DOTS OF HISTORY AND THE ARTFUL APPROACH
A CONVERSATION WITH TOM ALLEN ON JS BACH’S LONG WALK IN THE SNOW
The average modern listener probably gives little thought to music that was made 300 years ago. Even so, there is a long list of artists over the past sixty years, who name the 18th century composer JS Bach as an influence. This influence and enduring appeal are no mystery to Tom Allen. The musician, storyteller and long-time radio host (currently on CBC Radio 2’s About Time) has been appreciating Bach and his music for most of his life. That appreciation has resulted in a new touring show called JS Bach’s Long Walk In the Snow. Co-created with the harpist Lori Gemmell, this ‘chamber musical’ is part history, part storytelling, and part musical performance.
While it is unusual for a composer like Bach to be discussed in this publication, it is not without relevance. On the subject of Bach’s importance to modern, non-classical listeners, Tom Allen asserts that, “Popular music, as we understand it, at least in the era of rock and roll, from Elvis Presley to the early years of the 2000s, has a structure that is very much like baroque music, very much like from the era of Bach. If you look at the average piece by Bach, it falls into about a three-minute category, and it follows a harmonic language that, although it is a great deal more sophisticated than early rock and roll, the harmonic structure is not dissimilar.”
“I think that almost every great songwriter of the last sixty years, even if they don’t know it, has been influenced by the music created by Johann Sebastian Bach. A couple of the best-known pieces by Bach would be the first movement of the First Cello Suite, and a similar pattern to the first prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier. If you listen to those pieces, you hear the chord progressions and you hear that it informs just about everything that happened in popular music in the era of rock and roll. I think that anyone who makes music eventually needs to look at that. Further, Bach’s musical life was informed by melodies that existed before his time. The bulk of what he wrote for the Lutheran Church – and that was his employer for almost all of his adult life – was built around Lutheran melodies, these hymn tunes that had existed for at least a century before him. So, he was, in fact, setting popular music. He was taking tunes that people knew, and doing something creative with them. That’s what he did, time and time again. Sometimes he was so creative that his congregations wondered what the hell he was doing! There are examples of communications from the upper office saying, ‘Hey, people don’t know what you’re talking about. Keep it simple!’ But, he was working with what was, for the time, you could say, popular tunes. They were tunes that people knew. That was his job, to do something interesting with those tunes.”
While JS Bach’s Long Walk In the Snow is independent of his broadcasting work, Allen says that the two are, in a way, connected. “I’m a storyteller, more than anything. Telling stories about music, as I’ve done for 33 years. There are always going to be stories that are too long or too nuanced, or that require a little more focus than can be found in a music program where I’m only talking for a minute or two at a time. These shows that I create inevitably emerge from something that starts with a radio program, or that maybe preceded a radio program, but there wasn’t room for it. You could say it’s kind of the cutting room floor. It’s picking up the stuff that got cut, and realizing that there’s more to it, and that something more could be done.”
TOM ALLEN
Although he himself studied trombone, it was words rather than music that drove Tom Allen. “I mostly grew up in a storytelling house, honestly. Music was an interest of mine. My parents liked music. My mom loved the piano, and so I heard a lot of music. But mostly, I was surrounded by preachers. My grandfathers on both sides were preachers. There is a long history of connection to the church, so the idea of telling a story that somehow connects with music has been there since before I knew that’s what it was, really. My partner in life, my wife Lori Gemmell, is a harpist. She also comes from a similar background, so we both long loved the thing that happens when a story is picked up on by music, or vice-versa, when the sensibility of the emotion, of the feeling in a narrative can be amplified and explored through music. This naturally falls into what we’re doing.”
Speaking further about his inspiration for creating this show, and about the music of JS Bach, Allen states that, “The remarkable thing about that music, to me, is that Bach was principally a church composer. He wrote these cantatas. He wrote hundreds, literally. More than three hundred cantatas based on Lutheran tunes for the church. They had a constant appetite for what he could do. The stuff that we know best by him – the Cello Suites, the Brandenburg Concertos, the keyboard pieces like The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor – these were all extra things. They’re kind of the ‘loose change’ of what Bach did. It’s not what his job was. This was extra stuff, and it’s so eternally inspiring and beautiful. It’s hard to believe that someone could have had such a command of the emotion of music, that just the extra stuff is able to sustain an entire society of music lovers.”
On the topic of putting together chamber musicals like JS Bach’s Long Walk In the Snow, Allen says, “These are all shows that my wife, Lori Gemmell and I have created together. They really started with me saying to Lori, ‘Alright, what’s the piece you want to play?’ And there’s a big harp thing that she’s working on, so then I’ve got to figure out what story is going to be a good frame for that. We realized in the course of things, we started writing some of our own songs to go with these shows, and combining a really diverse musical language, and our friends Patricia O’Callaghan and Kevin Fox began singing some of these songs. They had kind of a foot in musical theatre, in that the music was extending the story being told in the storytelling. So they were sort of like musicals, but with chamber music, so that’s where that came from. Now it’s really just anything where the story and the music can interweave and hand from one to the other.”
JS Bach’s Long Walk In the Snow is definitely a show with ‘legs’. After some British Columbia performances in late 2023, and the upcoming Ontario dates in January-February, there are also plans to take the show to Atlantic Canada in Summer 2024, followed by select shows in Ontario and BC after that. Interestingly, for certain dates on the upcoming Ontario leg of the tour, audiences will witness a slightly different program, depending on the city they are in.
It is quite a task, to present the life and music of an artist whose work spans centuries, and has been so foundational to Western music. When asked what he hopes audiences will take away after a performance, Allen muses, “It’s different for every show, but this one is really about how history is recorded, and remembered. I liken it to a constellation in the night sky. We have dots, we have verifiable dots of history. We know he was here then, we know he went there then. What happened between those two dots is like assembling a constellation in the night sky. If you can draw the lines clearly, and with enough artistic power and detail, then those random thoughts become a lion or a bull, or a pair of twins – whatever it may be. This story is that. It is a combination of looking at the specifics of the dots of history, and connecting those lines with an artful approach.”
See the listing below for upcoming performances of JS Bach’s Long Walk In the Snow.
JS Bach’s Long Walk in the Snow – Performance Dates and Locations
Jan 18 Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts
Jan 19 Guelph River Run
Jan 20 Theatre Collingwood
Feb 8 Wellington, PEC
Feb 9 Peterborough Market Hall Performing Arts Centre
Feb 10 Waterloo, Knox Presbyterian
Feb 11 Toronto Hugh’s Room Live
Feb 18 Burlington Performing Arts Centre
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