Today’s postlude, the so-called Gigue fugue, is a favorite. A gigue, or a jig is a lively dance. This is a youthful piece and for years its authorship was contested. Recent scholarship has confirmed that the work is indeed from the quill of the great master himself, J.S. Bach. Perhaps young Johann wrote this piece after being introduced to a similar work by a former teacher of his, Dieterich Buxtehude, whose Prelude in C, BuxWV174 has similar melodic material. In late 1705 and early 1706, Bach spent three months in Lübeck studying with Buxtehude, when Bach would have only been around 20 years old.

Many organists have attempted to play this little gem, and although it’s supposed to be playful and peppy, it’s a treacherous ride, demanding great dexterity of fingers and toes. Virgil Fox, the famously flamboyant “Liberace of the organ,” made this piece one of his signature concert selections. Fox was the organist at the Riverside Church in New York from 1948–1965. He would play the Gigue Fugue of Bach and ask audience members to come up and dance a divine jig as he played. He performed it lickety-split! If you’d like to dance a divine jig whilst I play, by all means, help yourself!

This little piece is a brain twister. I suppose you could slow it down to make it more manageable, but you’d take away its implicit effervescence. In a recent organ lesson, one of my students was having trouble with a tricky passage of music, and she kept clamping down on it, as if she was straining to get it right. We all have a tendency to do this. When you “strain” to see something, you crinkle the muscles around the eyes, yet that does nothing. Some people stick out their tongue, or scrunch up their faces to do intricate things, but that does nothing either. Truthfully, to get detailed work done, you have to relax. With Bach’s music, you cannot strain, grunt, or slap the keys and expect it to dance. You actually have to let go, tickle the keys, and relax. I told my student to play it like God would play it – effortlessly. That’s easier said than done. But too often when faced with complexity, we try. God doesn’t try. God does, and with no effort at all. As the old Taoist proverb says, “God does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone.”

Try landing a plane, for example. Flying a plane requires corrective minutiae, and relaxed alertness. My flight instructor would always tell me, “Small corrections!” It’s often said that the devil is in the details, but I think God is in the details. When you get into those higher levels of advance coordination, clamping down, straining, or “trying” just get in the way of the freedom that you need to let it happen. That’s not to say you don’t practice, but that you don’t strain, stress, and grab to make it happen.  

Bach’s music is as close to perfect as a human can get. Therefore, it takes total comportment and a God-like poise to play it well. One distraction or one tense moment, and it will unravel like a tightly wound-up coil. You have to be internally still to play Bach. Remember, “Be still and know that I am God?” On those rare occasions when you do get it just right, it’s ecstasy. No wonder few people attempt to do things that are as complex as tight-rope walking or playing the Gigue Fugue. But if you ever get a chance to get to that level of advance coordination, and you succeed, the view “up there” is amazing. That’s because the divine is cleverly hidden in the alert focus that it takes to sort through and express all of those musical details. That’s worth dancing for! Soli deo Gloria!