Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass

Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass
Author: Yo Tomita
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-10-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1107469902

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.

Bach: Mass in B Minor

Bach: Mass in B Minor
Author: John Butt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 134
Release: 1991-06-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780521387163

The Mass in B Minor is arguably Bach's greatest single work. John Butt gives an absorbing account of the work's genesis, its historical context, and its reception by later generations.

Bach

Bach
Author: Christoph Wolff
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 1991
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674059269

More than two centuries after his lifetime, J. S. Bach's work continues to set musical standards. Noted Bach scholar Christoph Wolff offers new perspectives on the composer's life and remarkable career.

Bach’s Architecture of Gratitude

Bach’s Architecture of Gratitude
Author: James Crooks
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2024-05-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0228020654

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.

Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach

Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach
Author: Mark A. Peters
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2020-07-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1498554962

Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach collects seventeen essays by leading Bach scholars. The authors each address in some way such questions of meaning in J. S. Bach’s vocal compositions—including his Passions, Masses, Magnificat, and cantatas—with particular attention to how such meaning arises out of the intentionality of Bach’s own compositional choices or (in Part IV in particular) how meaning is discovered, and created, through the reception of Bach’s vocal works. And the authors do not consider such compositional choices in a vacuum, but rather discuss Bach’s artistic intentions within the framework of broader cultural trends—social, historical, theological, musical, etc. Such questions of compositional choice and meaning frame the four primary approaches to Bach’s vocal music taken by the authors in this volume, as seen across the book’s four parts: Part I: How might the study of historical theology inform our understanding of Bach’s compositional choices in his music for the church (cantatas, Passions, masses)? Part II: How can we apply traditional analytical tools to understand better how Bach’s compositions were created and how they might have been heard by his contemporaries? Part III: What we can understand anew through the study of Bach’s self-borrowing (i.e., parody), which always changed the earlier meaning of a composition through changes in textual content, compositional characteristics, the work’s context within a larger composition, and often the performance context (from court to church, for example)? Part IV: What can the study of reception teach us about a work’s meaning(s) in Bach’s time, during the time of his immediate successors, and at various points since then (including our present)? The chapters in this volume thus reflect the breadth of current Bach research in its attention not only to source study and analysis, but also to meanings and contexts for understanding Bach’s compositions.

The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach

The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach
Author: Robin Leaver
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 593
Release: 2016-11-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1315452804

The Ashgate Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach provides an indispensable introduction to the Bach research of the past thirty-fifty years. It is not a lexicon providing information on all the major aspects of Bach's life and work, such as the Oxford Composer Companion: J. S. Bach. Nor is it an entry-level research tool aimed at those making a beginning of such studies. The valuable essays presented here are designed for the next level of Bach research and are aimed at masters and doctoral students, as well as others interested in coming to terms with the current state of Bach research. Each author covers three aspects within their specific subject area; firstly, to describe the results of research over the past thirty-fifty years, concentrating on the most significant and controversial, such as: the debate over Smend's NBA edition of the B minor Mass; Blume's conclusions with regard to Bach's religion in the wake of the 'new' chronology; Rifkin's one-to-a-vocal-part interpretation; the rediscovery of the Berlin Singakademie manuscripts in Kiev; the discovery of hitherto unknown manuscripts and documents and the re-evaluation of previously known sources. Secondly, each author provides a critical analysis of current research being undertaken that is exploring new aspects, reinterpreting earlier assumptions, and/or opening-up new methodologies. For example, Martin W. B. Jarvis has suggested that Anna Magdalena Bach composed the cello suites and contributed to other works of her husband - another controversial hypothesis, whose newly proposed forensic methodology requires investigation. On the other hand, research into Bach's knowledge of the Lutheran chorale tradition is currently underway, which is likely to shed more light on the composer's choices and usage of this tradition. Thirdly, each author identifies areas that are still in need of investigation and research.

The Afterlife of Bach's Organ Works

The Afterlife of Bach's Organ Works
Author: Russell Stinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2023-10-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0197680437

The music of J. S. Bach continues to be revered and celebrated centuries after his death. Its timelessness can be attributed to masterful musical engineering combined with profound expressivity. In other words, Bach's unique art may represent the pinnacle of contrapuntal technique, but it is just as amazing for its depth of emotion. Bach's compositions remain an indispensable part of the classical-music canon today. The Afterlife of Bach's Organ Works explores the critical impact made on posterity by Bach's organ music. It concerns a diverse group of musicians and non-musicians alike--some famous, some forgotten--who in one way or another became champions of these compositions. These individuals performed the music; edited it for publication; promoted it by means of books, articles, and reviews; transcribed it for other media; taught it to their pupils; shared it with their family and friends; and incorporated it into the soundtracks of their motion pictures. They ensured its "afterlife." In five chapters, organist and Bach expert Russell Stinson traces the historical afterlife of Bach's organ music from the early nineteenth century--the era of the so-called Bach revival--to the present day. Engagingly written and containing a wealth of information previously unavailable in English, the book is a history of performance practice, an aesthetic history of musical taste, and a social history. Each chapter tells the story of how and why Bach's organ works have stood the test of time.

Rethinking Bach

Rethinking Bach
Author: Bettina Varwig
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2021
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190943890

This book a offers a multitude of provocative new perspectives on one of the most iconic composers in the Western classical tradition. Its collective rethinking of some of our most cherished narratives and deeply held beliefs about Johann Sebastian Bach will allow readers to see the man in a new light and to hear his music with new ears.

The Musical Discourse of Servitude

The Musical Discourse of Servitude
Author: Harry White
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2020
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190903872

"The Musical Discourse of Servitude examines the music of Johann Joseph Fux (c.1660-1741) in relation to that of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Its principal argument is that Fux's long indenture as a composer of church music in Vienna gains in meaning (and cultural significance) when situated along an axis that runs between the liturgical servitude of writing music for the imperial court service and the autonomy of musical imagination which transpires in the late works of Bach and Handel. To this end, The Musical Discourse of Servitude constructs a typology of the late baroque musical imagination which draws Fux, Bach and Handel into the orbit of North Italian compositional practice"--

Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass

Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass
Author: Yo Tomita
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-10-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107007909

The collection of essays represents a through and systematic study of Bach's B-minor Mass by leading scholars in the field and includes a range of discussions relating to the Mass's historical background and contexts, structure, sources and editions, and its reception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.