Bokemeyer’s public defeat in his debates with Mattheson on the merits of occult canonism in 1725 was not the end of Bokemeyer’s occult endeavors. He continued to invest himself in alchemy. His defeat, as far as he was concerned, was not that the occultism in canon should be dropped on a personal level but only that canon should not occupy a central position in European music nor should the occultism be taught to student adepts but should be stripped of its occult trappings and taught to all students freely. On a personal level, Bokemeyer continued to study canon as a form of occultism. He wrote to Walther and told him he wanted a copy of a set of musical manuscripts in Walther’s library written by Johann Thiele under the collective title of Musicalisches Kunstbuch after Walther had mentioned them to Bokemeyer in a 1731 letter. Walther painstakingly copied the manuscripts over a three-year period (1735-8) and sending them to Bokemeyer in installments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAkln8idIRQ
Thiele had been a friend of Buxtehude and was the first kapellmeister of the Hamburg Opera. Walther had been something of an apostle of Thiele and so inherited many of his written works. Bokemeyer and his teacher, Georg Österreich, who had also taught Thiele, studied his treatises. Thiele was known as “the father of contrapuntists” and was known from Königsberg to Vienna where Emperor Leopold I studied his works on learned counterpoint. Thiele was a big advocate of the learned secrets of canon and counterpoint and the Kunstbuch was his magnum opus in that regard. Composed of 15 pieces ranging from canon to dance suites to vocal polyphony from the 1670s and 80s, the Kunstbuch is titled as an alchemical work since many works on hermeticism and, in particular, magic were called
kunstbücher. Thiele’s title page states it outright: “Musicalisches Kunstbuch, in which 15 Kunst pieces and secrets, which spring from double counterpoint, are to be met.” These pieces were to be treated as powerful secrets from a mystical, magical, musical universe.
Each piece in the Kunstbuch was accompanied by a couplet spelling out a secret to the initiated who knew how to read it. Each had an emblem to go with it as well. This is exactly how alchemical treatises were written. Some of these emblems I’ve posted here already. In the second piece is written: “All of these can be transformed once more, / but one must also proceed very cleverly with them.” This puzzle has never been solved. In the fourth piece, for example, Thiele leaves off the bass part with the motto: “The bass has hidden himself somewhere within, / But a clever person will soon enough discover it.” Walther’s copy left the bass line blank. In the ninth piece, the couplet reads: “Although there is but one of me here, I appear two times. / Who can find what is hidden in me?” This riddle certainly seems to be referring to the use of learned counterpoint application. There is just one musical line, but through inversion or retrograde of that line and juxtaposed against the original line, we get two harmonious lines. To solve this, the artifex must apply the secret art and the Philosopher’s Stone will reward him beyond his wildest dreams. Even the simplest melodies could thereby produce endless possibilities of the highest artistic expression—spiritual gold.
This contrapuntal/alchemical transformation is demonstrated by Bach in his Canon a 2 perpetuus (BWV 1075):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taEAXZ-iOwQ
Here a simple eight-bar melody, through a knowledgeable application of the secret art, is transformed as if by magic into canon. The last four measures are simply an inversion of the first four bars. The last bar then circles back to the first in a seamless fashion which requires a good degree of skill to pull off. The last measure doesn’t simply hook up to the first but resolves to it even though the last is an inversion of the first. Yet, Bach does it without seeming effort and sounds like a two-bar canon. The operation is simple but the operation means nothing without the melody to start with. Bach not only has written a fine melody but whether played rectus or invertus, it retains that fineness. Whether in the original form, rectus form or invertus form, there is no dissonance to be found so when imposed over the original theme, the blend is always sweet. So, Bach composed sweet melody with sweet harmony and that’s where genius lies. Knowing the learned counterpoint is all fine and dandy but if the melody isn’t constructed correctly the result isn’t going to be much good. Bach shows amazing adeptness at both melody composition and learned counterpoint and that will put him a cut above anyone without that kind of command.
If Bach had read
Musicalisches Kunstbuch, and he probably did while in Weimar since have had access to Walther’s library, he would have understood the title to be something related to occultism specifically hermeticism and magic. Knowing that the author was none other than the Father of the Contrapuntists, Johann Thiele, and this was his magnum opus of contrapuntal works, we can hypothesize Bach’s reaction encountering such esoteric concepts as the Harmony Tree:
Due to the efforts men as Mattheson and Heinichen, those students that came a generation after Bach learned counterpoint only as exercises in mechanics. All occult attachments had long been stripped away and in so doing went the understanding of how counterpoint and canon were perceived in Bach’s day.