🎻Cello Suites

Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1007 to 1012, written around 1720. One instrument, no accompaniment, a little over two hours if you play all six. Sunday morning music: coffee, the window, Pallet on the shelf, nobody talking.

Each suite has the same skeleton, a prelude and then five dances, and inside that everything is different. What I hear, as someone who cannot read a score:

• No. 1 in G major. The prelude everybody knows. It is one line that implies three, and my ear fills in the chords that are not there.
• No. 3 in C major. The cheerful one. It begins by running straight down a scale as if somebody had dropped it.
• No. 5 in C minor. The top string is tuned down a tone, which darkens the whole instrument. The sarabande is a single bare line and the saddest four minutes I own.
• No. 6 was written for an instrument with five strings and sounds as if it wants more room than a cello has.

There is no manuscript in Bach's hand, only copies, one of them by his wife. For a long time they were treated as exercises, until a young Catalan cellist found an old edition in a second-hand shop and spent years on them before playing them in public. Things can sit in a drawer for a very long time and still be the best thing in it.

Live. 🎫 Cello suites at Depot 9 on 8 November with Jonas: suites one, three and five, one player, one chair, the old tram depot that is now 🪩 Depot 9 completely silent. I had not understood until then how physical it is. You can hear the breath before the sarabande.

Heard

• 8 November. Depot 9, suites one, three and five. Six days before the promotion answer, and for two hours I did not think about it once.
• 13 July. Number five only, twice. Flat, not sad. It did not help and it did not make anything worse.
• 23 February. All morning, all six, while I wrote about wanting to control a launch. First entry in this note.