What Do We Make Of Bach

Author : John Harbison
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 117 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2018-08-20
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1732509700

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What Do We Make of Bach? by John Harbison Pdf

Internationally-acclaimed composer John Harbison's lifelong absorption in the music of J.S. Bach has been a touchstone in all of his work: as conductor, performer, composer, teacher, and scholar. What Do We Make of Bach? collects for the first time many of Harbison's writings on Bach, and is intended as a stand-alone companion to his simultaneously-composed organ symphony of the same title (2018), which together summarize a lifetime preoccupation. In many ways the book is an extended comment on the musical work, sharing with it a relationship to Bach's music that is both obvious and oblique. The volume consists of portraits (encounters with individuals revolving around Bach's work), essays (experiences with institutions in which Bach was at the core, together with some thoughts about where Bach's music could take us, now), and program notes (from many written over the last sixty years, a few chosen to light upon the aesthetic and social issues the author finds most essential today). Through the lens of Bach, this fascinating collection gives us a memoir of Harbison's evolution as composer and performer, and offers a deeply personal history. The depth of Harbison's knowledge pervades the book, and offers a way to begin to absorb Bach's work as a living, breathing model for our musical and artistic selves, both privately and in community. Written in the light of half a century of studying and performing Bach, Harbison's book - part memoir, part composerly meditation - offers valuable, eloquent insights into the journey of an essential American composer.

Author : Paul Elie
Publisher : Union Books
Page : 731 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2013-04-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781908526410

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Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie Pdf

Johann Sebastian Bach – celebrated pipe organist, court composer and master of sacred music – was also a technical pioneer. Working in Germany in the early eighteenth century, he invented new instruments and carried out experiments in tuning, the effects of which are still with us today. Two hundred years later, a number of extraordinary musicians have utilised the music of Bach to thrilling effect through the art of recording, furthering their own virtuosity and reinventing the composer for our time. In Reinventing Bach, Paul Elie brilliantly blends the stories of modern musicians with a polyphonic account of our most celebrated composer’ s life to create a spellbinding narrative of the changing place of music in our lives. We see the sainted organist Albert Schweitzer playing to a mobile recording unit set up at London’ s Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach’ s organ works to the world beyond the churches, and Pablo Casals’ s Abbey Road recordings of Bach’ s cello suites transform the middle-class sitting room into a hotbed of existentialism; we watch Leopold Stokowski persuade Walt Disney to feature his own grand orchestrations of Bach in the animated classical-music movie Fantasia – which made Bach the sound of children’ s playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike – and we witness how Glenn Gould’ s Goldberg Variations made Bach the byword for postwar cool. Through the Beatles and Switched-on Bach and Gö del, Escher, Bach – through film, rock music, the Walkman, the CD and up to Yo-Yo Ma and the iPod – Elie shows us how dozens of gifted musicians searched, experimented and collaborated with one another in the service of a composer who emerged as the prototype of the spiritualised, technically savvy artist.

Author : Johann Sebastian Bach
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 1912
Category : Piano music
ISBN : OCLC:896634680

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Bach for Beginners by Johann Sebastian Bach Pdf

Author : John Eliot Gardiner
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 672 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2013-10-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781846147210

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Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner Pdf

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque - and occasionally so intemperate? John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents' house, where it hung for safety during the Second World War. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as one of the composer's greatest living interpreters. The fruits of this lifetime's immersion are distilled in this remarkable book, grounded in the most recent Bach scholarship but moving far beyond it, which explains in wonderful detail the ideas on which Bach drew, how he worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects - and what it can tell us about Bach the man. Gardiner's background as a historian has encouraged him to search for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and fruitfully coalesce. This has entailed piecing together the few biographical shards, scrutinising the music, and watching for those instances when Bach's personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Gardiner's aim is 'to give the reader a sense of inhabiting the same experiences and sensations that Bach might have had in the act of music-making. This, I try to show, can help us arrive at a more human likeness discernible in the closely related processes of composing and performing his music.' It is very rare that such an accomplished performer of music should also be a considerable writer and thinker about it. John Eliot Gardiner takes us as deeply into Bach's works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists. SIR JOHN ELIOT GARDINER is one of the world's leading conductors, not only of Baroque music but across the whole repertoire. He founded the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, the Orchestre de l'Opéra de Lyon, the English Baroque Soloists, and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique. He has conducted most of the world's great orchestras and in many of the leading opera houses. He lives and farms in Dorset.

Author : Sir Nicholas Kenyon
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 508 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2011-03-17
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780571272006

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The Faber Pocket Guide to Bach by Sir Nicholas Kenyon Pdf

The music of J.S.Bach has a unique power and attraction some 300 years after it was written. From annual performances of the great Passions and BBC Radio 3's hugely successful Bach Christmas, to its use in adverts, films and popular arrangements, the imaginative strength of Bach's music continues to draw listeners to explore its mysteries. This new Pocket Guide looks at all Bach's music, sacred and secular, and explores why he speaks so profoundly to our age about both the spiritual and the sensual in life. Among the features of this easy-to-use book: The Bach Top Ten Bach: The music work by work Performing Bach today Bach: The life year by year What people said about Bach Accessible and easy to use, Nicholas Kenyon provides for the first time an up-to-date survey of all Bach's major works in the light of the latest research, from Masses to Cantatas, Concertos to Suites, and recommends the best CDs and further reading.

Author : Megan Kaes Long
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2020-04-28
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780190851910

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Hearing Homophony by Megan Kaes Long Pdf

The question of tonality's origins in music's pitch content has long vexed many scholars of music theory. However, tonality is not ultimately defined by pitch alone, but rather by pitch's interaction with elements like rhythm, meter, phrase structure, and form. Hearing Homophony investigates the elusive early history of tonality by examining a constellation of late-Renaissance popular songs which flourished throughout Western Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century. Megan Kaes Long argues that it is in these songs, rather than in more ambitious secular and sacred works, that the foundations of eighteenth century style are found. Arguing that tonality emerges from features of modal counterpoint - in particular, the rhythmic, phrase structural, and formal processes that govern it - and drawing on the arguments of theorists such as Dahlhaus, Powers, and Barnett, she asserts that modality and tonality are different in kind and not mutually exclusive. Using several hundred homophonic partsongs from Italy, Germany, England, and France, Long addresses a historical question of critical importance to music theory, musicology, and music performance. Hearing Homophony presents not only a new model of tonality's origins, but also a more comprehensive understanding of what tonality is, providing novel insight into the challenging world of seventeenth-century music.

Author : Johann Caspar Kerll
Publisher : A-R Editions, Inc.
Page : 112 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 1967-06-01
Category : Masses
ISBN : 9780895790057

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Missa Superba by Johann Caspar Kerll Pdf

Author : Daniel R. Melamed
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2018-04-02
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780190881078

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Listening to Bach by Daniel R. Melamed Pdf

Of all the things we can know about J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor and Christmas Oratorio, the most profound come from things we can hear. Listening to Bach explores musical style as it was understood in the early eighteenth century. It encourages ways of listening that take eighteenth-century musical sensibilities into account and that recognize our place as inheritors of a long tradition of performance and interpretation. Daniel R. Melamed shows how to recognize old and new styles in sacred music of Bach's time, and how movements in these styles are constructed. This opens the possibility of listening to the Mass in B Minor as Bach's demonstration of the possibilities of contrasting, combining, and reconciling old and new styles. It also shows how to listen for elements that would have been heard as most significant in the early eighteenth century, including markers of sleep arias, love duets, secular choral arias, and other movement types. This offers a musical starting point for listening for the ways Bach put these types to use in the Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio. The book also offers ways to listen to and think about works created by parody, the re-use of music for new words and a new purpose, like almost all of the Mass in B Minor and Christmas Oratorio. And it shows that modern performances of these works are stamped with audible consequences of our place in the twenty-first century. The ideological choices we make in performing the Mass and Oratorio, part of the legacy of their performance and interpretation, affect the way the work is understood and heard today. All these topics are illustrated with copious audio examples on a companion Web site, offering new ways of listening to some of Bach's greatest music.

Author : Daniel R. Melamed
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780190490126

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Hearing Bach's Passions by Daniel R. Melamed Pdf

Daniel Melamed offers a study of Bach's passion settings seeking to familiarise readers with some of the intriguing issues in the study & performance of older music. He explores what it means to listen to this music today.

Author : Markus Zepf
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2012-04-02
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780252078453

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The Organs of J.S. Bach by Markus Zepf Pdf

"Published in cooperation with the American Bach Society."

Author : Christoph Wolff
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 644 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0199248842

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Johann Sebastian Bach by Christoph Wolff Pdf

Now available in paperback, this landmark biography was first published in 2000 to mark the 250th anniversary of J. S. Bach's death. Written by a leading Bach scholar, this book presents a new picture of the composer. Christoph Wolff demonstrates the intimate connection between Bach's life and his music, showing how the composer's superb inventiveness pervaded his career as a musician, composer, performer, scholar, and teacher.

Author : Melvin P. Unger
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
Page : 796 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1996-04-16
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781461659051

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Handbook to Bach's Sacred Cantata Texts by Melvin P. Unger Pdf

The German church cantata of the eighteenth century was the culmination of a long tradition of Lutheran "sermon music" that used the proclamation, amplification, and interpretation of scripture to teach and persuade the listener. Bach's cantatas also served this didactic purpose and typically incorporate numerous allusions to scriptural passages or themes in their librettos. Unfortunately, many of these passages remain obscure to the twentieth-century musician because they demand a much closer familiarity with the Bible than is common today. The Handbook to Bach's Sacred Cantata Texts identifies scriptural references for the wording, imagery, and themes that Bach's listeners would have known. In addition, the religious or literary theme of each text is summarized within the specific context of the cantata as a whole. With interlinear translations and a full complement of indexes.

Author : Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher : Penguin Group(CA)
Page : 832 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Art and music
ISBN : 0140289208

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Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter Pdf

'What is a self and how can a self come out of inanimate matter?' This is the riddle that drove Douglas Hofstadter to write this extraordinary book. In order to impart his original and personal view on the core mystery of human existence - our intangible sensation of 'I'-ness - Hofstadter defines the playful yet seemingly paradoxical notion of 'strange loop', and explicates this idea using analogies from many disciplines.

Author : James Crooks
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2024-05-14
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780228020646

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Bach’s Architecture of Gratitude by James Crooks Pdf

Every lover of music finds themselves, at privileged moments, in ecstasy – certain that what they are hearing has captured, somehow, an incontrovertible truth. In Bach’s Architecture of Gratitude James Crooks explores this profound aesthetic experience in a case study of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor – widely considered among the greatest works of the western choral canon. The book begins with an investigation of compositional principles – of what we might call the mass’s musical architecture. Crooks argues that in its cathedral-like structure, Bach gives us a detailed map of the spiritual journey it triggers. This journey culminates in our apprehension of the world as a gift. And that means, in turn, that the mode of knowing appropriate to its musical ecstasy is gratitude. In the gratitude of aesthetic experience, we learn something crucial about the genuine nature of our own identity, our relations with others, and the character of the things around us. Bach’s genius lies in his capacity to frame these lessons in the mass’s choruses, solos, and duets. Spotlighting the wisdom embedded in gratitude, Bach’s Architecture of Gratitude celebrates music as a pathway to understanding our deepest selves and our intimacy with the world.

Author : Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 880 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2008-08-04
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780786723867

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Metamagical Themas by Douglas R. Hofstadter Pdf

Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.