Thanks, I'm learning!
Finally it dawned on me, the G to D change
was while in D major and, thus, back to the
tonic! So, there, in the next to last bar,
right before the top of
the climax of the section, Bach touched on
the tonic again! So, artistically this
tied the motion and emotion of the other
notes back to the tonic and not left partly
lost out in the ozone -- or some such.
This afternoon, I listened to the Heifetz
and Piatigorsky performance of the Andante
of the Brahms Double Concerto: Finally it
dawned on me: Brahms had an abstraction
of some kind of speech, say, of just the
sound of the speech, the sounds that
conveyed the emotion without knowing the literal
words. So, it sounded like speech, maybe like
speech in a foreign language where didn't
understand the literal meaning of the words
but, still, got much of the emotional
expression. It appears that you have a book
that expands on such a thing.
Edit: Okay, at
http://www.nsi.edu/~ani/MLB_review_Psychomusicology_Sept_201...
I found a book review of
Aniruddh D. Patel.
Music, Language, and the Brain.
He's deep into some apparently fairly speculative
research and makes me like more my little idea
that some of music is like listening to some
passionate talking in a foreign language were
know none of the words but, still, get the
emotional content -- that is, the music and the
emotional content of the speech can be similar.
So, back to the opening cello solo of the
Brahms Double, we can imagine some
passionate speaking where a person says
something, just a few words, then says it
again a little differently, then again with
a little different emphasis, then again
using maybe different word order. Well,
maybe
that's much of what Piatigorsky playing
what Brahms wrote is doing.
Or, back to the beginning of the D major
section of the Bach Chaconne, we have
phrases
F# G E, F# G A D, E F# G F# E E A F#
[this example would be still more clear
with the actual music with the
note timings -- maybe the harmony
would also help!] Here I am inserting
commas to separate what I am regarding
as the separate phrases repeating
the same basic emotional content.
So, an idea is that that music is
like a speaker saying much the same
thought three times, each time
with mostly the same words and
in a similar but different way,
that is, with variations.
Why three times
with variations? The speaker is
passionate and, maybe even, pleading,
and trying to get their meaning across
if not the first way then maybe in one
of the two other ways. Besides, the third
way is more complete than the other two
and, even, with the rise to the A, has a point of
high emphasis and emotion. Maybe.
See something similar at the beginning
of Silent Night where there are four
variations of basically the same
emotional expression.
I suspect that Bach and Mozart could
"search their feelings" (Star Wars),
think of some corresponding speech,
hear the corresponding music, and just
write it down.
The book review suggested that different
languages have different patterns in
the speaking and, thus, for each such
language, music written in that language
will use similar patterns. So from that
might argue that the Bach Chaconne
was not written by a native speaker of
French or Greek. Or Massenet just does
not sound like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
Mendelssohn, Wagner, or R. Strauss! Maybe
Massenet sounds more like Debussy or Ravel!