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chris thile album commentary - chris thile lyrics

[intro]
well, ahoy there, fellow music lovers
welcome to bach: sonatas and partitas, volume 2
my first serious encounter with bach’s music came around ten years into my musical life
i was fifteen and had pretty music written off quote*unquote classical music as museum fodder
when my grandma sat me down with glenn gould’s second recording of the goldberg variations
i was transfixed
gould’s relentlessly rhythmic presentation of bach’s compositional g*nius blew the doors off my entire conception of music
i realized you can play any music you likе, however you like it
flash forward through almost thirty yеars of me practicing, performing, and recording bach
to the fall of 2024 with my band, nickel creek, opening for kacey musgraves
and me in a hallway backstage playing a fugue from bach’s sonata in c major for solo violin
in preparation for this project you’re about to check out
anyway, i finished a run*through of it, hit play on the voice memo i had just taken
and imagine my surprise when i hated it
not the actual music, of course
i consider the c major fugue to be one of humankind’s most soul*stirring artistic achievements
but how i was playing that music
it was square, lifeless, and worse, fearful
it hit me all at once that my reverence for bach and his greatest interpreters like gould
was preventing me from making his music the way i make my music
and indeed, any music besides bach
i could hear me worrying what bach would think of
how i was treating this cadence or if gould would approve of that tempo
instead of asking myself what i wanna hear when i play it
and it turns out that what i wanna hear is, you know
a bunch of rhythmic grace notes on the fugue
or harmonics on the upper line of the first menuet in e
and it turns out i really wanna hear the recordings of these things teleport
occasionally mid*movement, from, say, a studio in midtown manhattan
to a gazebo next to a creek in east tennessee
god, i had so much fun making this record
i hope you have fun listening to it
and if you see me somewhere around, let me know how you like to hear your bach
cheers

- chris thile lyrics

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