From Beethoven to Wagner to Schoenberg, Johann Sebastian Bach influenced the subsequent course of Western music. Everybody knows that. Particularly influential is Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. This work consists of two volumes, each of which features one prelude and one fugue in every major and minor key. Since Well-Tempered Clavier is a staggering compendium of Bach's contrapuntal techniques, classical performers and composers alike learn from it still today. But is Bach's encyclopedic work relevant even for jazz composers like Charlie Parker, to say nothing of performers of folk music from around the world?
Stephen Prutsman, a pianist, composer, and arranger, seems to think so. On a Sunday morning program he played Bach's 24 preludes and fugues from the second book of Well-Tempered Clavier (ca. 1740). Prutsman's recital fell within the "Carte Blanche" series of the Music at Menlo summer music festival. Artists who participate in this series, as its title suggests, have free reign in devising their programs.
Prutsman titled his recital "Bach and Forth," and in it he moved back and forth, alternating between Bach's preludes and fugues, and pieces by other composers. Prutsman's program ran nearly two hours long in playing time alone. The audience enjoyed lunch during an extended intermission. But hungry versus full stomachs were hardly the only difference between the two halves of this extraordinary — not to mention extraordinarily well-performed — program.
In the first half, Prutsman alternated between Bach's pieces and works by composers within the canon of Western art music. The interpolated composers dated from progressively later eras. A character piece by Jean-Philippe Rameau, a French composer who lived at about the same time as Bach, served as the first non-Bach piece. A movement from Arnold Schoenberg's Suite for Piano (1923), a composition in which Schoenberg pioneered the 12-tone method of composition, served as the last. Other pieces that were interspersed between the Bach preludes and fugues included the Adagio from Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata, compositions by Ravel and Scriabin, and a Liszt transcription of a piece by Wagner.
Prutsman performed all this music without ever pausing long enough for the audience to applaud. But while this first half was a concatenation of varied pieces, the second half was even more so. In the latter half, the remaining preludes and fugues alternated with jazz and folk songs. Prutsman himself penned their arrangements. They included Charlie Parker's Ornithology; a tune by Purandara Dasa, a South Indian who was active mainly in the first half of the 16th century; a progressive rock number by the band Yes; and folk tunes from Uzbekistan and Rwanda.