneath, shining through each arpeggiated outburst, the theme asserts itself as master gene.
My attending ear learns not to give over entirely to the sorrow or exuberance of the moment. The most stupendously brilliant piece in the set is also a premonition of the emotional devastation that must follow. The variations each announce the consequence each itself creates. Just after a variation harboring harmonies that will not surface again until this century comes the most rococo of diversions. Grief spills over into buffoonery. Every beauty has its bitter answer. Yet each reversal doesn't dispel its sibling. They are all obedient, first-filial offspring of the same parent; while different phenotypes, they carry the same underwriting code. They exist side by side, superimposed in my unforgetting ear, apparent incommensurates, but one at the core.