We continue our journey with Bach’s Goldberg Variations with Bernard Labadie’s unique arrangement of the work for full Baroque ensemble. Pedja Muzijevic’s Bach Family Album, builds on his Bach Dialogues, and explores the relationship between J.S. Bach and two of his sons through their keyboard music.
We have explored many different transformational processes from Bach’s toolbox: transcription or arrangement of music by other composers, transcription of his own instrumental music and recycling of his own vocal music by substitution of different texts (parody). We have also explored the pasticcio process used by many of his colleagues, which has allowed us to […]
There is no doubt that Bach was well aware of his worth and place in the music world of his time. Why wouldn’t he be? We have numerous reports of his bold and almost brash behavior as a young man. He famously got into a brawl with a bassoonist named Geyserbach in Arnstadt because he […]
Bach, like many of his contemporaries, had a habit of collecting and organizing pieces of similar nature in groups of six or its multiples. You might very well have seen or even own a recording of Bach’s six “official” motets BWV 225-230. A seventh one (BWV 231), whose authenticity has been doubted very early on, […]
In another essay I introduce the concept of parody, the process by which composers (Bach in particular) adapt a new text to preexisting music. Here I would like to explore with you another transformational process which was popular with 18th-century composers: the technique of pasticcio. The Italian word pasticcio sounds very much like “pastiche” in […]
One of my great mentors at the Juilliard School (and afterwards) was harpsichordist Albert Fuller. It so happens that I know Jim Roe, current President and CEO of Orchestra of St. Luke’s because of Albert and one of the selections I play in my Bach Family Album is Albert Fuller’s arrangement of Bist du bei mir from Anna Magdalena […]
Once in a while I feel the need to divert slightly from the music of Bach himself in order to put it in better context. We have visited Dietrich Buxtehude in Lübeck; and here we get acquainted with a composer who was a huge figure in Bach’s time: Georg Philipp Telemann. In many ways Telemann […]
Although we previously discussed, at length, the progress of the Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement from the pioneering days of the 1970s, there is one period instrument we haven’t discussed: the human voice. (I mean, other than Max van Egmond’s.) Beyond the use of period instruments, one of the great novelties of the Bach Telefunken recordings […]
[…]
[…]
[…]