As the official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives has pioneered new areas of research in the life, times, and music of Bach since its first appearance in 1995. Volume 8 of ...Bach Perspectives emphasizes the place of Bach's oratorios in their repertorial context. These essays consider Bach's oratorios from a variety of perspectives: in relation to models, antecedents, and contemporary trends; from the point of view of musical and textual types; and from analytical vantage points including links with instrumental music and theology. Christoph Wolff suggests the possibility that Bach's three festive works for Christmas, Easter, and Ascension Day form a coherent group linked by liturgy, chronology, and genre. Daniel R. Melamed considers the many ways in which Bach's passion music was influenced by the famous poetic passion of Barthold Heinrich Brockes. Markus Rathey examines the construction and role of oratorio movements that combine chorales and poetic texts (chorale tropes). Kerala Snyder shows the connections between Bach's Christmas Oratorio and one of its models, Buxtehude's Abendmusiken spread over many evenings. Laurence Dreyfus argues that Bach thought instrumentally in the composition of his passions at the expense of certain aspects of the text. And Eric Chafe demonstrates the contemporary theological background of Bach's Ascension Oratorio and its musical realization
Scholars and performers have long noted J.S. Bach's abundant use of parody procedures: that is, the recycling and reworking of pre-existing material from his own compositions or from other sources. ...Laura Buch edits essays exploring how the composer parodied the work of others and how other composers did the same with him. The contributors delve into the works of Baroque-era composers from Bach himself to C. P. E. Bach, Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer, and Ferruccio Busoni. But they also cast a wider net, investigating the ways Bach's music cross-pollinates with contemporary composer-performers John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet, and keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Parliament-Funkadelic. The diverse contexts illuminate a broad range of parody techniques, from structural scaffolding and contrapuntal elaboration to integration with stylistic languages far removed from the Baroque. An insightful look at how composers build on each other's work, Bach Reworked reveals how nuanced understandings of parody procedures can fuel both musical innovation and historically informed performance. Contributors: Stephen A. Crist, Ellen Exner, Moira Leanne Hill, Erinn E. Knyt, and Markus Zepf
The Bach cantatas are among the highest achievements of Western musical art; yet studies of individual Bach cantatas that are both illuminating and detailed are few in number. In this book Eric Chafe ...combines theological, historical, analytical, and interpretive approaches to the cantatas to offer the reader and listener the richest possible experience of the works in the light of the composer’s intentions and of the enduring and universal qualities of the works. Concentrating on a small number of representative cantatas, mostly from the Leipzig cycles of 1723-24 and 1724-25, and in particular on Cantata 77, Chafe illustrates how Bach strove to mirror both the dogma and the mystery of religious experience in musical allegory.
Providing a detailed analysis of Bach's Passions, this 2010 book represents an important contribution to the debate about the culture of 'classical music', its origins, priorities and survival. The ...angles from which each chapter proceeds differ from those of a traditional music guide, by examining the Passions in the light of the mindsets of modernity, and their interplay with earlier models of thought and belief. While the historical details of Bach's composition, performance and theological context remain crucial, the foremost concern of this study is to relate these works to a historical context that may, in some threads at least, still be relevant today. The central claim of the book is that the interplay of traditional imperatives and those of early modernity renders Bach's Passions particularly fascinating as artefacts that both reflect and constitute some of the priorities and conditions of the western world.
"Most people today think of Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the only Bach and Mozart of classical music. This volume in the Bach Perspectives series offers essays on the ...lesser-known musical figures who share those illustrious names alongside new research on the legendary composers themselves. Topics include the keyboard transcriptions of J. S. Bach and Johann Gottfried Walther; J. S. Bach and W. A. Mozart's freelance work; the sonatas of C. P. E. Bach and Leopold Mozart; the early musical training given J. C. Bach by his father and half-brother; the surprising musical similarities between J. C. Bach and W. A. Mozart; and the latest documentary research on Mozart's 1789 visit to the Thomasschule in Leipzig. An official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives, Volume 14 draws on a variety of approaches and a broad range of subject matter in presenting a new wave of innovative classical musical sch
J.S. Bach's Musical Offering is a broadly known and extensively studied collection of musical pieces, written in 1747 shortly after his visit to the Potsdam court of Frederick the Great. The ...composition, however, survived in separated sheets of different formats, and finding the logic of its organization into a cycle became a great challenge for scholars of the following centuries. Based on ground-breaking findings by Christoph Wolff, who revealed the main principles of the Musical Offering's structure, as well as those promulgated by Hans Theodor David, and more recently by G. Butler, W. Wiemer, R. Tatlow, and many other scholars, this book develops and revises their ideas, arriving at a unique conception of the possible original structure of the Musical Offering. While the rods of the collection do not provoke disagreements among scholars, the ordering of the ten canons (including the Fuga canonica) remains mysterious in many aspects, and this text gives them a close examination. It considers their kinds (thematic and contrapuntal); textual inscriptions; the canons' function within the cycle (as vignettes to the main pieces); and their location, among other aspects. The volume includes profuse references to historical and cultural context; court etiquette; contrapuntal techniques; the history of the ricercar; expertise in Bach's handwriting and habits of music layout in his manuscripts; and the Baroque principles of organization in arts.
More than any other part of Bach's output, his keyboard works conveyed the essence of his inimitable art to generations of admirers. The varied responses to this repertory - in scholarly and popular ...writing, public lectures, musical composition and transcription, performances and editions - ensured its place in the canon and broadened its creator's appeal. The early reception of Bach's keyboard music also continues to affect how we understand and value it, though we rarely recognize that historical continuity. Here, Matthew Dirst investigates how Bach's music intersects with cultural, social and music history, focusing on a repertory which is often overshadowed in scholarly and popular literature on Bach reception. Organized around the most productive ideas generated by Bach's keyboard works from his own day to the middle of the nineteenth century, this study shows how Bach's remarkable and long-lasting legacy took shape amid critical changes in European musical thought and practice.
Expanding in part on earlier studies of the St. John Passion and the principle of “tonal allegory” in Bach's vocal music as a whole, this book investigates the musico‐theological character of the ...passion and the sequence of cantatas that followed its second performance in 1725. Citing many Lutheran authors from the 16th to the 18th century (with particular reference to August Hermann Francke and Johann Jacob Rambach), it attempts to show how Bach responded to the qualities that theologians have long recognized as characteristic of John, and that are now generally described as “Johannine.” Part One sets forth the research “problems” involved in the revisions to and versions of the passion as well as those surrounding the breaking off of the chorale cantata cycle just before Easter 1725 and the composition of the so‐called “Ziegler” cantatas. In addition it lays the conceptual groundwork for Part Two (a five‐chapter study of the St. John Passion) and Part Three (a study of the Spring 1725 cantatas). The book argues that in this unique series of compositions Bach reveals a thoroughgoing understanding of John's special qualities and devises special means of translating them into music.
