Learning Bach with beats

If the Violin Partita is dance music, let's make it danceable

During the pandemic, I learned some Bach on the guitar. I am profoundly not a classical guitarist, but I was teaching an introduction to Western music theory that was supposed to cover the European canon. Also, I love Bach and had been meaning to learn some of his music anyway, I just needed an excuse. The biggest challenge I set for myself was the Chaconne, the final movement from the Partita No. 2 in D minor. Here’s a performance by Viktoria Mullova, which I like because it’s minimally melodramatic.

According to my students who play classical strings, my interest in the Chaconne reveals how basic I am. They consider the Chaconne to be only a small step up from Pachelbel’s Canon or Ave Maria, a piece that normies have run into the ground. What can I say? I’m basic, I’m not deep enough into Bach to listen past the greatest hits, and I love the Chaconne.

I found a nice guitar transcription by Rodolfo Betancourt and spent long months struggling through it. Eventually, I got to a point where I could play the Chaconne from top to bottom without pausing, very slowly and messily, but with enthusiasm and feeling. I now have it completely memorized, and while it will never be recital-worthy, my friends and family enjoy hearing me play it. There’s something relaxing about knowing that I will never have the fast and technical passages completely nailed down; all I can do is enjoy the journey.

The piece wasn’t hard to learn for the reasons you might think. It’s long, but it’s also structurally transparent and self-explanatory, and I had it memorized long before I got it under my fingers. There are a lot of notes, but they are organized in such logical and orderly patterns that they are easy to understand and remember. My big struggle was (and is) with the rhythm. Bach uses regular and symmetrical patterns of note placement and duration, but I find them counterintuitive, because he’s following the conventions of Baroque dance styles that are unfamiliar to me. The very first note of the Chaconne is on beat two. Why? Because chaconnes accent beat two; that’s just how the dance style works. My confusion compounds from there.

The whole idea that the Chaconne is based on dance music was bewildering to me at first. It doesn’t sound like anything that a person could dance to. The same is true for all of Bach’s sarabandes, gavottes, gigues, passacaglias, allemandes, correntes and menuets. I listened to lots of recordings to the Chaconne while I tried to get a feel for the rhythm, and none of them were helpful. There didn’t seem to be any relationship between the timing written in the score and the timing that people were playing. I know that tempo is an expressive dimension in classical performance, but these performers sometimes seem to be ignoring the written note durations entirely. I know classical music listeners like how this sounds, but it’s no help if you’re trying to learn by ear. I eventually hit on a technological solution that I will explain in depth below. But first let me give you some background on the music that Bach was drawing on.