C.P.E. Bach and the Challenge of Breaking into the Canon (original) (raw)

The songs of C. P. E. Bach: a performer's perspective

Early Music, 2014

The songs of C.P.E. Bach, while not his primary artistic genre, represent a large portion of his oeuvre and reflect a commitment on the composer’s part to expressing profound spiritual and moral concepts. The songs are also significant contributions to the flowering of the German Lied tradition, which is generally considered to begin in the early 19th century with Schubert but which has deep antecedents in the 18th century. The confluence of a rapidly evolving musical language, the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, and a native tradition of strophic poetry and song gave rise to the highly compressed, harmonically potent style of Bach’s lieder. Individual songs by Bach are examined for their inventiveness, emotional potency and sensitivity to the text. Selections from each of his three major song collections, as well as secular songs and a large-scale cantata for voice and keyboard, are described in detail. Issues surrounding performance, which may affect the current obscurity of these pieces, are considered: how to program, edit, and perform the songs; what keyboard instrument is best suited; what skills a singer needs to bring to bear for a modern recital audience.

Emanuel Bach: A Composer ahead of His Time

2019

Up until recently, many musicologists perceived music history through the lens of what is known as the “linear view.” This is the idea that one “musical period” seamlessly gave way to another, with brief transitionary periods to bridge the gaps. As a result, composers were expected to fall neatly into categories depending on their chronological placement. For this reason, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the eldest son of J. S. Bach, was (and still is) regarded as merely the bridge between the late Baroque style and that of the Viennese Classicists. In the past half-century, however, scholars have begun to study Emanuel Bach in his own right, giving an honest look at his works without imposing any preconceived notions on them. These scholars became captivated with the “pre-Romantic” aspects of his style, especially in the genre he advocated known as empfindsamer stil, or “sensitive style.” These new insights into Emanuel Bach and other composers who are “ahead of their time” have had a pr...

J.S Bach in Leipzig: Compositions and Context

The track record of composition that defines Bach’s notoriety has raised him to the pinnacle of composers in terms of western music. It was true that he is celebrated for how renowned he is, but much of his work is subject to contextual circumstances that would have affected him, for better or for worse. In his later life, these circumstances were perhaps the most tolling years of his compositional career. Read as I discuss the compositions of Bach during his time in Leipzig, examining the context of his compositional duties before analysing, to a certain degree, his methods of composition, specifically in relation to his Church Cantatas and, to a lesser degree, his B minor mass structure and Easter Passions.

Tinkering with Form: on W.F. Bach's Revisions to Two Keyboard Sonatas

Music Theory and Analysis, 2019

This article examines the way Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s revisions to two keyboard sonatas (Fk 1 and Fk 6) reflect his engagement with the emerging sonata-form aesthetic. I show how the revisions update his older, essentially binary practice by introducing Classical sentence structure in the first themes; a differentiated theme in the dominant before the end of the first half; distinct development and recapitulation sections; and an enhanced tonic-dominant polarity, as well as other features that were to become characteristic of sonata form. Bach’s conscious tinkering with his older works thus reflects a contemporary response to the way common practice was tinkering with binary form, gradually transforming it to what eventually became known as Classical sonata form.

Bach's Suites for Solo Cello (BWV 1007 - 1012) and the Textual Geographies of Modernity, PhD Thesis

This thesis examines the textual history of Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello (BWV 1007–1012). There is no autograph manuscript in Bach’s hand. The Suites gained their popularity via four different manuscript copies, each suggesting a different reading. Established research paradigms assume the existence of a single, ‘correct’ model of this music, prioritising the composer’s authority. This project challenges this perspective by valuing the Suites as an open and flexible text. Instead of searching for an authoritative source, bearing the truth, I focus on the ability of music to adapt to different audiences in order to communicate with them. The main goal of this study is to explain the abundance of interpretive readings in the extant sources of the Suites. I base my findings on the idea of expressive variety in music, which I trace as an aesthetic norm within professional music circles in Bach’s time. Variety in expression gives the performer freedom to reshape the composer’s original idea by adapting it to the context of the performance. A fundamental aspect of this understanding is to view music as a process that is flexible enough to go beyond its written texts. Central to my discussion is the expressive irregularity in Anna Magdalena Bach’s reading of the Suites, aiming for discovering as many expressive variants of a single melodic model as possible. The theoretical foundation of this study is deeper understanding of the contexts of music making in Bach’s time. I understand the variety of aesthetic conventions of this era as outcomes of specific cultural and social needs. I view these through the theoretical framework of the historical geographer Miles Ogborn. Ogborn understands history as a compilation of differences and not as a linear development. The interpretive variants in the extant sources of the Suites reflect a communication of different models of modernity, shared within different communities of listeners. I view the sources of the Suites as important documents of a diversity of cultural contexts for communicating Bach’s musical ideas. The main contribution of this thesis is to provoke an alternative understanding of Bach’s music: as a process of creative thinking and not as a fixed historical artefact. I view the composer’s original idea as an open text, inviting its consumers to develop it further in order to discover new meanings. This flexibility of music to adapt to various contexts in order to respond to a diversity of aesthetic needs, cultural traditions and learned expectations, builds a bridge between Bach’s music and present-day audiences. It also serves as a basis to explain irregular or amorphous music such as Anna Magdalena’s scripts.

The J. C. Bach-Mozart connections

2009

Johann Christian Bach (1735-82), eighteenth-century composer par excellence, was one of the most respected musicians of his time. Overshadowed by the achievements of the later Classical composers, and totally forgotten during the nineteenth century, 2 he reemerged as a composer of significant stature during the twentieth century. 3 Focusing on his contribution to music history and his close relationship with Mozart, this renewed interest resulted in numerous scholarly studies, culminating in Ernest Warburton's monumental 48-volume publication, The Collected Works of Johann Christian Bach. 4 Reflecting on these changing fortunes, we may ask ourselves what the factors were that led to a reassessment of Bach's contribution to the Classical style; what ways these factors were related to Mozart's high regard for Bach; and why modern Mozartiana has included a revival of Bach's music. Addressing these issues, this article opens with a biographical survey, illustrating the context of Bach's life and work. It then continues with a discussion of the Bach-Mozart connection, and concludes with brief comparative analyses of the first movements of Bach's Symphony Opus 6 No. 6 5 and Mozart's Symphony K. 183/173dB, both in the key of g minor.