Bach against Modernity

Abstract

By key standards of what in the eighteenth century and later was considered to be forward-looking and modern—namely to exalt reason (above revelation, whatever the flaws of reason) as arbiter of truth, to exalt human autonomy and achievement, to exalt religious tolerance, to exalt cosmopolitanism, and to exalt social and political progressiveness—Bach and his music reflected and forcefully promoted a premodern world and life view. While we are arguably free to make use of Bach and his music in whatever historically informed or uninformed ways we find fitting, we ought also to be on the ethical alert for a kind of cultural narcissism in which we end up miscasting Bach in our own ideological image and proclaiming the authenticity of that image, and hence its prestige value, in support of our own agendas.