JAVS Spring 2025

Stacy Davis examines the listener, and Dorian Bandy explores the violinist-composer. In Schröder’s Bach’s Solo Violin Works: a Performer’s Guide , he stresses the importance of recognizing the hidden polyphony to hear imaginary “missing” notes. 25 Playing Bach assigns an onerous task to the left hand; however, Schröder claims the bow provides the real magic, suggesting different tones and characters for each voice to maximize polyphony texture. 26 Davis, on the other hand, approaches this phenomenon from the listener’s view to figure out how and why we hear multiple voices in Bach’s solo string music. In her thesis, Davis raises interesting questions regarding Bach’s polyphony: 2) Performers who spend time practicing Bach’s music are likely to be aware of implied polyphony. Will this polyphonic implication always be communicated beyond the performer to the listener? Although human interpretation can help bring out implied polyphony to some degree, Davis concludes that it is not necessary for the performer to make the effect clear in order for the listener to hear implied polyphony. 27 Davis also points out that her experiments had too few participants to be reliable and more research is necessary. 1) Are these polyphonic effects coming from the composition itself or human interpretation?

Finally, Bandy explores the intriguing relationship between performer, composer, and listener. In his article, Bandy points out how the violin became a primarily melodic instrument even though there was a significant tradition of writing polyphonic music for the violin in the German-speaking region during the 17th century. Bandy argues that most of this contrapuntal tradition was lost since these violinist-composers poorly documented their composition, mainly because the composition was happening through the violinist’s left hand on the fingerboard, not the pen and paper. 28 Therefore, Bandy claims that one must develop different senses of imagination through the hands, ears, and mind to fully experience and understand the polyphonic writings for the violin. 29 The ultimate goal of implied polyphony is making an illusion of multiple players playing together simultaneously without using any chordal playing. I perceive four different approaches to achieve this goal. Two of the most basic approaches include arpeggiation and bariolage. The Prelude from the Cello Suite no.1 provides a notable example of arpeggiation in Bach’s music. When performers play arpeggiated texture, they usually emphasize the bass and the top notes to give an impression of two performers. The Prelude from Bach’s Violin Partita no.3 represents an iconic bariolage example (See Examples 7 and 8).

Example 7. Bach Violin Partita No.3, Prelude. mm.11-20.

Example 8. Bach Cello Suite No.1, Prelude. Beginning.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring 2025