Notes On Bach

In the final episode of Season Six, we return to the subject of Bach translation in a conversation with scholars Michael Marissen and Daniel R. Melamed about their free, open-access Bach cantata translation project, https://bachcantatatexts.org/. If you have questions, comments, or even cantata translations requests, you can reach them at the website, where you can also sign up for email announcements of new translations.

This month we hear from historian Dr. Tanya Kevorkian, Associate Professor of History at Millersville University, about her forthcoming book, Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany, which documents and explores the rich variety of everyday sounds and music that characterized life in German Baroque cities. This episode is sponsored by the American Bach Society, which supports the study and performance of the music of J.S. Bach in the U.S. and Canada, with membership open to anyone interested.      

In April 2022, Bach Society Houston premiered a new American English translation of the St. John Passion. On today’s episode, we’ll hear from the collaborators who brought this innovative project to life over years of workshops and dialogue by phone, zoom, text and email: Madeleine Marshall, translator; Ryan Rogers, scribe; and Rick Erickson, Artistic Director of Bach Society Houston. The April 2022 premiere can be viewed here.  

This episode of "Notes on Bach" is sponsored by the American Bach Society. This month we hear from Dr. Mark Peters and Dr. Reginald Sanders about the complex subject of meaning in Bach’s vocal music, which can emerge from compositional choices, listener reception, and an intersection of these and other factors. Dr. Peters and Dr. Sanders edited an essay collection on this subject, Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J.S. Bach, published by Lexington Books.

In this episode of “Notes on Bach,” we hear from musicologist and violinist Dr. Noelle Heber about J.S. Bach’s attitudes towards, experiences with, and cantatas related to the ideas of spiritual and material wealth. Dr. Heber's book, J.S. Bach's Material and Spiritual Treasures, can be ordered here. For more about her book, check out Dr. Heber's blog post. Resources Mentioned in the Show For recent research about Anna Magdalena Bach, visit Eberhard Spree's English-language blog and check out our earlier Notes on Bach episode with Dr. Andrew Talle. To hear about how scholars have used Bach's Calov Bible in their research, check out our Notes on Bach episode with Dr. Robin Leaver. To learn more about the Calov Bible and see facsimile pages, visit here.  

To kick off Season 6 of “Notes on Bach,” we hear from musicologist and BBC radio host Dr. Hannah French about how conductor Sir Henry Wood, long associated with the BBC Proms, shaped Bach reception in twentieth-century England. Her book, Sir Henry Wood, Champion of J.S. Bach, was recently published by Boydell and Brewer. For more, check out “Henry and Seb,” Dr. French’s podcast miniseries on the book.  Image above: Wood’s final conducting score of J.S. Bach, Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor: For Orchestra, orch. Henry J. Wood [Klenovsky] (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 39. Property of Dr. Hannah French.       

Bach Society Houston is grateful to the American Bach Society for sponsoring this episode. In our final episode of the season, we hear from Dr. Stephen Rose, Professor of Music at Royal Holloway University of London, about his recent book, Musical Authorship from Schütz to Bach (soon available in paperback). Dr. Rose joins us to discuss how people in early modern Lutheran Germany thought about musical creativity, authorship, and ownership in economic, cultural, theological, and philosophical terms.    

On June 6, 2021, Bach Society Houston will present a concert called “Music in the Americas at the Time of Bach," which can be streamed online. The concert’s theme—“eighteenth-century music” outside the European geographical context and repertoire typically implied by the term—might raise questions for BSH audiences. Our episode today will explore some of those questions with Dr. Glenda Goodman, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book Cultivated By Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press). Dr. Goodman joins us to discuss how her book—and concerts like the one I just mentioned—can help us consider, and then expand, some of our assumptions, definitions, and labels around European-derived music during Bach's lifetime and in the generation or two following him. Resources mentioned in the show: Image from an 18th-century American music notebook at Dr. Goodman’s website “Notes on Bach” episodes with Dr. Andrew Talle about his bo

This episode is generously sponsored by the American Bach Society (ABS), which supports the study, performance, and appreciation of the music of J.S. Bach in the U.S. and Canada. The ABS produces publications and a video lecture-concert series, sponsors conferences, and offers research grants and prizes. Information on membership, open to all, is available here. This month we hear from Dr. Christina Fuhrmann about the history, mission, activities, personnel, and holdings of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (RBI) at Baldwin-Wallace University, which recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The RBI houses rare sources related to J. S. Bach, his family, and contemporaries; historical reference materials; scores; recordings; and sources related to other noted figures in Western classical music. The Institute also sponsors conferences and performances, supports and collaborates with scholars at many career stages, and publishes musical editions and research. Dr. Fuhrmann is editor of the journal BACH, the R

In this episode, Dr. Bettina Varwig of Cambridge University joins us to discuss a wide range of Bach-related topics, starting with Cantata BWV 131 (Aus der Tiefen rufe ich), which Bach Society Houston will present in a streamed Passiontide concert later this month (March 2021). We also hear about Dr. Varwig's recent research into how Bach’s Leipzig congregants listened to his cantatas in ways that differ from the “attentive listening” model now associated with Western classical music culture. The conversation concludes with a preview of the essay collection Rethinking Bach, which Dr. Varwig is currently editing for Oxford University Press. Read more about Dr. Varwig here. Instrumentation, text and translation(s), and additional resources for BWV 131 can be found here and here.  Stream Bach Society Houston's Passiontide Vespers performance of BWV 131 and other works on March 28, 2021, at their webpage or Facebook page. Audio example used in episode is from an archived Bach Society Houston performance of BWV 13

In this month's episode, we hear from noted scholar and harpsichordist Dr. David Schulenberg of Wagner College. He joins us to discuss his new biography of Bach, recently published by Oxford University Press. We'll hear about the process of researching and writing this kind of book--including challenges and surprises--as well as why we need an updated biography of this formidable subject. We also draw on aspects of Dr. Schulenberg's new biography to discuss J.S. Bach's Violin Sonatas and Partitas, which Bach Society Houston will perform in Spring 2021. Listeners will hear about the historical context and notable stylistic features of these six works, aspects of which Dr. Schulenberg helps us hear by playing excerpts of his own harpsichord transcriptions. For more about Dr. Schulenberg, including recordings and scholarship, visit here. For Bach Society Houston's upcoming concerts, including Bach's complete solo violin works which you can stream beginning in late February, visit here.

Earlier in November, Bach Society Houston performed works from the two Anna Magdalena Bach Notebooks; you can watch the concert here. These notebooks, which originated in 1722 and 1725, respectively, were owned by Anna Magdalena Bach, J.S. Bach’s second wife. These two manuscript collections contain keyboard and vocal works of varying levels of complexity, composed by multiple people and entered into the notebooks by different scribes, including Anna Magdalena herself. In our own time, some of the more elementary pieces in the books are still well-known as teaching pieces for piano students. The notebooks are one of the few surviving sources related to Anna Magdalena Bach, who has been the subject of research, conjecture, devotion and fiction across centuries and continents. With us to talk about Anna Magdalena's musical and domestic life, her Notebooks and other sources related to her, and how we know what we think we know about her is Dr. Andrew Talle. Dr. Talle is Associate Professor of Musicology at No

To finish Season 4, we hear from Dr. Erin Lambert, Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She joins us to talk about her book, Singing the Resurrection: Body, Community, and Belief in Reformation Europe, published by Oxford University Press. Our conversation covers how the Reformation fragmented late medieval belief about the body, resurrection, and community into a kaleidoscope of differing confessional notions which then found expression in song. We also talk about Erin’s research process and where her book fits with, and how it interrogates, existing Reformation historiography.

This month, we're diving into the world of Jewish salon culture in late-18th- and early-19th-century Berlin, a setting where women such as Sara Levy shaped the transmission and reception of Bach family music. Our guest on this episode is early music scholar and performer Dr. Rebecca Cypess, who joins us to discuss new research about Sara Levy in the book Sara Levy's World along with two related recordings by the Raritan Players: In Sara Levy's Salon and Sisters, Face to Face: The Bach Legacy in Women's Hands. Together, these projects provide new perspectives on the complicated musical and cultural agency of a notable upper-class Jewish woman in Enlightenment Germany.

If you can identify the sound of the harpsichord but know very little about its history and performance practice, this is the episode for you. Join us as Mark Kroll, internationally-known harpsichordist, noted scholar, and Emeritus Professor of Music at Boston University, tells us about a comprehensive new book on the harpsichord, the Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord. Kroll edited the collection, which includes essays covering various national/geographical harpsichord traditions, key composers for the instrument, and 20th-century harpsichord music. Houston listeners who plan on attending Bach Society Houston's upcoming concert of Bach's Concertos, which includes the harpsichord showpiece Brandenburg No. 5, will be especially interested in this episode. 

People often hear the pipe organ more in December than in other months, thanks to the profusion of Christmas-centered church services and concerts. Here to give us a "crash course" on this mighty instrument--its anatomy and its history in various geographical regions--is noted U.S. organ consultant, restorer, and builder John Bishop, owner of John Bishop Organ Consultation. He is also the Executive Director of the Organ Clearing House, whose mission is to "rehome" unused or unwanted organs. Additionally, John writes a monthly column for the organ journal The Diapason.   Other organ resources, including videos of historic organs that John selected for us:  Gwendolyn Toth plays Scheidemann on the 1457 organ at Rysum   Visit to the oldest organ in Holland, Oosthuizen, 1521   Considered the oldest organ in the world, Sion Switzerland, 1390. This one is especially charming because Guy Bovet playing the music of Haydn (1730-1809). The organ is nearly 400 years older than the music. Vox Humana, a web magazine o

This month, we hear from Dr. Tanya Kevorkian, Associate Professor of History at Millersville University. She joins us to discuss her research into sacred and secular musical life in Baroque Germany and helps us understand Bach's place in the complex social hierarchies that ordered early modern Germany. Our wide-ranging conversation covers two of Dr. Kevorkian's books: Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650-1750 and Weddings, Rumbles, and Tower Guards: Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany, forthcoming in 2021 from the University of Virginia Press.   

To kick off our 2019-2020 Notes on Bach season, we hear from Dr. Samantha Owens, Professor of Musicology at Victoria University Wellington. She joins us to discuss a recent collection of essays that she co-edited, J.S. Bach in Australia: Studies in Reception and Performance, available from Lyrebird Press/University of Melbourne in paperback or as an e-book.  In the episode, we talk about how European colonists and immigrants spread Bach's music to Australia. We hear about some of the people and institutions who helped create a uniquely Australian Bach culture, along with challenges they faced in mounting performances of Bach's St. Matthew Passion and B Minor Mass in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Owens also tells us about the current robust early music scene in Australia, including organizations such as the Australian Bach Society and the Orchestra of the Antipodes. If you've never thought much about Bach performance and reception outside of a European geographical context, this epi

In our final episode for Spring 2019, we have a wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Daniel R. Melamed, Professor of Musicology at Indiana University, about his latest book, Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio.  Click here to hear a previous Notes on Bach interview with Dr. Melamed about his book Hearing Bach’s Passions.  

This month we’ll be hearing about Bach’s so-called Calov Bible, a rare surviving example of the composer’s once-robust theological library and, for many scholars, a window into Bach’s life and work. Joining us to discuss the Calov Bible is Dr. Robin Leaver, one of the first scholars to extensively explore Bach’s copy of what is really a three-volume German theological commentary built largely on Martin Luther’s writings. Dr. Leaver is author of numerous books and articles about Bach, theology, and Lutheranism. He is Emeritus Professor at Westminster Choir College and, until recently, Visiting Professor at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. More Resources: Click here to read about, or order, the Calov Bible Commentary facsimile published last year. Read more about Dr. Leaver’s book J.S. Bach and Scripture: Glosses from the Calov Bible Commentary. For an accessible and recent example of how one noted Bach scholar has used the Calov Bible to interpret aspects of Bach’s biography, read this New York