I'm getting married in 22 days!

I have been meaning to blog for some time. Things have been extremely busy, it's all good and exciting, and I didn't want the 400th post on this blog to be a "here's what's new" kind of thing.

Then today on YouTube I found the perfect thing. If you watched Ted Kennedy's funeral last summer, then perhaps you've already seen this. The funeral itself is not my reason for posting the video, but rather the piece of music you'll hear.

This is the Sarabande from Bach's 6th Cello Suite in D Major.
Sarabande - Derived from a Spanish dance form revolving around castanets. Bach wrote many unaccompanied suites for Violin and Cello - all of which incorporated movements based on various dance forms, regardless if the movement actually sounded dance-like or not.

About this Suite - this is the last of the Suites that Bach wrote for the unaccompanied cello. [Nobody can know for sure for what use Bach intended them, as he never published them or had them publically performed to our knowledge. Also, several of the suites' original autograph copies are missing.]
At the time of their coneption, the cello was still very much an evolving instrument, and Western Music had not yet settled the question of how many strings a cello would have. While 4-string cellos were the most widely used [all cellos have had 4 strings for about the last 200 years] 3 and 5 stringers were still around and preferred by some. Bach wrote the 6th Suite for a 5-string cello, which would have had one string extending the cello's range by a 5th. On a 5 string cello the 6th suite seems to fit in with the other 5, but on a 4 string cello - today - it is by far the most technically difficult, arguably impossible, to play. In case you're wondering, I cannot play it, and because of my love of Bach will never attempt it unless I intend to spend great deals of time growing my technique to handle it.

About this Performance - Because of the cello community's tendency to admire the technical difficulty of its faster movements, we fail to realize that underneath all the "tricks" and "stumbling blocks" of such a challenging piece, lies the sublime musical perfection that causes musicians to spend lifetimes admiring Bach centuries after he died. Watch this video, and you will not say "Wow, what a great cellist Yo Yo Ma is" but rather, "What a beautiful piece." Only talent such as this can conceal the difficulty of a piece so well that we're able to ignore the "showmanship" that lesser players would display, in order to hear the flesh and blood music between the skeleton of notes.