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
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.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is one of his most popular pieces. This book is the first thorough study of this masterpiece in English. While giving a comprehensive overview of the ...Christmas Oratorio as a whole, the book focuses on the cultural and theological understanding of Christmas in Bach’s time and the compositional process that led Bach from the earliest concepts to the completed piece. Traditional Christmas rituals were abolished during the decades around 1700. Instead, Christian devotion focused increasingly on the metaphor of a birth of Christ in the human heart. The cultural and religious context of the oratorio provides the backdrop for a detailed analysis of the composition. Bach reused and parodied several movements that had originally been composed for secular cantatas. He thoroughly revised these movements and integrated them into the oratorio by adapting the music to new text. The book analyzes Bach’s composition score and sheds new light on the way Bach wrote the piece, how he shaped musical themes, and how he revised his initial ideas into the final composition.
Bach'sWell-tempered Clavier(or the 48 Preludes and Fugues) stands at the core of baroque keyboard music and has been a model and inspiration for performers and composers ever since it was written. ...This invaluable guide to the 96 pieces explains Bach's various purposes in compiling the music, describes the rich traditions on which he drew, and provides commentaries for each prelude and fugue.In his text, David Ledbetter addresses the main focal points mentioned by Bach in his original 1722 title page. Drawing on Bach literature over the past three hundred years, he explores German traditions of composition types and Bach's novel expansion of them; explains Bach's instruments and innovations in keyboard technique in the general context of early eighteenth-century developments; reviews instructive and theoretical literature relating to keyboard temperaments from 1680 to 1750; and discusses Bach's pedagogical intent when composing theWell-tempered Clavier. Ledbetter's commentaries on individual preludes and fugues equip readers with the concepts necessary to make their own assessment and include information about the sources when details of notation, ornaments, and fingerings have a bearing on performance.
The B-minor Mass has always represented a fascinating challenge to musical scholarship. Composed over the course of Johann Sebastian Bach's life, it is considered by many to be the composer's ...greatest and most complex work. The fourteen essays assembled in this volume originate from the International Symposium 'Understanding Bach's B-minor mass' at which scholars from eighteen countries gathered to debate the latest topics in the field. In revised and updated form, they comprise a thorough and systematic study of Bach's Opus Ultimum, including a wide range of discussions relating to the Mass's historical background and contexts, structure and proportion, sources and editions, and the reception of the work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the light of important new developments in the study of the piece, this collection demonstrates the innovation and rigour for which Bach scholarship has become known.
This Theological Commentary on Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion explains the historical context of Lutheran church music, and then explains the Biblical and poetic text, and its musical ...setting, line by line.
Johann Sebastian Bach was a Lutheran and much of his music was for Lutheran liturgical worship. As these insightful essays in the twelfth volume of Bach Perspectives demonstrate, he was also ...influenced by--and in turn influenced--different expressions of religious belief. The vocal music, especially the Christmas Oratorio, owes much to medieval Catholic mysticism, and the evolution of the B minor Mass has strong Catholic connections. In Leipzig, Catholic and Lutheran congregations sang many of the same vernacular hymns. Internal squabbles were rarely missing within Lutheranism, for example Pietists' dislike of concerted church music, especially if it employed specific dance forms. Also investigated here are broader issues such as the close affinity between Bach's cantata libretti and the hymns of Charles Wesley; and Bach's music in the context of the Jewish Enlightenment as shaped by Protestant Rationalism in Berlin. Contributors: Rebecca Cypess, Joyce L. Irwin, Robin A. Leaver, Mark Noll, Markus Rathey, Derek Stauff, and Janice B. Stockigt.
"This book examines the nature of musical performance. In it, Dorottya Fabian explores the contributions and limitations of some of these approaches to performance, be they theoretical, cultural, ...historical, perceptual, or analytical. Through a detailed investigation of recent recordings of J. S. Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, she demonstrates that music performance functions as a complex dynamical system. Only by crossing disciplinary boundaries, therefore, can we put the aural experience into words. A Musicology of Performance provides a model for such a method by adopting Deleuzian concepts and various empirical and interdisciplinary procedures. Fabian provides a case study in the repertoire, while presenting new insights into the state of baroque performance practice at the turn of the twenty-first century. Through its wealth of audio examples, tables, and graphs, the book offers both a sensory and a scholarly account of musical performance. These interactive elements map the connections between historically informed and mainstream performance styles, considering them in relation to broader cultural trends, violin schools, and individual artistic trajectories. A Musicology of Performance is a must read for academics and post-graduate students and an essential reference point for the study of music performance, the early music movement, and Bach’s opus."
In his nearly forty-year career, Johann Scheibe became Leipzig's
most renowned organ builder and one of the late Baroque's masters
of the craft. Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Kuhnau considered
...Scheibe a valued colleague. Organists and civic leaders shared
their high opinion, for Scheibe built or rebuilt every one of the
city's organs.
Drawing on extensive research and previously untapped archival
materials, Lynn Edwards Butler explores Scheibe's professional
relationships and the full range of his projects. These assignments
included the three-manual organ for St. Paul's Church, renovations
of the organs in the important churches of St. Thomas and St.
Nicholas, and the lone surviving example of Scheibe's craft, a
small organ in the nearby village of Zschortau. Viewing Scheibe
within the context of the era, Butler illuminates the music scene
of Bach's time as she follows the life of a gifted craftsman and
his essential work on an instrument that anchored religious musical
practice and community.
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