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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.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: (Still) Talking about Bach
- Bettina Varwig
- I. Histories
- Chapter 1
- Bach and Material Culture
- Stephen Rose
- Chapter 2
- Rethinking 1829
- Ellen Exner
- Chapter 3
- Post/Colonial Bach
- Yvonne Liao
- II. Bodies
- Chapter 4
- Bach and the Soprano Voice
- Wendy Heller
- Chapter 5
- Embodied Invention: Bach at the Keyboard
- Bettina Varwig
- Chapter 6
- Rethinking Affect
- Isabella van Elferen
- III. Meanings
- Chapter 7
- Bach and Theology
- Jeremy Begbie
- Chapter 8
- Bach the Humorist
- David Yearsley
- Chapter 9
- Rethinking Bach Codes
- Daniel R. Melamed
- Chapter 10
- Bach's Works and the Listener's Viewpoint
- John Butt
- IV. Currents
- Chapter 11
- Bach's Chorale Pedagogy
- Derek Remeš
- Chapter 12
- Rethinking Editions: Mass, Missa, and Monument Culture
- Joshua Rifkin
- Chapter 13
- Bach Against Modernity
- Michael Marissen
- Chapter 14
- Bach Anxiety: A Meditation on the Future of the Past
- Michael Markham
- Works Cited
- Index
About the author
Bettina Varwig is Lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College. She has published widely on music and cultural history in the early modern period.
Summary
Johann Sebastian Bach has loomed large in the imagination of scholars, performers, and audiences since the late nineteenth century.This new book, edited by veteran Bach scholar Bettina Varwig, gathers a diverse group of leading and emerging Bach researchers as well as a number of contributors from beyond the core of Bach studies. The book's fourteen chapters engage in active 'rethinking' of different topics connected with Bach; the iconic name which broadly encompasses the historical individual, the sounds and afterlives of his music, as well as all that those four letters came to stand for in the later popular and scholarly imagination. In turn, challenging the fundamental assumptions about the nineteenth-century Bach revival, the rise of the modern work concept, Bach's music as a code, and about editions of his music as monuments. Collectively, these contributions thus take apart, scrutinize, dust off and reassemble some of our most cherished narratives and deeply held beliefs about Bach and his music. In doing so, they open multiple pathways towards exciting future modesof engagement with the composer and his legacy.
Additional text
The book largely lives up to its billing, requiring readers to think about Bach in new ways. The main readership will be scholars, but others interested in Bach will also find much of value.
