The Trio in the " Musical Offering " : Perceptions of Bach Late in Life (original) (raw)

Instrumental Bach: questions of scoring and interpretation

Review of the following recordings: Flute Sonatas by the Bach Sons (Accent ACC 24216, rec 2008, 76’), played by Barthold Kuijken (flute) and Ewald Demeyere (harpsichord); Bach arranging and arranged (Hyphen Press Music 001, rec 2008, 57’), with the Bach Players; Johann Sebastian Bach: Triosonatas for organ (Antoine Marchand/Challenge Classics CC72314, rec 2008, 67’) with Reine-Marie Verhagen (recorder) and Tini Mathot (organ and harpsichord); Johann Sebastian Bach: Sonatas for Flute and Harpsichord (Arts SACD 47612-8, rec 2003, 64’), with Mario Folena (flute) and Roberto Loreggian (harpsichord) ; Johann Sebastian Bach: Musikalisches Opfer (Antoine Marchand/Challenge Classics CC72309, rec 2008, 57’), with Ton Koopman and members of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra; Bach: The Cello Suites (Red Priest Recording RP006, rec 2001, 2004, 148’) with Angela East; Johann Sebastian Bach: Sonatas for Violin and Keyboard (ABC Classics ABC 476 5942, rec 2005-2007, 95’), with Richard Tognetti (violin), Neal Peres Da Costa (organ and harpsichord), and Daniel Yeadon (cello and viola da gamba); and Bach: Chamber Music (Passacaille 942, rec 2007, 68’) with La Divina Armonia.

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.

Bach, Mozart, and the "Musical Midwife"

New Federalist, 2001

The reconstruction [see the beginning of the article], by this author, is based on some of the known facts surrounding Mozart’s transcriptions of several three- and four-voice fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Mozart transcribed them during the period around 1782-83, when he attended Baron van Swieten’s Sunday-morning musical salon, and while a phase-change in his compositional method was occurring. This change was provoked by his encounters with Bach’s works, in combination with Joseph Haydn’s revolutionary new string quartets (Op. 33), written the year before. To continue the year 2000 commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the death of Bach (1685-1750), and to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, this article concerning Mozart, and a projected future article on Robert and Clara Schumann, will present evidence of the degree to which these composers who lived after Bach, intensively studied and “re-composed” his works as pedagogical exercises, to deepen their knowledge of polyphony and counterpoint, and then directly made use of Bach’s compositional method in composing new works. This evidence will be presented through the words of these composers, and through several of their musical works, not widely known today.

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.

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.