Vernunft

Vernunft ("Reason") is a companion piece to the fourth Suite for Solo Cello by Bach, to be played directly before the Prelude without pause. Vernunft explores the musical material of the suite, and particularly those of the Prelude, marginalizing the foreground and centering the background. The work bears the title Vernunft in homage to Hegel's category of thinking: "The battle of reason," he says, "is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything." In other words, reason strives to move past the banality of neutral observation, to understand the forces at play beneath the surface, and to grasp the essence of the thing. The same process is at play in Vernunft. The disparate, discontinuous sounds of the opening are each broken down, understood, and subsumed into a coherent discourse in the end. And furthermore, Vernunft bases itself on the underlying structural processes of the Prelude, discarding its accidental, surface-level details. Thus, though its musical language and the minutiae of its processes differ, Vernunft presents a distorted mirror image of Bach's Prelude that serves to reframe and recontextualize the suite.

Download includes score for both cello and viola.