Thile plays Bach
2024-08-20Review of Chris Thile’s “Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 1”
Listen:
It is a simple story: Chris Thile plays Bach songs on a porch at night.
Crickets chirp in the background. Thile plays these impossibly intimate songs with immensely delicate gentleness.
As we know, Thile is a shredder. If he wanted to, he could set these songs on fire. Yet he plays with utmost restraint. This is not about Thile showing us his great talent. This is about communing with the spirit of Johann Sebastian Bach.
At times, these songs feel like a musical expression of being home alone, walking into the kitchen and struggling to remember why you walked in there. Or like the flickering aimlessness of a tea candle on a porch at night.
But these songs are neither struggling, nor are they aimless. Thile is locked in – it is we who must change, who must become more patient, more curious, gracious and generous to hear the voice of Bach’s spirit and receive him.
Our kitchen entry amnesia exemplifies a mortality so mundane, so commonplace, so embedded in our minute to minute lives, it is barely perceptible. Such is life. Bach asks us, “Will you awaken to the sweet brilliance of even these moments, or will you stay asleep?”
The simplicity of the technology – man and mandolin – along with the presence of the bugs in the background, are striking in that the music we hear on these recordings sounds exactly as it might have sounded three or four hundred years ago, when these songs were composed.
We are allowed to enter into a great truth of our world: that it eternally is. That Bach is just as we are.
…But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint–
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.– T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/fq.html
Together in this recorded performance, Bach and Thile teach us the meaning of the Communion of the Saints and the Cloud of Witnesses. To receive this good thing that God is doing, to see the Great Mystery in the smallest of things, all are welcome. All belong.