Rethinking BachPub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0010
Daniel R. Melamed
{"title":"Rethinking Bach Codes","authors":"Daniel R. Melamed","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"J. S. Bach has long attracted claims that his music is fundamentally a code to be broken. Interpreters count notes and measures, add up numbers derived from texts, refer to ancient writings, parse doodles, trace out shapes made by notes on the page, and make detailed calculations, all in search of ciphers that reveal hidden meaning. Traditions of scriptural interpretation in which every detail has significance and purpose often provide a model. The idea of “perfection” repeatedly surfaces, suggesting mathematical completeness, along with hypotheses that Bach’s abstract works are connected to other aspects of eighteenth-century culture. The symbolic and allegorical make frequent appearances. There are attempts to relate Bach’s works to elements of his biography that go beyond routine Romantic associations of musical works with personal expression. Many of these theories are amateur work, undertaken perhaps because treatments of Bach’s music are often technical, and because many aspects of the music are alien to the esthetics of the modern world. But the approach also surfaces in scholarly writings. All new claims start from the insufficiently examined premise that Bach worked in codes at all.","PeriodicalId":355356,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Bach","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115363982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rethinking BachPub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0011
J. Butt
{"title":"Bach’s Works and the Listener’s Viewpoint","authors":"J. Butt","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter attempts to review the status of Bach’s compositions in relation to emerging concepts of musical works in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Certain pieces might seem problematic in the face of the notions of originality and uniqueness that became essential to the high status of artworks. The Christmas Oratorio, as a sequence of cantatas largely borrowed from preexisting works honoring royalty, could therefore be seen as secondhand. But a more nuanced view might emerge from the ways in which metaphysical and hermeneutic theory of Bach’s age could reflect how a musical construction might have been conceived, and how such developments themselves might have influenced emerging narratives about art music. The crucial issue might be the accommodation of the notion of viewpoint into how music is composed, heard, and judged. It is unlikely that Bach paid any consistent attention to the cutting edge of critical thought. But at least the latter may function as evidence of what it was possible to think within Bach’s environment, something that might provide a bridge toward later beliefs about what music represented or rendered actual.","PeriodicalId":355356,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Bach","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130595625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rethinking BachPub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0002
S. Rose
{"title":"Bach and Material Culture","authors":"S. Rose","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Bach’s music is often interpreted as transcending the material conditions of everyday life. This chapter, by contrast, argues that Bach scholarship could be enriched via approaches taken from the study of material culture. It places Bach within the vibrant consumer culture of early-eighteenth-century Leipzig, exploring his postmortem inventory and his keyboard publications in the context of how the town’s bourgeoisie used material goods to show their status and identity. It investigates Bach’s printed and manuscript music in terms of the social practices surrounding these material artifacts. Finally, the chapter relates Bach’s working practices to debates about the interplay of human and material agency. It discusses how he experimented with the material characteristics of instruments such as organs, and analyzes his compositional practice as an interaction between player-composer and contrapuntal materials.","PeriodicalId":355356,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Bach","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133846411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rethinking BachPub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0005
Wendy Heller
{"title":"Bach and the Soprano Voice","authors":"Wendy Heller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter begins with a simple question: given the fact that Bach’s music for sopranos was composed almost exclusively for boys, why have early music practitioners—including those endorsed in 2018 by the Bach Leipzig Archive—become so accustomed to using female sopranos? Taking account both of the rhetorical strategies that Bach uses in a representative group of soprano arias (choice of affect, use of topoi, scoring, and vocal writing) and the use of female sopranos in this repertory in concert, radio, and recordings since the nineteenth-century revival, this chapter proposes that Bach imbued his soprano arias with an intrinsic sense of femininity—passion, optimism, desire, compliance, modesty, and submission—that was central to his expression of Lutheran theology and that emerges as no less vital for listeners, even long after the original theological context had lost its relevance. The chapter also shows how Bach’s unacknowledged capacity for representing female subjectivity has influenced even the most historically informed performance practices.","PeriodicalId":355356,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Bach","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124491705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rethinking BachPub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0006
Bettina Varwig
{"title":"Embodied Invention","authors":"Bettina Varwig","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter develops a historical account of Bach’s musicking body, and those of early-eighteenth-century keyboardists more generally, as a way to rethink how Bach’s keyboard music was conceived and performed. It synthesizes aspects of contemporaneous medical, scientific, and theological discourses about the human faculties of touch, memory, and invention, and brings these into dialogue with the inventive and performative dimensions of Bach’s keyboard practice. The chapter unearths historical conceptions of memory as physiologically grounded and distributed across the body, of touch as a corporeal-spiritual faculty, and of human bodies as purposive and intelligent. These notions of a bodily kind of intelligence suggest the need to ascribe much greater agency to the embodied aspects of early-eighteenth-century modes of composing and performing. The chapter thus offers a somatic alternative to the customary focus on mental, disembodied patterns of invention in understanding Bach’s compositional and improvisatory practices at the keyboard.","PeriodicalId":355356,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Bach","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126637279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rethinking BachPub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0012
Derek Remeš
{"title":"Bach’s Chorale Pedagogy","authors":"Derek Remeš","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Largely because of the proselytizing efforts of J. P. Kirnberger, J. S. Bach’s four-part vocal chorales (Choralgesänge) have come to be viewed as idealized microcosms of Baroque composition. For this reason, the Choralgesänge have enjoyed pride of place in compositional instruction for over two centuries. Yet recent archival discoveries have begun to problematize this hallowed pedagogical patrimony. A growing number of manuscript sources originating from Bach’s circle contain chorales melodies with multiple figured basslines. This focus on outer voices and thorough bass at the keyboard aligns quite well with C. P. E. Bach’s account of his father’s teaching, in which pupils first composed inner voices to a given outer-voice framework, and later learned to compose their own basslines. These findings suggest that our image of the “Bach chorale” should be broadened to include such Choralbuch settings with multiple basslines—a reframing that in turn has potential ramifications for historically informed teaching today.","PeriodicalId":355356,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Bach","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116935205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rethinking BachPub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0008
Jeremy S. Begbie
{"title":"Bach and Theology","authors":"Jeremy S. Begbie","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Amid a flourishing of interest in the theological dimensions of Bach’s output, relatively little attention has been paid to what the disciplines of biblical exegesis and systematic theology can bring to Bach studies. In the first part of the chapter, two major issues are examined: “anti-Judaism” in Bach, and his vision of time and eternity. Approaching the St. John Passion through close exegesis of John’s Gospel shows that Bach is a subtler and more independent figure than some current discussions of his alleged “anti-Judaism” imply. With regard to time and eternity, it is argued (against Karol Berger) that Bach displays a profound understanding of what a distinctively Christian metaphysics entails. The second part of the chapter asks what Bach might bring to the theologian. Two matters are considered—Bach’s creativity, and his layering of different theological lines—to show how his music can enable theology to be better attuned to its subject matter.","PeriodicalId":355356,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Bach","volume":"417 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115983797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rethinking BachPub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0003
E. Exner
{"title":"Rethinking 1829","authors":"E. Exner","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s 1829 Berlin performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is one of music history’s most legendary events, often cited as the origin of the “Bach Revival.” The historical record makes it clear, though, that Mendelssohn did not single-handedly rediscover Bach or his Passion and that his concert was not the first, even in Berlin, to feature Bach’s sacred vocal music. Nevertheless, the legend persists. This chapter re-examines the sources in search of a more inclusive view of Bach’s reception history in Berlin. In addition, it argues that the rhetoric of legend has endured in spite of the facts because it trades in the reassuring vocabulary of myth. The belief that Mendelssohn’s 1829 concert was a sudden and miraculous rediscovery cannot stand up to the facts, but the traditional story better serves the master narrative of German cultural hegemony in which Bach has played such an essential role.","PeriodicalId":355356,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Bach","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125844162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rethinking BachPub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0004
Yvonne Liao
{"title":"Post/Colonial Bach","authors":"Yvonne Liao","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter contributes a new post-European perspective to Bach studies, re-examining J. S. Bach as a colonial import in Hong Kong in relation to its post/colonial condition across a British colony (1842–1997) and a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (1997–present). Based on its proposition of rethinking Europe “after Europe,” the chapter considers post/colonial Bach across three specific institutions: The Helena May, a colonial club originally for women members; the Anglican St John’s Cathedral in the early 1900s and “landmark churches” (i.e., declared monuments or listed buildings) in the 2010s; and the City Hall in the later decades of the twentieth century. The chapter concludes with some further thoughts on the symbolism of post/colonial Bach, extending from its significance for Bach studies to related matters of historiography.","PeriodicalId":355356,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Bach","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117115052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rethinking BachPub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0009
D. Yearsley
{"title":"Bach the Humorist","authors":"D. Yearsley","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943899.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"From chortling gags heard in his church music, to the off-beat physical humor enlivening his first published keyboard music, to the jesting chutzpah of his Brandenburg Concertos, Bach’s wittiest creations display the composer/performer’s irreverence for expectation and reflect his musical—and social—daring. While no composer’s image is sterner than that of Johann Sebastian Bach, his early admirers painted a more varied picture of the composer than did later commentators driven by the imperatives of Art and the rigors of unsmiling scholarship. Convivial, dramatic, domestic, and courtly contexts could spark Bach to indulge in droll escapades and jokes, but even beyond such occasions, the prankster lurks in the transgressions of genius.","PeriodicalId":355356,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Bach","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114446244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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