108: Brandenburg III

  Today, we move out of the F major concerti into the G majors; today with number 3 and tomorrow with number 4, we’ll be in that key. This one has a special place in my life, since it’s the only one I’ve actually ever played, and not just listened to many, many times, and spent a bunch of time thinking and writing about it. This concerto is the shortest of the collection and takes about as long to play through as does just the last movement of the first concerto (remember, the one with the set of dances all packed into one movement). A quick popular culture connection: if you’re intentionally listening to the concerto for the first time and you have a feeling you recognize it but you’re not sure from where and you’ve seen the movie “Die Hard,” yes, they do use this concerto in the soundtrack of the movie.

The first movement, is, like many of the faster movements before it, in ritornello form; that is, there’s one central melodic idea that keeps coming back over and over, surrounded by other material. Immediately, having heard the first two concerti already, you’ll notice something odd, especially given the context of the immediately preceding second concerto: no winds whatsoever. As you listen to that material, keep these two things in mind: sequences and scales. If you understand how these two basic melodic constructs work, you can understand the first movement of Brandenburg III. (If only I had had that realization years ago, and/or not had performance anxiety as bad as I do, I would have done much better than I did in the audition I had that involved Brandenburg III.)

The second movement is quite the enigma. By a mile, it’s the shortest movement in the whole set, and genuinely has a shot at being the shortest complete movement Bach ever wrote, period. The whole thing is just two chords, in E minor, a iv6 going to a V. Now this cadence is one which you may recognize if, after our initial discussion of cadences months ago, you went and did more research on your own, as a Phrygian Half Cadence. Gen Z likes to speculate, for example, that Bach’s girlfriend (to keep with the format of a meme; he was, in fact, married, not just dating her, when he wrote this concerto) invited him over and he dropped everything and never finished the concerto after his date. 

Another (much more plausible) theory is that Bach intended the movement as an improvisation, either which was entirely over those two chords, but to be extended as long as the harpsichordist wanted, or which was to end with those two chords, but which could contain whatever else the harpsichordist wanted; or that, since the prevailing theory is that this movement was by nature improvisatory, the actual material was made up on the spot performance-by-performance and never formally written down. Much in the same way as I said a few days about the Tristan Chord—there are so many theories about what it is and how it functions and what to call it, with no indisputable proof of any of them even though they’re all reasonable—we just don’t know, and, I think, never will know, why Bach only wrote these two chords. We also have no idea why, of all the cadences he chose, it was the Phrygian Half that made it into the history books.

After the second movement, we come to the third. The first and third, together, are about 90% of the total length of time (and probably something like 99% of the measures) of the whole concerto. Like the first movement and many other movements in the set we’ve already discussed, this movement is in ritornello form just like concerto grossi are. (It’s not a concerto grosso, strictly speaking, because there aren’t 2 nested orchestras, but it’s quite close, at least formally. The concerti that are, strictly speaking, concerti grossi are II, IV, and V.) As you listen to this movement, pay attention to the counterpoint and how the lines, moving independently, fit together. Bach was a master of counterpoint, and there truly is no better way to learn to listen to, appreciate, play, or write counterpoint than by using the music of JS Bach as a reference.

Here are some great recordings:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lAlx23VKbk

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czsd13Mmcg0

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr0f6t2UbOo

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKvu3dQqcBk


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