Encountering Bach Today: Historical, Listening, Post-Modern

Encountering Bach Today: Historical, Listening, Post-Modern

William L. Hoffman wrote (January 30, 2021):
The current series of discussions of the Bach Cantatas Website's Bach Mailing List (BML) focuses on questions involving The World of the Bach Cantatas, concluding with "What difficulties do we come across today in performances because of changed conditions.?" These questions¹ were promulgated a quarter century ago by leading Bach scholar Christoph Wolff in his seminal, exemplary study of Bach's core vocal compositions.² This study of Bach's cantatas "focuses more on the wider and deeper context" than the music, observes Wolff in his Introduction (Ibid.: ix). "General historical and biographical aspects, literary and theological points of view, as well as analytical and aesthetic considerations will be mutually complementary in the contributions to this volume . . . ." The final question focuses on today's musicological perspective of the challenges that confront the music world in performances due to changing conditions since Bach's creation of his cantatas three centuries ago.

The Bach Revival, beginning two centuries ago, has experienced a profound recognition, accounting, and understanding of his creations, best exemplified in Wolff's newest study, Bach's Musical Universe.³ The eighteenth century period (1700-1800) established the initial composition and transmission, the second (1800-1900) of initial reception including acceptance of this music and systematic publication, and the third (1900-2000) wrought a profound recognition and understanding of Bach's achievements, bolstered by the technology of recordings, the development of historical musicology, critical studies and commentaries, a wealth of publications, and accessible on-line resources — far beyond the still-debated topic of "Historically Informed Performance" (HIP) related to performance practice and the use of period instruments, says Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historically_informed_performance), as well as a "further area of study, that of changing listener expectations, is increasingly under investigation" (see below). The governing historical factor is related to the historical period or era in which the music was created and the specific, unique conventions of those and succeeding, interpretive times — the Baroque or Common Practice Period, the Romantic revival or individualized interpretive era, and the establishment of public concerts and venues, and the Early Modern era of great technological advances and the Early Music Movement.⁴

Determinant Contexts, Conditions, Traditions

Given that the past is always prologue with the new ever becoming old, the 21st century — as in all previous centuries — is creating new contexts and changing determinant conditions, some established, others evolutionary, still others now seemingly finite. Bach works today "are usually heard within contexts that are very different from what the composer had in mind when creating them," says Robin A. Leaver. "Today they are heard as independent concert music whereas they originated as dependent worship music, the product of specific historical, liturgical, theological, hymnodical and hermeneutical traditions." The Bach cantatas also are the realization of these five primary factors and contextual functions as he composed and presented them during an extended period from the earliest Arnstadt and Mühlhausen periods beginning c.1706 to his death in Leipzig in 1750. Determinant conditions in the creation of Bach cantatas, most significant in Leipzig and more important than any other composition type,⁵ involved the following factors (most often determined through correspondence or research): major supportive institutions (courts, churches, municipalities, and universities); training and performing ensembles (Thomas School for choir singers, municipal Stadtpfeifer musicians guild, and Collegiium musicum professional ensembles); performing venues (main churches with organs, the secular town square, Zimmermann's, or Bach's home or those of others); textual materials (libretti, theological and biblical sources); documentation (collection, publication, transmission); manuscript study (evidence, notation, chronology, copyist, performance implication, pedagogical use); print edition sources (hymn books, sacred commentary, libretto books, chronicles, compendia); supportive household venues (residences, work sites, production places); schools (Lutheran instruction, academics, music); churches (worship, clergy, governance); court (residence, governance, conditions); other composers influences musical libraries); and genres and forms contributing to cantatas (keyboard, instrumental, chorales, counterpoint).

Historically Informed Performance

A 20th century phenomenon, the concept of historically informed (period, authentic) performance (HIP) "aims to be faithful to the approach, manner and style of the musical era in which a work was originally conceived," says Wikipedia (Ibid.). The various facets of performance practice, particularly as they relate to HIP, involve how the music is played, with an emphasis on subjective "authenticity" determined in a particular historic era of music history. Originally focusing on "Early Music" (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque) and electronic recordings, HIP begins with musicological analysis of the musical ingredients, called "texts," with the emphasis on "scholarly or Urtext editions of a musical score as a basic template." The "term 'historically informed' is now preferred to 'authentic,' as it acknowledges the limitations of academic understanding, rather than implying absolute accuracy in recreating historical performance style, or worse, a moralising tone," says Wikipedia. The performing medium of reproducing sound, both instrumental and vocal, has been subject to rigorous examination and analysis, particularly involving a revival of period instruments and modern reproductions found in the proliferation of ensembles using period instruments. "As with instrumental technique, the approach to historically informed performance practice for singers has been shaped by musicological research and academic debate." observes Wikipedia. The actual reproduction of sound, most notably pulsating vibrato, is found in a variety of gradients (permutations and combinations), as well as the concept particularly found in performing Bach's music, of one voice (or instrument) per part (OVPP), particularly choir sizes (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/OVPPControversy.pdf), and the actual layout or dispersement of performing forces.

Changing Listener/Hearer Expectations

Another area of musicological study involves changing listener expectations and realizations, particularly in the music of Bach, as promulgated by the scholar Daniel Melamed in the major vocal works of the oratorio Passions, the B-Minor Mass, and the Christmas Oratorio. A fascinating exploration of source-critical issues is found in Melamed's Hearing Bach's Passions.⁶ They involve the gulf that separates us from the world in which Bach created and presented musical Passions. The essential theme of his study is that today we hear Bach’s Passion settings “distantly removed from their original contexts” as written for liturgical events and performed with concomitant conventions (Preface v). Melamed points out two key features of Passions in Bach’s time: They were heard “against the background of other liturgical and devotional music and of contemporary operas” while “Passion settings were revised, altered, and tampered with both by their composers and by other musicians who used them.” Melamed examines the original conditions, particularly the uses of double forces in the Matthew Passion, BWV 244; the various versions of John, BWV 245; six versions of the pastiche "Keiser-Hamburg" St. Mark Passion; the challenges of parody and reconstruction in the Mark Passion, BWV 247; and the anonymous LuPassion, BWV 246, with its spurious attribution and tenuous connections to Bach performances. Recent 21st century research findings, contextual studies, and new trends have informed significantly the understanding of Bach's musical Passions. These include, says Melamed, Bach's performances of poetic Passion oratorio music of other composers, a definitive 1744 version of the Mark Passion, on-line sources (www.bach-digital.de), new publications and recordings of various Bach Passion versions, the important liturgical context of Bach's Passion performances as found in John Butt’s recent recording of the St. John Passion Linn Records, recent recorded realizations of the Cöthen Funeral Music, BWV 1143=244a (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/BWV244a.htm), the staging of Bach's Passions, studies of the theology underlying his Passions, and rigorous intellectual pursuits such as Eric Chafe’s Bach’s Johannine Theology: The St. John Passion and the Cantatas for Spring 1725 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), John Butt’s Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Karol Berger’s Bach’s Cycle and Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), with a chapter on the Matthew Passion.

Listening to Bach

From a contemporary perspective, the most informative view of Bach's Mass in B Minor could be achieved by encountering its musical substance and varied styles in a more intimate, contemporary performance setting as historically informed, rather than from the 19th-century perspective of a massed-work that sanctifies Bach as the Fifth Evangelist, suggests Melamed in his 2018 study, Listening to Bach. ⁷ Its reception history, colored by public concerts far from church settings and later obscured by the German scientific history concept (Geschichte) embodied in Lutheran tradition, has hidden its musical substance as a perfunctory hearing rather than an informed listening experience. The "conceptual gulf between the eighteenth century and our time," he suggests, can thwart an active, conscious listening experience. Consequently, obsessive concerns over the parody origins and musical genesis of Bach's Mass and the Christmas Oratorio, which extensively use borrowed materials, as well as other accumulative barnacles of history, have suppressed the experience of the two distinct old and new musical styles in the Mass so "that their reconciliation is the musical topic of the piece," he says (Ibid.: xiv). Today, Bach's B-Minor Mass, whether live or in recordings, is music with integral, conventional substantial ingredients cast as a multi-movement concerted work, with an established doctrinal text, manifested in a structure of comparative and contrasting musical forms as well as innovative, mixed styles, says Melamed (Ibid.: 42ff). It is the summation of traditional common practice techniques wrought for almost two hundred years, with idiomatic instrumental and vocal passages blended skillfully and seamlessly. Singling out the "Confiteor" in the "Credo" section, the result is an infusion of old style contrapuntal technique in which various voices complement rather than conflict with each other, with staggered entrances, independent of each other yet interconnected and using the same materials, he shows. To these, Bach selectively adds the oldest form of musical expression, the cantus firmus chant, within the elaborate, contrapuntal texture. While Bach in his chorale settings pervasively emphasized the meaning of individual words and phrases, in this Mass, "the focus is rather on musical artifice, counterpoint, and constructive techniques as affect-neutral, not aimed at moving the emotional states of the listener," Melamed emphasizes (Ibid.: 46f). In his "Epilogue, How to Listen to Bach," Melamed says there is no ONE way. Instead, Bach's music can be best approached recognizing its 18th century sensibilities from out modern listening in a long performance tradition, noticing the markers or conventions in which its was composed (lullabies, love duets, choral arias) and with a "sensitivity to style and musical construction" (Ibid.: 126), rejecting the "what" was the composer's motive and the "how" the music was conceived and developed from its source origins and genesis. This is a theme Melamed established in his previous book, Hearing Bach's Passions.

New Bach Studies: Evangelists of the Modern

A recent article, Evangelists of the Postmodern: Reconfigurations of Bach since 1985,⁸ by Irish musicologist Harry White, is primarily a dialectical recent reception history study of Anglo-American (new) musicology evangelists which could open up a box of pandoras. Three major figures in new musicology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_musicology) and their perspectives on Bach — the Post-Modern Evangelists of the emerging Susan McClary, the music philosopher Lydia Goehr and the venerable Richard Taruskin — (non-Bach specialists) are analyzed from a Bachian perspective. This involves reconfigurations over the last thirty years since the watershed 1985 Bach Tercentenary, with previous historical studies dating back to Charles Burney in 1789 and forward to musicological dean Theodore Adorno in the 1950s, with the current contemporary, parallel trajectory dealing with the "New" Bach scholars, notably John Butt, says White.

The current history began at mid-20th century, observes White, with Adorno's classic article, "Bach Defended Against His Devotees (https://lamusicologia.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/adorno1.pdf), which is still part of "recent configurations of musical narrative and meaning in relation to Bach's significance" (Ibid.: 88), which resurfaced along with Burney's original judgement in these scholarly investigations. Meanwhile, one of the Bachian mythological accretions was the motif of Bach as the "Fifth Evangelist," which was assailed by Friedrich Blume in his 1962 "Outlines of a New Picture of Bach (https://academic.oup.com/ml/article-abstract/44/3/214/1096166?redirectedFrom=PDF), and subsequently lead to a group of Bach theologians, called the Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft für theologische Bachforschung, affirming Bach's spirituality, which disbanded in the 1990s. This controversy produced three theological studies in English: Günther Stiller's Johann Sebastian Bach and Liturgical Life in Leipzig, ed. Robin A. Leaver; Eng. trans. Herbert J. A. Bouman et al (St. Louis: Concordia, 1984); Robin A. Leaver, J. S. Bach and Scripture: Glosses From the Calov Bible Commentary (St. Louis: Concordia, 1985), and Jaroslav Pelikan's Bach Among the Theologians (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986).

Near the end of his article (Ibid.: 103, Footnote 56), White lists contemporary Bach scholars with a theological perspective that involves "reception history as a meaningful construct" (Ibid.: 103): Michael Marissen's Lutheranism, Anti-Judiasm and Bach's St. John Passion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Tanya Kevorkian's Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650-1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), and Karol Berger's Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). "All three works are prominently engaged by Butt," says White" in Butt's Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2010). Marissen wrote a sequel, Bach and God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Books/B0215.htm). Butt's book "holds in apposition a dual conception of modernity that obtains from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century," saWhite (Ibid.: 99, citing Butt: 17), provides a "close reading of the Passions which argues a perspective on Bach that is oriented against the ordinances of post-modern discourse," and "re-inscribes Bach in history through the agency of musical works which are 'firmly grounded in the experience of the past' and yet 'somehow oriented toward the future'."

The "Old" Bach pre-1945 revival was received as "the supreme intelligencer of German musical sovereignty" which survives in conservative Bach scholarship "otherwise dedicated to his 'stand-alone' status," suggests White (Ibid.: 86, Footnote 3).⁹ The origins of the current perspective date back to Burney's condescension (he was a champion of Handel in the 1785 centenary) and were secured in Nicholas Forkel's 1802 Biography (Project Gotenberg EBook) when the Bach revival began. While the "New" Bach is the subject of his article, observes White, there are emerging scholars who "are receptive to the kind of intellectual disturbance" the "New" Bach represents, including Marissen, Kevorkian, and Berger as well as Laurence Dreyfus (Patterns of Invention, University of Oxford: Professor Laurence Dreyfus), Eric Chafe (tonal allegory, Johannine theology, Brandeis Faculty Guide), Daniel Melamed (Hearing Bach's Passions, Mass in B Minor, Christmas Oratorio; http://info.music.indiana.edu/faculty/current/melamed-daniel-r.shtml), and David Yearsley (counterpoint meanings, https://music.cornell.edu/david-yearsley).

Much of White's article is focused on the Bach criticism with "post modern attenuations," he says (Ibid: 87), involving McClary's Bach "as an agent of radical discontent with the canon ("The Basphemy of Talking Politics During the Bach Year," in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Cambridge University Press); Goehr's "strategic deconstruction of Bach as a composer of musical works" (The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works – An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, Oxford Scholarship Online), and Taruskin's repudiation of the hegemony of German musical idealism through Bach's "aesthetic, religious, and expressive orthodoxies" (The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol I: The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, Amazon.com). In particular. Goehr criticizes the "general sense of borrowing" with "no uniqueness or ownership of any given expression," (Goehr: 182-3, in White: 92). With their "innovative and pioneering" "influential reconfigurations of narrative in western musical culture," says White (Ibid.: 87), these polemical critiques "collectively reflect the more general trajectory of Anglo-American musicology of the past generations." Butt's Bach's Dialogue with Modernity is a "strategic recovery of the imaginative autonomy of individual works [Passions] by Bach in the wake of such readings" by McClary, Goehr, and Tauskin.

Adorno's seminal work begins as a critique of the historically-informed performance practice at mid-20th century ("punctilious purity" and "objectivity," Ibid.: 143) which anticipates the later conflicts involving Urtext principals and "historically-informed performance practice," says White (Ibid.: 89), citing Dreyfus.¹⁰ Adorno's dialectic study is conflicted, says White, "as in his remarkable distinction between 'universality' of the music's ahistorical condition and the false consciousness of its quasi-theological power" (Ibid.: 89, ref. Adorno: 135). At the same time, Adorno cites Bach modernisms in five fugues from both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier (Ibid.: 136-140): II: VII E-Flat, BWV 876b (YouTube, "evocation": 138); I:XIII, F-sharp minor, BWV 859b (YouTube, "subjective grace"); II: XVIII, G-sharp minor BWV 887b (YouTube: 3:27, "vague harmonization"); I:II, C-sharp minor, BWV 847b (YouTube, a "pre-schematic state"); and II:IX in E Major, BWV 878b (YouTube, "archiac-sounding"). Adorno also emphasizes the "lyrical element" with "differentiation, individuation, freedom" that point to the future, and even suggests in his closing (Ibid.: 146) that the orchestrations of the Viennese "moderns" Schoenberg and von Webern (whom he championed), in the six-part Ricerata No. 2 (Musical Offering, BWV 1079, YouTube) and E-Flat Major (Musical Offering, BWV 1079) "St. Anne" Fugue, BWV 552b (YouTube), are "models of an attitude to Bach which corresponds to the stage of his truth," says Adorno.

"A convenient example of this progressive understanding" of Bach is the recent series of essays on the B-minor Mass, says White (Ibid.: 103).¹¹ It "unmistakably affirms the historical integrity" of the music with "textual scholarship, numerical and proportional analyses, stylistic, scrutiny and documentary study" as a single entity with self-standing text, and refuting previous criticism of Friedrich Smend and Taruskin. "If BWV 232 is intelligible as an autonomous musical work because of empirical research, might we not want to reconsider other works by Bach in the light of these findings?," White asks. "An increasing conflict between autonomy, cultural meaning and historical significance lies at the very nerve center of Bach reception since 1985," says White (Ibid.: 106). The 'Old' Bach "lost its singularity of meaning no later than 1945" while the "New" Bach Testament "is a much more plural enterprise" and "a continuity of meaning." "Despite the dramatic reconfigurations of his music over the past thirty years, a study of Bach's reliances in relation to the musical imagination of his contemporaries is long overdue."

In a recent personal communication, White observes: "I am especially grateful that you identified my very last point about the need for a comparative study of Bach (a notoriously difficult prospect, I know), because I have attempted to redress this lacuna in The Musical Discourse of Servitude,¹² which countenances a comparison between Bach's arias and those of Johann Joseph Fux, as well as a generic and stylistic comparison between BWV 232 and the mass settings of Fux and Antonio Caldara."

ENDNOTES

¹ The current round of BML cantata questions began on October 28, 2020 with "Cantata Favorites: Discussion, Food for Thought," followed by "Role and Development in Overall Output(http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Cantata-Gen1.htm). In succeeding weeks, the questioned topics centered on "Cantata Models, Comparisons with Other Composers, Specific Features" and "Cantata Contexts, importance to Bach (http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Cantata-Gen2.htm); "Bach Cantata Texts: Structure, Function, Message" (http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Cantata-Text-Structure-Part1.htm); "Leipzig Sacred Cantata Cycles 1 and 2: Structures, Librettists" (http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Leipzig-Cantata-Cycles-1&2.htm); "Leipzig Sacred Cantatas: 1725 Interim" (Trinity Time, http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Leipzig-Cantata-1725-Interim.htm); "Third Cantata Cycle: Librettists, Structures" (http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Cantata-Cycle3-Structure.htm); "Bach Texts as Cantata Mini-Cycles" (http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Cantata-Text-Mini-Cycle.htm); and "Bach's broad Spectrum of Different Compositional Settings (https://groups.io/g/Bach/topic/79964923).
² Christoph Wolff ed., Die Welt der Bach-Kantaten, 3 vols., only the first series of essays was published in English, The World of the Bach Cantatas: Early Sacred Cantatas, from Arnstadt to Cöthen time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995; Amazon.com, "Look inside," "CONTENTS"). The last two volumes only in German and Dutch (Stuttgart: Metzger: 1997) are: vol. 2, Johann Sebastian Bachs weltliche Kantaten (secular cantatas); and vol. 3, Johann Sebastian Bachs Leipziger Kirchenkantaten (Leipzig church cantatas). The essays by noted Bach scholars are divided into two sections: "The Composer in His World" history and "The Works and Their World" music (Bärenriter: Inhalt). The publication accompanied Ton Koopman's Erato recordings of the sacred and secular cantatas in chronological order (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Performers/Koopman.htm) with the three-volume Forewords by Koopman and Prefatory Notes of Wolff.
³ Christoph Wolff, Bach's Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), Amazon.com; contents, Google Books; details and review, http://bach-cantatas.com/Books/B0221.htm; BML Discussions, http://bach-cantatas.com/Order-2020.htm: "Review of Bach Books & New Bach-Related Studies," May 15 to July 29, 2020.
⁴ Early Music Movement (Resarch Gate). <Abstract. The concept of authenticity in musical performance has been debated extensively in British-American musicology during the 1980s and 1990s mostly in the context of early music and historical performance practice. What is missing from these publications is an acknowledgment and integration of research of the issue by European scholars and performers, which occurred some 20 years earlier. The current paper provides a comprehensive review of this earlier literature on authenticity and its meaning as it unfolded during the period from the 1950s to the late 1970s. It demonstrates that many of the claims put forward by English and American scholars in the 1980s were neither new nor fair towards certain performers associated with the movement. For instance, several of the concerns expressed by [Richard] Taruskin had already been declaimed by Continental writers such as [Ludwig] Finscher and artists like [Nikolaus] Harnoncourt. The research also shows that the indiscriminate use of the word 'authentic' in journalistic and promotional publications provided the real basis for criticism because certain leading scholars and performers have always regarded authenticity in musical performance as a chimera" or illusion.>
⁵ These conditions are best described in The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach, ed. Robin A. Leaver (London: Routledge, 2017); Amazon.com: "Look inside, Contents, v).
⁶ Daniel Melamed, Hearing Bach’s Passions, Updated Edition (New York, Oxford University Press, 2016); http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Books/B0214.htm, Amazon.com: "Look inside."
⁷ Daniel R. Melamed, Listening to Bach: the Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio (Oxford University Press, 2018: xviiif); Amazon.com: "Look inside"; http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Vocal/BWV232-Gen19.htm: "B-Minor Mass: Contemporary Perspective."
⁸ Harry White, Evangelists of the Postmodern: Reconfigurations of Bach Since 1985, Understanding Bach, 12, 85–107 (Bach Network UK 2017), https://bachnetwork.co.uk/ub12/ub12-white.pdf. Harry White UB 12 (2017) holds the Chair of Music and is the professor of historical musicology at University College, Dublin. He is currently writing a book about concepts of authority and imaginative autonomy in the music of Fux, Bach and Handel, The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the European Musical Imagination, 1700-1750 (SoundCloud). Biography, https://people.ucd.ie/harry.white.
⁹ Bach revival summarized in Bach, ed. Yo Tomita (Farnham: Ashgate/Routledge, 2011, https://www.routledge.com/Bach-1st-Edition/Tomita/p/book/9780754628910: Contents). White notes (Ibid.: 86) that Tomita omitted reception history articles since that aspect of Bach research is "a work in progress" (Bach Introduction: xxviii).
¹⁰ See Dreyfus' critique of "Early Music Defended Against its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the 20th Century," Music Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Summer, 1983: 297-322, Oxford University Press; Oxfor Journals).
¹¹ Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass, eds. Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver and Jan Smaczny (Cambridge: University Press, 2013); contents: Cambridge University Press.
¹² Harry White, The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the European Musical Imagination, 1700-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Amazon.com: "Look inside."

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To Come: Harry White, The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the European Musical Imagination, 1700-1750.