Bach & the Medium of Sound
In craftsmanship, the boundaries imposed by the artist’s medium are sometimes obvious. Tailors do not try to make dresses from sheet metal. An architect knows he cannot remove all load-bearing pillars from his design. But in some crafts, the limitations of the medium are not so self-evident. Consider music: instruments and human voices have obvious limits, yes. But how do the properties of sound itself constrain a composer?
The medium of sound can give the illusion of being infinitely protean, especially now that computer programs allow composers to manipulate sound without resorting to physical instruments. The avant-garde composer in the twenty-first century, working with an entirely virtual sound world on his laptop, may fall into the trap of thinking that the world of sound is an unbounded environment for self-expression, and that it places no constraints on his creativity. But in fact, even a medium as mutable as sound has its own God-given properties and limitations.
One such property is the overtone series. Most musical instruments do not produce a single, pure tone. When a pianist, for example, strikes a single key, the listener does not hear just one tone, but a whole series of tones.
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Christopher Hoyt is the organist/choirmaster at Good Shepherd Church in Tyler, Texas, and teaches Sacred Music at Cranmer Theological House (Reformed Episcopal) in Dallas. He was general editor of the hymnal, The Book of Common Praise/Magnify the Lord (2017) and is a composer of hymns and other church music (hoytcomposer.com).
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