In tap dancer Sam Weber’s signature routine, “Bach,” set to the final Presto movement of J.S. Bach’s “Italian” Concerto BWV 971, the choreography closely corresponds with the features of Bach’s composition, particularly concerning its ritornello form. Weber’s rhythms and steps amplify the function of the form’s various sections by drawing attention toward significant structural events and downplaying moments holding less structural import. Notably, he choreographically communicates his reading of formally ambiguous moments, providing clarificatory information that can guide the audience’s interpretation. I read Weber’s choreography as an act of translation, converting Bach’s musical details into analogous tapped versions.

Weber’s performance is thus an analysis, in the sense described by Olivia Lucas (2021) in her exploration of metal concert light shows: his performance transcribes Bach’s music into a “three-dimensional visual score” that provides an “interpretative layer” and “goes beyond coordination with musical events to communication of abstract ideas about the music” such as “musical gesture or rhythmic grouping” through cross-modal metaphor. However, an analysis is not an endpoint and itself requires a reader’s interpretation. As such, this paper not only interprets Weber’s tapped analysis of Bach but also performs a meta-analysis of this analysis of Weber.

I argue that examining how Weber exaggerates the formal functions of Bach’s composition in movement and sound implicitly uncovers how tap generates formal functions—a burgeoning but under-theorized topic in music theory research (Langille 2020; Leaman 2021; Gain 2022, 2023; Bilidas 2024). I posit that we can understand devices in Weber’s tap choreography through the baroque functions they translate, thus capitalizing on our comparatively more thorough understanding of ritornello form and common-practice musical functions (Fischer 1915; Dreyfus 1996; Caplin 2001). Accordingly, this meta-analytical approach reveals how tap choreography articulates formal boundaries, builds and releases tension, shapes and delimits phrases, manipulates motifs, and differentiates characteristic and conventional material.

In J.S. Bach’s concerto allegro movements, the material of the opening ritornello is restated in new combinations and is interspersed with new material. Using Bach’s Concerto BWV 1061/I as an exemplar, I examine ritornello form through the interaction between ritornello material and period organization. I break down each of the movement’s periods (i.e., relatively large, formal-cadence-delineated sections) into three phrase functions—initiating, medial, and concluding—that are primarily associated with prolongational, sequential and cadential harmonic progressions respectively. I show that this tripartite period model is sufficiently flexible for each phrase function to incorporate a harmonic progression type different from that with which it is primarily associated. This property allows ritornello material to recur in a phrase function different from that in which it originates. As I argue, a tripartite period model can justify the specific ordering and placement of later occurrences of ritornello material, an issue not adequately addressed by other analytical approaches to Bach’s ritornello form.

Despite J.S. Bach’s preeminence, a central subset of his oeuvre—the cantatas—remain little-studied among Anglo-American music theorists, while much German language scholarship has historically been dominated by conservative Lutheran interpretations (Lloyd 2007). As a step towards addressing this lacuna, the present study offers a narrative analysis of a particularly unusual aria from the cantata, Widerstehe doch der Sünde, BWV 54 (c. 1711-1715). The text of the eponymous opening aria, written by Georg Christian Lehm, instructs listeners to resist sin and temptation. The aria is harmonically and formally exceptional even amongst the Weimar cantatas (Crist 1988)—a fact frequently acknowledged but rarely explored in detail in the existing critical surveys of Bach’s cantata corpus which, for reasons of methodology or space, focus almost exclusively on text-painting and large-scale form (for instance Dürr 2006, Geck 2000, Petzolt 2004, but see Chafe 1991 and 2000). Yet scholars’ often contradictory assertions of madrigalisms are insufficiently flexible to account for either the aria’s formal processes or the spirit of the work, which emphasizes activity, struggle, and resistance (Widerstand). Drawing on Dreyfus’s (1997) metaphor of the ritornello as a machine and Monahan’s (2013) hierarchy of narrative agents, I explore the first two movements of the cantata to show how the instruments resist formal, harmonic, and stylistic convention as the solo alto instructs us to resist the temptation of sin.