steps

Not the least of the advantages of playing these suites on the viola rather than the cello is that one is on one’s feet.  This is dance music, and the instrument is your partner.  Each of the dance movements (not the freer prelude with which each suite begins) adapts the characteristic tempo and rhythms of its dance and a successful performance will capture that dance-like quality.  That said, these are not pure dances.  If you wanted to dance you’d choose some music which posed the accompanying musicians fewer technical difficulties, so that they could keep time strictly, and the dancers' steps would not stumble.  And because Bach has spliced dance motifs with sonata form, these dances are of the wrong proportions for the customary choreography.

So a certain rhythmic regularity pulls against the need to get fingers round chords, to shape phrase with rubato, to say something.  If you compare performances you soon see the difference between those players who want to keep up an even pulse and those who let it go perhaps too willingly.  Enter the metronome.  A useful tool for keeping us steady as we practice, for recording and repeating an appropriate tempo, for showing us when we rush and when we dawdle, for ensuring that subtle deviations from strict tempo are for musical reasons.

The metronome helps you learn a movement by starting slow and gradually notching up the tempo.  And that experience of advancing by slow degrees or little steps is one the Suites represent as a whole.  Each is a gradus ad Parnassum, a step to Parnassus and a step up in difficulty.  No surprise that we treat them as studies and that they are examined in Associated Board grade exams (again, gradus, Latin for ‘step’, ‘pace’, ‘degree’).  The preludes are themselves preparatory exercises, designed to get the fingers moving (that at least is the original nature of the ‘prelude’ or ‘pre-play’), and tending to concentrate on particular aspects of technique.

On many recordings you’ll notice that in simple terms of duration the suites get progressively longer.  This is not a coincidence.  Each suite is more extensive and complex than the last.  The highest notes, too, are found in the sixth suite, as we climb the ladder to its top.  Learning and playing a new suite each week, then, does feel like a well-graduated training regime.  I solve one problem and Bach asks me a new question.  I develop stamina week by week as I try to get in shape to tackle the last two suites.  Small steps.