Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint

Author: David Yearsley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521803465
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
In Bach's Germany musical counterpoint was an art involving much more than the sophisticated use of advanced compositional techniques. A range of theological, cultural, social and political meanings attached themselves to the use of complex procedures such as canon and double counterpoint. This book explores the significance of Bach's counterpoint in a range of interrelated contexts: its use as a means of reflecting on death; its parallels to alchemy; its vexed status in the galant music culture of the first half of the eighteenth century; its value as a representation of political power; and its central importance in the creation of Bach's image in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Touching on a wide array of contemporary literary, philosophical, critical, and musical texts, the book includes new readings of many of Bach's late works in order to re-evaluate the status and meaning of counterpoint in Bach's work and legacy.

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

Author: Laurence Dreyfus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674013565
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
In this major new interpretation of the music of J. S. Bach, we gain a striking picture of the composer as a unique critic of his age. By reading Bach’s music “against the grain” of contemporaries such as Vivaldi and Telemann, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach’s approach to musical invention in a variety of genres posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics. “Invention”—the word Bach and his contemporaries used for the musical idea that is behind or that generates a composition—emerges as an invaluable key in Dreyfus’s analysis. Looking at important pieces in a range of genres, including concertos, sonatas, fugues, and vocal works, he focuses on the fascinating construction of the invention, the core musical subject, and then shows how Bach disposes, elaborates, and decorates it in structuring his composition. Bach and the Patterns of Invention brings us fresh understanding of Bach’s working methods, and how they differed from those of the other leading composers of his day. We also learn here about Bach’s unusual appropriations of French and Italian styles—and about the elevation of various genres far above their conventional status. Challenging the restrictive lenses commonly encountered in both historical musicology and theoretical analysis, Dreyfus provocatively suggests an approach to Bach that understands him as an eighteenth-century thinker and at the same time as a composer whose music continues to speak to us today.

Sex, Death, and Minuets

Author: David Yearsley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661784X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
“Insightful commentary on the Bach family’s musical life and . . . the culture in which the Bachs lived. . . . Important and fascinating . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701–60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history’s most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music—long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening—has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity. Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a historical subject—at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow. David Yearsley explores the notebooks’ entries against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion—for living and for dying. “Fascinating.” —Laurence Dreyfus, University of Oxford “Yearsley’s account . . . will doubtless stand as the definitive account of the ‘Bachin’ and her notebooks for years to come.” —Bettina Varwig, University of Cambridge “A warm, insightful, and compelling portrait.” —Matthew Dirst, University of Houston

Bach's Feet

Author: David Yearsley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521199018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
Yearsley explores the cultural significance of making music with hands and feet, a mode of performance unique to the organ.

Bach's Well-tempered Clavier

Author: David Ledbetter
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300128983
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Book Description
Bach's Well-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 the Well-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 Aesthetic of Johann Sebastian Bach

Author: Andre Pirro
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442232919
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Book Description
The Aesthetic of Johann Sebastian Bach (L’Esthéthique de Jean-Sébastien Bach), by the celebrated French musicologist André Pirro (1869‒1943), was originally published in 1907 and reissued in 1973. It is offered here for the first time in English, as translated by Joe Armstrong. Pirro’s work is based primarily on an examination of the close relationships between language and music in Bach’s vocal works and provides us with an extensive and well-researched “lexicon” of the expressive resources of Bach and his contemporaries. Pirro’s study thus serves as a still sound basis for understanding and interpreting Bach’s instrumental works. Pirro’s engaging analysis that has informed and even moved discerning readers for more than a century. This translation introduces his work to a new audience of performers, music teachers and their students, composers, musicologists, and all who wish to have a greater understanding of the expressive import of Bach’s music.

Bach & God

Author: Michael Marissen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190606967
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Bach & God explores the religious character of Bach's vocal and instrumental music in seven interrelated essays. Noted musicologist Michael Marissen offers wide-ranging interpretive insights from careful biblical and theological scrutiny of the librettos. Yet he also shows how Bach's pitches, rhythms, and tone colors can make contributions to a work's plausible meanings that go beyond setting texts in an aesthetically satisfying manner. In some of Bach's vocal repertory, the music puts a "spin" on the words in a way that turns out to be explainable as orthodox Lutheran in its orientation. In a few of Bach's vocal works, his otherwise puzzlingly fierce musical settings serve to underscore now unrecognized or unacknowledged verbal polemics, most unsettlingly so in the case of his church cantatas that express contempt for Jews and Judaism. Finally, even Bach's secular instrumental music, particularly the late collections of "abstract" learned counterpoint, can powerfully project certain elements of traditional Lutheran theology. Bach's music is inexhaustible, and Bach & God suggests that through close contextual study there is always more to discover and learn.

Musical Models of Democracy

Author: Robert Adlington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197658814
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Music's role in animating democracy--whether through protests and demonstrations, as a vehicle for political identity, or as a means of overcoming social divides--is well understood. Yet musicians have also been drawn to the potential of embodying democracy itself through musical processes and relationships. In this book, author Robert Adlington uses modern democratic theory to explore what he terms the 'musical modelling of democracy' as manifested in modern and experimental music of the global North. Throughout the book, Adlington demonstrates how composers and musicians have taken strikingly different approaches to this kind of musical modelling. For some, democratic principles inform the textural relationships inscribed into musical scores, as in the case of Elliott Carter's 'polyvocal' compositions. Pioneers of musical indeterminacy sought to democratise the relationship between composer and performers by leaving open key decisions about the realisation of a work. Musicians have involved audiences in active participation to liberate them from the passivity of spectatorship. Free improvisation groups have experimented with new kinds of egalitarian relationships between performers to reject old hierarchies. In examining these different approaches, Adlington illuminates the achievements and ambiguities of musical models of democracy. As a result, this book not only offers an important new perspective on modern musicians' engagement with a central political idea of the past century, but it also encourages a deeper and more critical engagement with the idea of democracy within present-day musical life.

Resonant Witness

Author: Jeremy S. Begbie
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802862772
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Book Description
Resonant Witness gathers together a wide, harmonious chorus of voices from across the musical and theological spectrum to show that music and theology can each learn much from the other and that the majesty and power of both are profoundly amplified when they do. With essays touching on J. S. Bach, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Olivier Messiaen, jazz improvisation, South African freedom songs, and more, this volume encourages musicians and theologians to pursue a more fruitful and sustained engagement with one another. What can theology do for music? Resonant Witness helps answer this question with an essential resource in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of music and theology. Covering an impressively wide range of musical topics, from cosmos to culture and theology to worship, Jeremy Begbie and Steven Guthrie explore and map new territory with incisive contributions from the very best musicians, theologians, and philosophers. Bennett Zon Durham University This volume represents a burst of cross-disciplinary energy and insight that can be celebrated by musicians and theologians, music-lovers and God-lovers alike. John D. Witvliet (from afterword)

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Studies

Author: Annette Richards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521836298
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
A collection of the latest work by distinguished scholars on C. P. E. Bach.