by Neil Vodavzny

Thinking yourself into the mind of your protagonist is an old author’s trick - a fraternity of which I consider myself a peripheral member - in that an innate facility for words doesn’t come easy, but from practice and a hell of a lot of note-taking. This relates to a piece on Anna Magdalena Bach, wife of JS - which just serves to illustrate the limited imaginations of moderns.

Not only were performance and composition closer in the early 18th century, as IH notes, but performers would have been inculcated with the harmonies of baroque. Harmony being notes in a chord, Anna Magdalena likely transcribed them from memory. One tends to forget in the days before mass media, music of a certain style was all that would be heard. There were literally no distractions so what we’re likely seeing are Magdalena’s inspired guesses based on practice of what would almost be a family or folk tradition.

Such is tradition, and one has to recognize that nurture and nature – see – are very difficult to disentangle. Baroque, and Magdalena’s complete grasp of the form, are a very apt metaphor for the harmony of the daily round in the cobbled streets of Weimar (incidentally, just saw his first wife was his second cousin). The milieu is the message.

Harmony of local content implies local control, a socio-religio culture. So that’s relatively tribalistic in nature. Harmony, I would suggest is a feature of great art of whatever style. It’s quite instructive to compare modern artists with old masters for that reason. Compare, for example, Egon Schiele’s Two Girls Embracing:

… with Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Lady With Ostrich Feather Fan:

Now, this is where moderns routinely fall completely flat. If you look closely at the Rembrandt, it’s extremely simple in form. There are two light-coloured shapes in a lot of black. Then he refines the shapes with ultra-precision. Rembrandt paints in thick impasto, and what you see is the boldness. No modern portraitist can attempt this.

Schiele is equally bold, but there is a conscious disregard of harmony. He is of the Viennese school and preoccupied with penetrating the sexual dimension (pardon the pun). There’s no denying Schiele’s skill, but for eternal truth you go to Rembrandt. It has been said that Schiele’s representations resembles dead meat, and lacks traditional motifs. See Barry Windsor-Smith for the power of symbolism to place things in a moral perspective. The hunter. The prey.

Moderns dissect reality; traditionalists harmonise it. The one modern artist you might compare with old masters is Robert Crumb. He is very bold and facile with a genius for character. Angelfood McSpade is more or less a super-traditional White Man’s view of Blacks:

Because Crumb is a 60s icon, he’s “allowed” to think this way but, as he himself admits, it’s just flotsam that comes out of the subconscious. BWS, as can be seen from his elaborate visions, couldn’t be more dissimilar. Crumb actively abhors the superhero form. They don’t travel in the same circles – BWS plays rock guitar and Crumb doesn’t (direct from La belle France, Crumb having moved out of Cali in the 90s with the odd notion marketing was ruining America).

Practically the only things that connects the two is that both play guitar and both are artistically arrant traditionalists, they just follow a separate tradition.