New Bach Essays

Contents

1. New Bach Essays, Bettina Varwig, Rethinking Bach, Part I, Histories
2. Rethinking Bach, Part II, Bodies: Wendy Heller, "Bach and the Soprano Voice"
5. Rethinking Bach, Bettina Varwig, Chapter 5, "Embodied Invention; Bach at the Keyboard"
6. Varwig's <Rethinking Bach>, Chapter 6, van Elferen's "Rethinking Affect"
7. Rethinking Bach, Part III, Meanings; Chapter 7, Jeremy Begbie, "Bach and Theology"
8. Rethinking Bach, Chapter 8, David Yearsley, "Bach the Humorist"
9. Rethinking Bach, Part III, Meanings; Chapter 9, Daniel R. Melamed, "Rethinking Bach Codes"
10. Rethinking Bach, Meanings, John Butt's "Bach's Works and the Listener's Viewpoint"

New Bach Essays, Bettina Varwig, Rethinking Bach, Part I, Histories

William L. Hoffman wrote (January 31, 2022):
The writing format of essays involving Bach has evolved in the past half century and more recently has prospered through diversity as scholars pursue all manner of inquiries, especially in the fields of spirituality and interdisciplinary new musicology.¹ Publications of Bach essays offer a variety of perspectives, ranging from Bach authorities on various topics² (Gerhard Herz, Robert L. Marshall, Christoph Wolff, Raymond Erickson, Hans-Joachim Schulze) to other formats.³ The latest and most impressive essay collection is the academic perspective of Rethinking Bach,⁴ edited by expert and versatile Bach scholar Bettina Varwig and published by Oxford University Press. It yields 14 chapters from a range of Bach scholars (See Rethinking Bach: Look inside: List of Contributors, xiff) and is divided into four generic topical parts: I. Histories (of Bach, three chapters, 9ff); II. Bodies (voices, corporeal-material, three chapters, 77ff), III. Meanings (theology, reception tropes, four chapters, 167ff), and IV Currents (reevaluation, editors' perspectives, deconstruction, four chapters, 269ff). Lecturer in early modern music at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Dr. Varwig has compiled 15 entries in Bach Bibliography on a range of topics (Bach-Bibliographie). Her interests are expressed in her Cambridge on-line biography (University of Camnbridge: Faculty of Music): "I am interested in questions of musical meaning and expression, historical modes of listening, and music’s place in the history of the body, the emotions and the senses. I have also worked on issues of reception and historiography, in particular the reception of J. S. Bach’s music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries." Her most recent posting is the American Bach Society Tiny Bach Concerts, Episode 13, which involves remarks on Bach's second Brandenburg concerto, American Bach Society.

Rethinking Bach: Introduction; Part I, Histories: "Bach and Material Culture"

In her "Introduction: (Still) Talking about Bach," the concept of "rethinking Bach" entails the following: "The paradoxical challenge of 'rethinking Bach' thus consists in thinking about Bach by thinking beyond him: remapping the contours and borders of that island of Bach research, populating it with different people and unexpected objects, launching" (Ibid.: 2) "forays into the wider ocean of scholarship — all while keeping an eye on its principal site of attraction, the initial shared object of scholarly inquiry." Her in-depth introduction involves framing the essays with insightful perspectives on various essays (with endnotes), beginning with a summary of Bach scholarship reception from Forkel's 1802 biography to new musicology thinking of Susan McClary in 1987.⁵ Still, "ample scope undoubtedly remains for entering Bach more decisively into current intellectual trends and debates, both those within musicology and those shared with adjacent disciplines." Beginning with Part I, Histories presents three chapters on temporal concerns related to people, time and place in Bach studies. The first chapter, Stephen Rose's "Bach and Material Culture" (Ibid.: 11-35), frames the entire essay collection with contextual and agency concerns (the latter as an inherent "power to act," says Rose (Ibid.: 12), who has a distinguished resume and publishing credentials.⁶ He shows that Bach's "musical practices hold the potential for offering particularly — even unique — kinds of insight into broader patterns of cultural production and social interaction," says Varwig (Ibid.: 3). He "demonstrates that this material focus embraces pertinent personal subjects," "the things surrounding those bodies and practices associated with them" ("Bodies" in the subject of Part II, relatiing to corporeal-material interests). While Bach's works are considered "as products of his mind, transcending the material conditions of everyday life," says Rose (Ibid.: 11), "insights into Bach's musical activities," on the other hand, "can be gained from an investigation of material culture," involving "physical properties of an object" as well as "the network of social entanglements and strategies within which the object is embroiled," says Varwig, citing Ian Holder.⁷ Humans create a sense of being in the world and in a "creative exchange" with material objects (11) in shared agency. Rose's chapter studies three Bach perspectives (Ibid.: 12), "each inspired by different approaches within the diverse field of material culture studies": 1. "Bach and Leipzig's Consumer Culture," especially Bach's possessions and activities (13-18); 2. "Musical Sources in Material Culture," Bach's late works and homage funeral Cantata 198, (18-24), and 3. "Bach and the Agency of Body and Materials" (24-29), the interplay between performer and instruments and compositions. "Methods from the study of material culture can place Bach's activities in broader contexts," Rose concludes (Ibid.: 29), to "enhance close readings of Bach's compositions" as "a craft of musical materials," "illuminating the constant interplay between human and material agency."

Exner's "Rethinking 1829," Matthew Passion Revival

Chapter 2, Ellen Exner's "Rethinking 1829" (Ibid.: 37-57) reexamines the reception of Bach's St. Matthew Passion of 1829 led by Mendelssohn, a benchmark of German nationalism and the concert hall, which suggests that in this "fêted moment," says Varwig (Ibid.; 5), for Exner, "preceding and surrounding cultural events" seemed to make the Berlin public concert both inevitable and singular. This essay is a rich exploration of Bach and pronounced musical reception in the past two centuries, citing a wide range of authorities. One of the Bach myths of Romanticism was that his music died with him in 1750 and was resurrected in the 19th century. "If we put aside the miracle rhetoric and seek instead evidence of human agency behind the concert, it become's clear that Berlin's history was full of Bach before 1829," says Exner (Ibid.: 37). The hallowed (revered) event also seems hollowed (shaped). It is a "very human story of appreciation of Bach's music that is traceable from generation to generation in the decades leading up to the famous Passion concert," she says (Ibid.: 39). Her essay reveals the community's "engagement with older repertories" and "it's active patronage of Bach's music" as "a continuation of long-standing elite tradition made public." Exner provides a chronicle of watershed events in the sections, "Dr. Burney's Complaint [of 1775 re. Berlin musical life] and the Case of Mendelssohn's Great Passion," "Mendelssohn, Bach and Berlin in 1829," and "1929: Centennial Celebrations, National Socialis, and the Battle for Bach." In Exner's hands, "the miracle narrative" is replaced with "a more inclusive, very human picture of Bach's early reception — one in which new voices, including those belonging to women, might finally be heard" (Ibid.: 51). Exner's essay is a fitting reception history conclusion to her forthcoming Matthew Passion study guide from Oxford University Press and the American Bach Society, hopefully with similar insight into Bach's Passion materials, the unique ingredients in BWV 244, Bach's special Passion tapestry, BWV 244-247, and perhaps even an early history of his "Great Passion" (see BCW).

"Post/Colonial Bach" in Hong Kong

Music historian Yvonne Liao presents a distinctive and unique historical-geographical account of 20th century Bach reception history in Hong Kong and its emergence as an indigenous expression of musical creativity. Chapter 3, Liao's "Post/Colonial Bach" provides a pathway "by which this product of the Western imagination traveled beyond its home turf as part of the European colonial enterprise," says Varwig in her Introduction (Ibid.: 5f), as well as to "begin to appreciate Bach as a potential interlocutor in a broader cross-disciplinary conversation about developing a historical-critical paradigm of 'after Europe'." Liao's essay follows recent/current geographical-historical studies of Bach in Berlin, Italy, Japan (and far East), Australia, Poland.⁸ Much of Liao's essay relates to her conflation of "Post/Colonial" within the context of "After Europe" in East Asia (Ibid.: 61f), notably British-ruled Hong Kong. Here she presents three institutional manifestations of Bach sonic presence in three British institutions: the Helena May colonial club recital 1936, St. John's Cathedral and "Landmark Churches" in Bach Motets, BWV 225-230 in 2011, and the "New" City Hall with still dominant British influence such as the St. John Passion in 1983 (before the Chinese take-over of Hong Kong in 1997), where Liao displays pejorative bias, freighted with British Colonialism, citing "musicians of their ilk" (Ibid.: 73). Meanwhile, recent Chinese influence in performers and audience suggests a "shifting collective listening, and a nascent democratization of access," she concludes (Ibid.: 74). Obviously, Hong Kong, in contrast to Japan, is a special case of cultural appropriation.

Further Bach Studies, Post-Script: Bach & Disabilities

In the "historical-critical paradigm of "After Europe'," Varwig in her Introduction suggests new areas of Bach pursuit (Ibid.: 6), such as "disability studies" involving Bach's late-life visual impairment or excessive vocal demands on performers. A worthy subject might be the three distressed Bach sons (David Gordon: Spirited Sound): Gottfried Heinrich (1724-1763), mentally handicapped ("feeble-minded") and required a caregiver; Johann Gottfried Bernhard (1759-1739), who may have been emotionally troubled and whose cause of death is unknown; and eldest Wilhelm Friedemann (1710-1784), who squandered his talent and his father's manuscript legacy.

ENDNOTES

¹ See "Encountering Bach Today: Historical, Listening, Post-Modern, especially New Bach Studies: Evangelists of the Modern," BCW; also, see BCW: "Previous Bach Essays, Contextual Approaches."
² Bach essay authorities: 1. Gerhard Herz, Essays on J. S. Bach, Studies in Musicology (Ann Arbor MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), Essays on J.S. Bach, by Gerhard Herz; 2. Robert L. Marshall, The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach: The Sources, the Style, the Significance (New York: Schirmer Books, 1989), Google Books); 3. Christoph Wolff, BACH, Essays on His Life, Music (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), Amazon.com; 4. Raymond Erickson, The Worlds of Johann Sebastian Bach (New York: Amadeus Press, 2009); BCW: 3, BOOK REVIEWS; 5. Hans-Joachim Schulze, Bach-Facetten: Essays – Studien – Miszellen (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017), Amazon.com; contents, Ciando eBooks.
³ Bach publication essay formats: single authors on one topic (Robin A. Leaver, Bach Studies; Liturgy, Hymnology, and Theology), topical studies (The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach, Bach's Changing World [Leipzig], Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass, Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach), to series from one source (American Bach Society: topical Bach Perspectives 1-13, American Bach Society) and general collections by various authors (Bach Studies and Bach, 32 essays, Routledge) and festschrifts (A Bach Tribute: Essays in Honor of William H. Scheide). Other essays involve speciality publications such as the venerable Bach Jahrbuch (annals, Neue Bachgesellschaft e.V., still a German-only enterprise, and the English-language periodical Bach, journal of Riemenschneider Bach Institute (Baldwin Wallace University). Still others are found in the emerging electronic field on-line: Yo Tomita's Bach Bibliography ( Bach-Archiv Leipzig), Bach Network: Understanding Bach, Discussing Bach (https://bachnetwork.org), and the Bach Society Houston: Notes on Bach (primarily author interviews, Bach Society Houston); Noelle M. Heber, J. S. Bach's Material and Spiritual Treasures: A Theological Perspective (Woodbridge GB: 2021), Amazon.com; review, Mark A. Peters, ProQuest.
⁴ Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), Amazon.com.
⁵ See Encountering Bach Today, BCW: "New Bach Studies: Evangelists of the Modern."
⁶ Stephen Rose, Rethinking Bach (Ibid.: xiiif) and Bach Bibliography, Bach-Bibliographie; Rose's most recent book is Musical authorship from Schütz to Bach (Cambridge University Press, 2019), especially Chapter 2, "Between Imitatio and Plagiarism" in Bach's "Sanctus," BWV 241: 78-80); Houston Bach Society, Bach Society Houston. Musical Creativity, Originality, and Ownership in Early Modern Germany, interview with Stephen Rose, Musical Authorship from Schütz to Bach (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Bach Society Houston, Hwcdn.Libsyn; review, Daniel R. Melamed, Jstor.
⁷ Ian Holder, "The Social," in "Archeological Theory: An Historical and Contemporary Perspective," in A Companion to Social Archaeology, ed. Lynn Meskell and Robert Preucel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) p. 28); cited in Rethinking Bach (Ibid.: 11, 29).

Rethinking Bach, Part II, Bodies: Wendy Heller, "Bach and the Soprano Voice"

William L. Hoffman wrote (February 7, 2022):
Having laid the groundwork (? and footwork) for Rethinking Bach,¹ Bettina Varwig (See New Bach Essays²), the editor and scholar in Part II, Bodies, explores (Ibid.: 3) "this sense of the elusive immateriality of his legacy," intending "to address this over- (or through-)sight by delving into Bach's imagination of the bodies/voices of his soprano singers," as explored in Wendy Heller's essay ["Bach and the Soprano Voice," Chapter 4, Ibid: 79-113]; "into contemporary theories of musical affect as a corporeal-material force, discussed in Isabella van Elferen's contribution ["Rethinking Affect," Chapter 6, Ibid.: 141-166]; and, in my own chapter, into the material fleshiness of Bach's keyboard practice" ["Embodied Invention; Bach at the Keyboard," Chapter 5, Ibid.: 115-140], "discussed in dialogue with recent neurophysiological approaches to human creativity." "Crucially," Varwig continues, "it is not only Bach's body that thereby comes more decisively into view, but also those of his performers, listeners, congregants, surrounding family members and so on, thus situating Bach's own physical existence within a larger assemblage of (gendered) boodies that productively widens the scholarly field on vision. . . . "Bach as historical figure here becomes merely one node in an extensive network of cultural agents and activities; and while such a de-centering exercise may well threaten Bach's inherited hegemonic position in the Western canon, it contributes appreciably to a more textured, interconnected, and alive understanding of his actions in an engagement with the world around him."

Heller: Bach, Soprano Voice (Solo Arias, Love Duets)

In "Bach and the Soprano Voice," Wendy Heller,³ Scheide Professor of Music History and Chair of the Department of Music at Princeton University, provides a musical analysis of significant Bach solo soprano arias, often heard as the voice of the Soul or Congregation, as well as the pairing of the Soul with the bass Vox Christi in spiritual-mystical love duets⁴ of the symbolic bride and bridegroom (see BCW: Solo Cantatas for Soprano, Solo Cantatas for Soprano & Bass). To bolster her findings, she relies on an array of endnote sources involving academic studies, recordings, established Bach documents, topical Bach writings, and recent vocal music studies. Heller's essay begins with an exposition of the recent omnibus recording collection, Bach 333, J. S. Bach: The New Complete Edition of Deutsche Grammaphon and the Leipzig Bach Archive (BCW), containing what she calls "a provocative contradiction regarding the use of soprano soloists" (Ibid.: 79). On the one hand, Bach used boy soprano voices in virtually all his church vocal music while Bach 333 almost exclusively uses recordings "performed by women" and increasingly such is the case in new recordings in both solo and chorus parts. The pioneer Harnoncourt/Leonhardt Das Kantatenwerk "complete" cycle (1971-89, BCW) used boy sopranos except in Cantata 199 (Barbara Bonney, YoiuTube), "one that today's early music practitioners have soundly rejected," says Heller (Ibid.: 80). At "the heart of the matter are fundamental aesthetic questions concerning changing notions about voices, gender, and historical performance in this repertory." Heller explores femininity in Bach's Magnificat, BWV 243 (Mary's canticle), beginning in her 2015 article.⁵

Modern Preference for Female Sopranos

Today, says Heller (Ibid.: 80), "modern day preference for female sopranos in Bach's sacred music," "codified" in Bach 333, "is in fact a function of qualities intrinsic to the music": "Bach's musical expression of Lutheran theology" and "the tension between performance practices past and present." Heller considers (Ibid.: 80f) "rhetorical strategies" in Bach's soprano arias: "choice of affect, use of certain topoi [topos], form, and vocal writing," "evoked in Bach's listeners an unambiguous sense of the feminine." This Bach bolstered with the use of special instruments "such as the oboe da caccia or violoncello piccolo in certain theological contexts," she says (Ibid.: 81), and "stylistic features": dance rhythms, elements of galant style, sensual vocal lines replete with chromaticism." These give "a distinctly feminine aura" with "illustrative texts that share certain affective sensibilities: passion, desire, optimism, confidence, compliance, modesty, submission, and pleasure."⁶ Heller offers striking examples with music in Cantata 32/1 for the First Sunday after Epiphany 1926 (YouTube) which culminates in the duet, YouTube, Ibid.: 85). This is reinforced in Heller's study (Ibid.; 87) of Luther's mystical union, expressed as "Ich bin deine, du bist meine" (I am yours, you are mine), found in the early Motet BWV 228 (YouTube) and profane Cantata 213 (YouTube). Heller displays the sense of the feminine in two soprano solos from Bach's 1723 Magnificat (Ibid.: 88): "Et exultavit" optimism (YouTube) and "Quia respexit" humility (YouTube), and joy, German Magnificat, Cantata 10, "Herr, der du stark und mächtig" (Lord, you are strong and might, YouTube). Emotional extremes are found in dialogue Cantata 57 for the second day of Christmas 1725, in the free da capo aria, No. 3"Ich wünschte mir den Tod" (I would wish for myself death, YouTube), in which "the Soul is simultaneously anxious and confident," she says (Ibid.: 89), similar to aria BWV 32/1 (above). "Anxiety, humility, introspection, and desire, often juxtaposed with or leading to optimism, confidence, and utter pleasure" "are the qualities that emerge. As her study continues into more oblique feminine references, "we see Bach using many of the same compositional strategies: dance rhythms, modifications, the da capo scheme, an intimate relationship between the voice and various obbligato instruments, and a preference for rarely used instruments and instrumental combinations," she observes (Ibid.: 91f). She then cites (Ibid.: 92) the free da capo trio aria, No. 3, "Erfüllet, ihr himmlischen göttlichen Flammen" (Fill, you divine flames of heaven, YouTube), a chorale cantata paraphrase of the third verse of Philipp Nicolai's Epiphany (and wedding) hymn, "Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern" (How beautifully shines the morning star), for the Marian feast of the Annunciation in 1725. As in the Magnificat "Et exultavit" aria (cited above), the sense of desire is expressed in a dance setting (here a bourrée) with intimacy "experienced in the relationship" between voice and oboe da caccia, she notes (Ibid.: 93).

Other Soprano Arias: Minuet, Bassetto, Trios

Then Heller turns to an aria from Leipzig poetess Christiane Mariane von Ziegler,⁷ who crafted on commission a mini series of nine cantatas for the 1725 Easter to Trinityfest season,⁸ "Höchster Tröster, Heilger Geist" (Greatest Comforter, Holy Spirit), No. 4, in Cantata 183, Sie werden euch in den Bann tun II (They will put you under a ban, John 16:2), for the Sunday after Ascension 1725. This two-part aria (YouTube), set as a 3/8 minuet, is "the anticipation of the comfort provided by the Holy Spirit (soprano aria in C major, accompanied by strings and a pair of oboes da caccia in unison)," says Heller (Ibid.: 94). Next is a multi-parodied 3/8 binary dance soprano aria in unaccompanied bassetto style (no basso continuo texture), symbolizing innocence, No. 10, "Jesu, deine Gnadenblicke" (Jesus, your gracious look, YouTube), in the Ascension Oratorio, BWV 11, of 1738,⁹ with its secular origin in a profane wedding cantata of 1725, BWV 1163=Anh. 196, sung by allegorical figure Modesty (Schamhafftigkeit), No. 5, "Unschuld, Kleinod reiner Seelen" (Chasteness, jewel of pure spirits, Z. Philip Ambrose, University of Vermont: J.S. Bach: Texts of the Vocal Works with English Translation and Commentaryt). Observes Heller (Ibid.; 100): A "recognition of the origins here, I would suggest, frees the imagination, allowing us to hear what would have been obvious to his contemporaries from the surface of the music: the ways in which Bach associated femininity with innocence, purity, intimacy, and sensuality." Two additional citations in the early (c1713) multi-use undesignated cantatas involve "another secular convention" of "the lament in the Soul's search for Jesus," says Heller (Ibid.: 101), are the soprano trio aria, "Seufzer, Tränen, Kummer, Not" (Sighs, tears, grief, distress), No. 3 in Cantata 21, "Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis in meinem Herzen" (I had much affliction in my heart, YouTube), and the soprano trio aria, "Stumme Seufzer, stille Klagen" (Silent sighs, quiet moans, YouTube), No. 2 in the solo soprano Cantata 199, "Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut" (My heart swims in blood, YouTube), as well as the arias Tief gebückt und voller Reue" (Bent low and full of remorse) and the concluding gigue, "Wie freudig ist mein Herz" (How joyous is my heart).

Final Section: Soprano Voice Reception History; Modern Expectations

In her final, untitled section, Heller provides a reception history of soprano voices in Bach's music (Ibid.: 103-07), as well as a concluding note on the inherent qualities of Bach's music for female voices and bodies (Ibid.: 107). While "theological connotations may well have faded as Bach's sacred music moved from its original liturgical context to the concert stage," "later listeners seem to have taken the music's intrinsic femininity for granted," she suggests (Ibid.: 103). When Bach's vocal music was disseminated in the 19th century and entered the concert stage, adult choirs with female singers replaced Bach's male church choruses in Germany and "also became the norm for English performances," as well as the United States. "The first sopranos to record arias from Bach cantatas were no less varied in terms of their voice type and repertory," Heller says (Ibid.: 105). Numerous and varied sopranos pursued Bach works such as Cantata 51 with its coloratura display such as Kathleen Battle (YouTube), and Cantata 199 with its low tessitura in the first aria sung by mature mezzo sopranos, and Bach's B-Minor Mass sung by women.¹⁰ Vocal technique and recordings now are able to capture the full timbre and nuances of adult voices which in turn, such as those of Emma Kirkby (Zach Uram's Blog), have the pure quality of boy's voices. Concerning reconciling modern expectations of the soprano aria perceived expressivity with historical record and affects/moods was considered inherently feminine, says Heller (Ibid.: 107). "Bach's listeners — like Shakespeare's audiences — were more adept at using their imaginations to transcend conventional gender expectations than modern audiences have tended to be." Bach's music for soprano now "is identified with female voices and bodies," "regardless of pressure from the early music revival." At the same time, Bach's audiences were more attuned to the theological import of his sacred music.¹¹ The enduring notion of femininity in music makes a woman "compelled to express her desire for and joy in salvation a physical act of singing and dancing," Heller concludes (Ibid.: 107).

ENDNOTES

¹Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), Amazon.com: "Look inside."
² New Bach Essays, Bettina Varwig, Rethinking Bach, Part I, Histories," BCW.
³ Wendy Heller, biography Depatment of Music at Princeton; Bach Bibliography, Bach-Bibliographie;
⁴ See "Jesus-Soul Dialogue Cantatas & Arias," BCW.
⁵ Heller article, "‘Aus eigener Erfahrung redet’: Bach, Luther, and Mary’s Voice in the Magnificat, BWV 243," in Understanding Bach 10 (2015): 31–69, © Bach Network UK, Bach Network UK; sections: "Magnificat and the Feast of the Visitation," "Transforming Mary," "Mary as singer: Luther’s Commentary on the Magnificat," "Bach’s Magnificat through the lens of Luther’s Commentary," and "Bach’s feminine voice."
⁶ Se, a discussion of the bodily existence of emotions involving Varwig, Heller, and others has just been released at the Bach Network, "Bach and the Corporeality of Emotions," Issue 4 of Discussing Bach, Bach Network.org. It was recorded 15 July 2021 at a roundtable discussion of Bach scholars, 'Bach and the History of Emotions,' at the 19th Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music (University of Birmingham; video, Bach Network.og; transcript, Bacjh Network.org). There are three very diverse approaches to Bach and the emotions: the physiological, from Varwig, the proportional or mathematical from Ruth Tatlow, and John Butt's approach through the physical and regulative qualities of dance. Heller asks (Ibid.: 11) the three scholars to amplify on the subject and the common directions to come. Varwig suggests that an early modern anthropology approach can help understand how humans interact with the world through music and interact today in the domains of physiology, proportional/mathematical, and dance; Tatlow on how proportions move emotions (Ibid.: 12), and Butt on proportions and dance steps.
⁷ Ziegler is the subject of two fine monographs cited in Heller: 1. Eric Chafe, J. S. Bach's Johannine Theology: The St. John Passion and the Cantatas for Spring 1725 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014; Part III, Chapters 10-14), Amazon.com, John Butt review (H-Music); and 2. Mark A. Peters, A Woman’s Voice in Baroque Music: Mariane von Ziegler and J.S. Bach (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2008), Amazon.com; review, Mark A. Peters, "Death to Life, Sorrow to Joy: Martin Luther's Theology of the Cross and J.S. Bach's Eastertide Cantata Ihr werdet weinen und heulen (BWV 103)," in Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach, ed. Mark A. Peters & Reginald Sanders, Contextual Bach Studies No. 8, ed. Robin A. Leaver (Lanham MD; Lexington Books, 2018), BCW: paragraph beginning "One of the von Ziegler texts . . . ."
⁸ Ziegler's mini-series of cantatas marks the virtual beginning chronologically of Bach's third and final church-year cantata cycle, as recently recognized in two Bach cantata handbooks in German: 1. Reinmar Emans and Sven Hiemke eds., Bachs Kantaten: Das Handbuch, vol. 2, Der sogenannte "Dritte Jahrgang" (The so-called "Third Year") (Lilenthal: Laaber-Varlag, 2012; Amazoin.com), beginning with "Zu den nur durch Textdrucke nachweisbaren Auffürungen des jahres 1724" (On the performances of the year 1725, which can only be verified by text prints; and 2. Konrad Klek. Dein ist Allein die Ehre: Johann Sebastian Bachs geistliche Kantaten erklärt (Yours alone is honor: Johann Sebastian Bach's sacred cantatas explained), Vol. 3, From Easter 1725 (Leipzig, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017; Stretta Music; these handbooks will be discussed in a forthcoming Bach Cantatas Website, Bach Handbooks installment (BCW).
⁹ Ascension Oratorio of 1738: previously listed as premiering in 1735, recent research shows 1738 (Bach Digital), composed in three stages (Facebook: BACH - We Are FAMILY! - Bachfest Leipzig).
¹⁰ B-minor Mass sung by women chorus and soloists in 1986 vs. children in 1968: Harnoncourt, BCW; 1986 liner notes: "on this occasion we used women soloists instead of boys [and a mixed choir]. It is, after all, known that Bach did this, even though it was frowned upon, that he was interested in the attractiveness and the difference between a fine boy's voice and a female voice, and that he preferred to have women rather than boys to sing certain works" (Ibid.: 29) where "they also contribute the sensuous flair of adults to the music" and "it is no longer important whether the ideal, historically accurate rendering is by boys' choir or mixed choir" since "a modern boys' choir is not the same as it was in Bach's day."
¹¹ The authoritative study of Bach's sacred music is Martin Petzoldt, Bach Kommentar, Theological and musicological commentary on the sacred vocal works of Johann Sebastian Bach (Kassel; Bärenreiter), 4 volumes: 1. The sacred cantatas of the 1st to 27th Trinity Sunday (omnes tempore, 2005), 2. The spiritual cantatas from the 1st Advent to the Feast of Trinity (de tempore, 2007), 3. Festive and causal cantatas, passions (2018, Bärenreiter), 4. Masses, Magnificat, Motets (2019, Bärenreiter). Kommentar, Theological and musicological commentary on the sacred vocal works of Johann Sebastian Bach (Kassel; Bärenreiter), 4 volumes: 1. The sacred cantatas of the 1st to 27th Trinity Sunday (omnes tempore, 2005), 2. The spiritual cantatas from the 1st Advent to the Feast of Trinity (de tempore, 2007), 3. Festive and causal cantatas, passions (2018, Bärenriter), 4. Masses, Magnificat, Motets (2019, Bärenriter).

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To come: Rethinking Bach, Bettina Varwig, Part II, Bodies, Chapter 5, "Embodied Invention; Bach at the Keyboard"

Rethinking Bach, Bettina Varwig, Chapter 5, "Embodied Invention; Bach at the Keyboard"

William L. Hoffman wrote (February 13, 2022):
Part II, Bodies, in the new Bach essay collection, Rethinkiing Bach,¹ began with Chapter 4, "Bach and the Soprano Voice", examining Bach's imagination of the bodies/voices of his soprano singers, the dominant voice in his vocal music which constitutes almost half of his canon of extant vocal works, BWV 1-524 (Wikipedia). The next essay, Chapter 5, Bettina Varwig's "Embodied Invention: Bach at the Keyboard" (Ibid.: 115-140), logically and contextually considers Bach's instrumental music, here the keyboard works² (organ and clavier), BWV 525-994, the second largest "body" of Bach music, where the hands take creative and interpretive pride of place over the voice. Dr. Varwig, also the book's editor, nears its mid-point with an iconic exploration of "the material fleshiness of Bach's keyboard practice, discussed in dialogue with recent neurophysiological approaches to human creativity," she says (Ibid.: 3). Varwig in Part I, Histories, had laid the groundwork for this provocative and challenging thematic gathering with her primary interests in Bach scholarship centering on "questions of musical meaning and expression, historical modes of listening, and music’s place in the history of the body, the emotions and the senses" (see BCW). The first three chapters (Ibid.: 11-76) related to 1. Stephen Rose's "Bach and Material Culture," 2. Ellen Exner's cultural reception history essay of "Rethinking 1829," and 3. Yvonne Liao's "Post/Colonial Bach" historical-geographical account of 20th century Bach reception history in Hong Kong. Now, "Crucially, it is not only Bach's body that thereby comes more decisively into view, but also those of his performers, listeners, congregants, surrounding family members and so on, thus situating Bach's own physical existence within a larger assemblage of (gendered) bodies that productively widens the scholarly field of vision," she says (Ibid.: 3).

Bach as Creator-Performer, Goldberg Variations

Where the voice involves a single line of music in melodic expression, the hands on the keyboard entail all manner of complex harmonic, compositional, and stylistic devices in a captivating choreography of motion and gesture. As the premier keyboard virtuoso of his generation, Bach set the gold standard for physically performing repertoire that initially was set apart as the creation of the mind in a dichotomy that only recently, "gratefully embraced by this study (see below) has been much more attuned to the physical dimensions of his music" and to the practitioner . . . who "might find intuitively that the body is central to their conception and execution," she suggests (Ibid.: 115). There is only one detailed description of Bach the creator-performer, in all his grandeur at the Thomas School in Leipzig in the early 1730s, rehearsing a major vocal work from the keyboard, a multi-task activity without seeming parallel: Theory of Music. Varwig focuses (Ibid.: 116) on a "performer-centered mode of analysis" "to embrace the embodied aspects not just of performing but also of listening and, especially, of composing." She offers "an exploratory engagement with questions of invention and embodiment specifically in relation to Bach's keyboard practice, in a manner that establishes a dialogue between early eighteenth century conceptions of bodies, minds, and souls on the one hand, and some recent thinking in embodied cognition and the neuroscience of creativity on the other." Further, "the different keyboard instruments of Bach's time required distinct kinds of physical action, finger placement, agility, strength, and touch, thus linking playing and compositional style directly to bodily activity," she observes (Ibid.: 116f). Considered is "the interface between a keyboard, the fingers that touch it, and the body-souls that produce and/or/receive the sonic signal," she says (Ibid.: 117). Her "primary focus falls on the Goldberg Variations"³ and "the illusive nexus between the mechanical and the spiritual from which this music seems to spring." The sections of her essay that follow are the "Purposive Hands" (Ibid.; 117ff) of Bach the player and teacher, especially in the context of thorough-bass realization (Ibid.: 119); "A Black Key" (Ibid.; 121ff) of constraints from "more uneven keyboard topographies" (121) while seeking "pre-cadential intensification" (123); "Thinking (and) Matter" (Ibid.: 124ff), especially the improvisational process and "muscle memory" (127); "Embodied [Goldberg] Variations" Ibid.: 128ff), "grounded in bodily affordances" (129); and the final "Touching Souls" (Ibid.: 131ff), "the vastly different haptic character of the [Goldberg] variations and the corporeal musical knowledge they carry" (131).

"Purposive Hands," "Black Keys"

Descriptions of Bach at the keyboard are found at the beginning of the first section, "Purposive Hands" in accounts of Bach students Johann Adolph Scheibe and Johann Christian Kittel (Ibid.: 117f). These are followed by the influences on the learned Bach of musical writings, treatises and collections⁴ involving Johann Mattheson, Philipp Kirnberger, Johann Gottfried Walther, Johann Joseph Fux 1725 Gradus ad Parnassum counterpoint treatise, Johann David Heinichen 1728 Generalbass treatise, Bach Clavierbüchlein for Friedemann after 1719 (BCW), Emanuel Bach 1787 Versuch über die Wahre Art das clavier zu spielen, and other keyboard sources.⁵ The keyboard "also affords a multitude of multi-sensory feedback loops for its player, including aural, visual, haptic, kinesthetic, and cognitive feedback, giving rise to complex patterns of what scientists now describe as auditory-motor coupling," says Varwig (Ibid.: 120f). The challenge of chromatic keys in the next section, "A Black Key" (Ibid.: 121ff) relates to the original early modern "constraints" of these chromatic keys in "uneven keyboard typographies," she says (121). Now, "modern performance practice has tended to prioritize smooth, longer lines over local gestural articulation," she says (Ibid.: 122). While a "pre-cadential intensification forms a common strategy in many of Bach's keyboard works," she observes (Ibid.; 123), there is the realization that the first of the Goldberg Variations (YouTube: 5:01) "counteracts this sense of potential ease at both ends of the piece, thereby setting the tone for the whole set as an exploration of the limits of a keyboardist's prowess." she says.

"Thinking (and) Matter," "Embodied Variations"

The next section, "Thinking (and) Matter" (Ibid.: 124ff), focuses on the "ingenious and idiosyncratic" Goldberg Variations, showing that the "Improvisational processes, in particular, have attracted the interest of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, as they seem to allow us too capture the creative act as it unfolds." Psychological creative processes involve spontaneous improvisation, offering "this growing body of insight into the creative process," says Varwig (Ibid.: 125). A key area of influence involves the 18th century "conceptions of 'soul'," that is "the gap that still remains in current scientific analyses between neural activity and conscious experience" that leads to "the finely contoured melodic arch of the opening phrase in the Aria from the Goldberg Variations" (as above, YouTube). Various personal, subjective factors in musical invention are discussed at length (Ibid.: 126-128), including "imagination as one of the faculties of the soul" (126), "closely allied to the movements of the affections" (see Wikipedia), "a valuable source of inspiration" — "mixed motions generated by the intermingling agencies of body, soul, and spirits." "Memory, as the third principal faculty of the soul beside reason and imagination thus has a central role to play in enabling creative activity." Skills of keyboard manual dexterity today are "colloquially referred to" as "muscle memory," she says (Ibid.: 127). The next section, "Embodied Variations," studies the Goldberg Variations 5, 8, 19, and 29 (Ibid. 128-131, YouTube). Among the influential factors are "intermingled agencies" and imitation in Variation 5, "competing automatisms" in Variation 8, three-voice texture in Variation 19, and syncopation in Variation 29.

"Touching Souls"

The concluding section of Chapter 5, "Touching Souls" (Ibid.: 131-135), suggests that embodied analysis can stimulate sensory touch characters "of the variations and the corporeal musical knowledge they carry" (131). Thus, "something as minute as a finger movement potentially emerges as a generative of large-scale features of design and expression. Within the "domain of expression" (Ibid.: 131f) is where "most writers of the time [early modern] would have located the illusive presence of 'soul'." Variation 13 "opens with the standard clavieristic (and vocal) figuration of a groppo" (knot), she says (Ibid.; 132), that initiates a melody creating a "singing effect" which is "fundamentally determined by the quality of touch," the "most fundamental of the five senses," says Varwig (Ibid.: 133), conby Bach biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel and son Emanuel. Early modern writers explored "Four Temperaments" of human personality types (Wikipedia) while contemporary writers sometimes consider the four overarching, sentient faculties or phases of human existence in three parallel categories: places of body, mind, heart, and soul; activities of doing, thinking, feeling, and being; and health categories of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. "When Bach offered up his Goldberg Variations for the 'Gemüths-Ergötzung' [mind's or spirit's delight]⁶ of his fellow keyboardists, this hoped-for effect would have relied on the powers of music to enable a corporeal-spiritual exchange between performer, instrument, sound and(performer-as)listener," she comments (Ibid.: 134). The "delight" is "particularly manifest in the song-like outpouring of melody in Variation 13, when tackled with an appropriately fluid internal state and suppleness of touch." The gigue style in Variation 7 with "its persistent dotted rhythms and sprightly melodic shapes," "could also, through an analogous alchemy of kinesthetic effort, ensouled touch, and affective contagion, set a human heart and spirit literally a-leaping." In conclusion, Varwig argues (Ibid.: 134f) a more "carnal" "musicology of Bach, imagining him and his knowing hands at the clavier, improvising, performing, and creating, can offer an impetus for upending the long-standing tradition of approaching Bach as a bloodless cerebral entity." 'Music, including Bach's music, continually and prolifically unsettles the dualisms of mind and body, idealism and materialism. The fundamental questions about human nature it thereby raises remain tantalizingly unanswered."

ENDNOTES

¹Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), Amazon.com: "Look inside."
² Keyboard music (organ and clavier): Wikipedia, Wikipedia; keyboard topics: Keyboard Music Intro.: Repertory, Development, Reception, BCW.
³ Goldberg Variations, fourth and final published Clavier-Übung (keyboard exercise or practice) of 1741, theme and variations with canons interspersed (see Clavier-Übung I to IV: Keyboard Publications: scroll down to "Clavier-Übung IV: Goldberg Variations," BCW). The Clavier-Übung starting in 1725 was the second of three major keyboard endeavors which began with the earlier pedagogical and compositional Three Köthen Keyboard Collections (1722-23, BCW) involving the Orgel-Büchlein chorale preludes, BWV 599-644; 2. the Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) preludes and fugues, Book 1, BWV 846-69; and 3. the Aufrichtige Anleitung (Faithful Guide) book of 15 each sinfonias and inventions, BWV 772-801, and concluding in the 1740s with the WTC Book 2, BWV 870-893, and the "Great 18" organ chorales, BWV 651-668.
⁴ "The Learned Musician" is the subtitle of Christoph Wolff's decisive Bach biography, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, updated ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), W.W. Norton; select Bach keyboard compositions can be considered as applied, practical examples of treatises, most notably the two manuscript books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the four published Clavierübung, as well as the publications in the late 1749s of the Musical Offering, BWV 1079; Schübler Chorales, BWV 645-50; and the Canonic Variations on "Von Himmel hoch," BWV 768, and the posthumous publication of the Art of Fugue, BWV 1080 — annual examples of his work for the Mizler scientific society of composers, BCW.
⁵ Other keyboard sources: Varwig cites thoroughbass realization in keyboard chorale-based pedagogy (Ibid.: 119), reference to Derek Remeš (Ibid.: 4) and Works Cited of Remeš (Ibid.: 378; see also Bach Bibliography, Bach-Bibliographie; see also Keyboard Music: Historical Background, 1600-1750, BCW.
⁶ The four Clavier-Übung publication begins with the inscription Denen Liebhabern zur Gemüths Ergötzung verfertigen (For those who love to make it for the pleasure of their hearts, Google Translate), Wikipedia.

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To come: Rethinking Bach, Chapter 6, Isabella van Elferen, "Rethinking Affect" (New Materialism).

Varwig's <Rethinking Bach>, Chapter 6, van Elferen's "Rethinking Affect"

William L. Hoffman wrote (February 27, 2022):
Part II, Bodies, in the new Bach essay collection, Rethinking Bach,¹ concludes with Chapter 6, Isabella van Elferen,² "Rethinking Affect," an interdisciplinary reexamination of the Doctrine of the Affections in German Baroque music, called Affektenlehre (affect theory), "to replace the discredited twentieth century myth of Affektenlehre with an approach to affect that is simultaneously more in tune with Baroque thinking that takes inspiration from the vast body of contemporary scholarship on affect," says van Elferen. Now, it is "musical affect as a corporeal-material force," says Bettina Varwig, editor of Rethinking Bach in her Introduction, "(Still) Talking about Bach" (Ibid.: 3). Van Elferen addresses the "Doctrine of the Affections" (Wikipedia) with "musical affect as a new perspective on what musicology has tended to isolate historically under the umbrella of German baroque rhetoric" (Ibid.; 141).³ The first section, "Affektenlehre" (Ibid.: 141-45), seeks to "sketch a historiography of hermeneutic views" as originally promulgated at the beginning of the 20th century by German musicologists. "I investigate the ways" they "developed views on affect in German Baroque music, the relation of these views to the historical situation, and their role in Bach studies." These are discussed in the succeeding sections: "Rethinking the Doctrine" (Ibid.: 145-52), 'The Affective Turn" (Ibid.: 152-54), "Toward an affective Turn in Bach Studies" (Ibid.: 155-57; and "The Vital Fold of Musical Affect" (Ibid.: 157-161). Says van Elferen (Ibid.: 141); "Taking into account early modern affect theories as well as modern philosophies of affect based upon them, the final paragraphs aim to achieve an understanding of affect that is more in line with contemporary musical practice and theory. The chapter proposes an approach to affect in German Baroque music, and Bach's music in particular, that takes into account the ways in which affect was (and is) material rather than cerebral, spontaneous rather than mimetic, unpredictable and changeable rather than representational and decodable." "The aim of Baroque musical rhetoric was movere, which meant that music ought to move the human affects."

Affektenlehre Pioneers

She begins by deconstructing the challenges of Affektenlehre, outlining the pioneering efforts of German musicologists Hermann Kretzschmar and Arnold Schering in essays on affect, then the recent studies of Rolf Dammann and Dietrich Bartel on Baroque musical rhetoric, as well as treatises on the "links between music, rhetoric, and affect" from Michael Praetorius to Johann Mattheson, examining stylized affects,⁴ says van Elferen (Ibid.: 142). Historical musicology considers affect "as a stylized aesthetic concept offering of musical representation of human emotion." The original Baroque concept of affect she finds very literal, exclusive, and simplistic with few corporeal manifestations, particularly when old treatises are examined by contemporary musicologists from a pervasive hermeneutics perspective. She cites (Ibid.: 143f) the sorrow of the closing chorus, "Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder" (We sit down with tears), from the St. Matthew Passion and the joyous "Sanctus" from the B-Minor Mass.⁵ Because van Elferen finds a "dichotomy between the strict determinism of hermeneutics and the complete relativism of individual variance," she s considers "a history of Affeketenlehre with the aim of achieving an approach to affect that can lead us out of this dichotomy" (Ibid.: 145).

Rethinking the Doctrine (of the Affections)

In the next section, "Rethinking the Doctrine" (Ibid.: 145ff), van Elferen finds that the term Affeketenlehre "was not widely used in the Baroque" and that the romantic Wagnerian perspective of emotive significance directly (Ibid.: 146f) influenced the Affeketenlehre pursuit at the beginning of the 20th century. She resurrects the treatises of Bach contemporaries Mattheson and Johann David Heinichen "as evidence of the prevalence of affects in Baroque music" subsequently transformed "to music as a form of mimesis and representation, and from early twentieth-century music education to analytical methodology." She examines the work of Kretzschmar (Ibid.: 145-47), Schering and Gotthold Fritscher (1926) (Ibid.: 147) as well as the later work between 1950 and 2000 of "(i)nfluential scholars" Dammann and Bartel plus Renate Steiger, Arnold Schmitz, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, and Arno Forchert, who found "more sources from the German Baroque, studied period rhetoric and composition, and demonstrated that Figuren and Affekte were intricately connected to the rhetorical aims of persuasiveness and movere" (147). 'The focus of this hermeneutics was often the music of Bach, in whose works the Affektenlehre was considered to have reached its zenith" (148). Steiger coined the term "hermeneutics plus" to show "those moments in which Bach's music exceeded textual expression," shows van Elferen (Ibid.: 148), "that music in those cases simply "does what the text means." She then finds that "The hermeneutic approach to Baroque musical affect, which culminated in the notion of a fixed Affektenlehre, has met with criticism⁶ since the early twentieth century, citing Fritz Stege, Peter Hoyt, and especially Roger Grant, George J. Buelow, and Daniel Chua (148f). "And while they acknowledge that 'music cannot be held down to a fixed meaning'," says van Elferen (Ibid.: 149), "Bruce Haynes and Geoffrey Burgess⁷ search for 'enduring truths of human emotion that can . . . approach the original meanings' of Bach cantatas." The Baroque treatises are lacking substantial "lists of codified emotions," and "can be summed up in a disenchantingly short space," she finds. She cites (Ibid.: 150), the noted work of Athanasius Kircher, Joachim Burmeister, Johann Gottfried Walther, Wolfgang Caspar Prinz, Andreas Herbst, and Andreas Werckmeister, finding few mentions of "enumerations of musical affects," "lopi topici" (Thoughts Co.), "rhetorical figures," and other pertinent musical descriptions.⁸ Van Elferen finds that "there was no doctrine of the affections" and it "simply did not exist in the Baroque." After reviewing the various meanings of the suffix -Lehre, van Elferen concludes (Ibid.: 151): "Kretzschmar's term Affektenlehre would thus more adequately have been translated "collected knowledge pertaining to the affections" rather than "doctrine pertaining to the affections." She concludes the section, "Rethinking the Doctrine": the conception of musical affect that underpins" the mythical 20th century doctrine of affections is arguably flawed." Thus, the next section, "The Affective Turn" (Ibid.: 152-54), looks at "notions of affect" current in the Baroque which regained interest in the 20th century, "outlining the ways in which these notions may help adjust the musicological understanding of affect as coded emotional representation," she says (Ibid.: 152).

The Affective Turn

Although affect "was firmly grounded" in German Baroque philosophical thought, says van Elferen (Ibid.: 152), it "is strikingly different from that used" by 20th century proponents of the Affektenlehre. Instead of a cognitive cerebral phenomenon, affect was perceived as the physical action of the mind and body, "connected by perceptions of the senses, which sent vibrations to the soul through the fluids in the body and the nerves," teachings reaching back to the Greeks and related to the four temperaments or humors (Wikipedia), "a mechanistic view." Thus, affect was not an isolated, static state but a distinction, citing Spinoza's 1677 Ethics,⁹ between affection (affectio) and affect (affectus) as fluid actions. Further, emotion had just one in a range of manifestations and in many writings, affect "was not considered universal" among people and activities. "Emotion as one form of affect was far from unified." Now, citing Brian Massumi's 1995 article, "The Autonomy of Affect," van Elferen (153) and the 20th century's "affective turn" in the humanities, she goes on to suggest "that affect should be seen as an emergent potential or property that connects bodies and minds with broader networks of agencies and events," both interior and exterior to the human body. Affect conflates the body to the world around it, creating "networks of connected [affective] events," she says, citing Jane Bennet's 2010 Vibrant Matter, which "explores agency across the boundaries separating body, and mind, life and matter." She finds (Ibid.: 154) distinctions between Baroque definitions of affect and traditional affect in historical musicology: Affect is corporeal and mental, not static but fluid, not predictable but changeable, not restricted to emotion and humans; "therefore affect cannot be coded as the representation of human emotions." She advocates restoring to Baroque affect its "disturbing, unpredictable, distributed agency." In the final two sections, "Towards an Affective Turn in Bach Studies" (Ibid.: 155-57) and "The Vital Fold of Musical Affect" (Ibid.: 157-61), "I will study the ways in which Baroque affect philosophy was negotiated in Baroque music theory, and subsequently explore the ways in which contemporary affect theory can enhance historical musicology."

Towards an Affective Turn in Bach Studies

The penultimate section, "Towards an Affective Turn in Bach Studies," examines the Baroque era concept of affect as a "lively material event," beyond stylized emotions, says van Elferen (Ibid.; 155) with the corporeal dimensions of music "embedded in mechanistic conceptions" and "especially apparent in the affective movements stirred by musical experience." These musical affections "were described in [early modern] contemporary medical, musical, and devotional literature as simultaneously corporeal and mental, leading to a very different approach to understanding how Bach's music affected his congregational listeners," she says, citing a recent article by Bettina Varwig.¹⁰ Van Elferen again cites (Ibid.: 156) pertinent treatises (Ibid.: 150) and Spinoza (Ibid.: 152-54), as well as the Four Temperaments where Kircher and Johann Kuhnau (Bach's Leipzig predecessor) showed that "no two listeners are the same," "each temperament lead to different affective responses to music," and are unpredictable.¹¹ "The affective turn that galvanized early modern affect theory for cultural research is beginning to be explored in musical terms," she observes, citing Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle's 2013 essay collection, Music, Sound, Affect.¹² The essays, says van Elferen (Ibid.: 156) "explore the affective registers of sonic experience through the musical shaping of physical, psychological, aesthetic, social and political motion." She discusses musicology's struggle with "romantic notions of musical autonomy and the extra-musical" (Ibid.: 157).

The Vital Fold of Musical Affect

in the final section, Jane Bennett's "vital materialist affect philosophy holds an exciting potential for musicology and for our approaches to the music of Bach in particular," van Elferen says. She brings to bare context of vital materialism in German Baroque music, discussing the Johann Adolph Scheibe (BCW) dedication poem for Mattheson's Capellmeister.. "Music of the German Baroque, of course, wallows in the strongest of effective encounters," says van Elferen (Ibid.: 159), citing the chorus "Sind Blitze, Sind Donner" from the St. Matthew Passion (YouTube). The music impacts the senses as well as the listener's body, "and that experience can lead to visual, emotional, and mnemonic imaginations related to storms, violence, or Passion theology alike," she says. She proceeds to discuss a philosophy of intensity based on the work of philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, reliant on "the ongoing motion of Baroque forms," interpreted as an amalgam of thinking, aesthetics and metaphor, based on Gilles Deleuze's The Fold: Leibnitz, and the Baroque.¹² "The Baroque endlessly produces folds" and "the Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity" and she observes: "This perpetual organic folding of lines, in Baroque arts and thinking alike, is vibrant, vital, and affective." Deleuze's "conception of the Baroque, we would argue, turns the vital motion of counterpoint into the musical form of the fugue," she says (Ibid.; 160f), where "polyphony is perpetually folding, unfolding, and refolding, leading to countless affective encounters." Her proposal is "to replace the discredited twentieth-century myth of the Affektenlehre with an approach to affect" (160) that is both "more in tune with Baroque thinking and that takes inspiration from the vast body of contemporary scholarship on affect," paying "closer attention to the many corporeal, imaginative, and unexpected aspects of the music of Bach and his contemporaries" involving rhythm, "aesthetic intensities," "and to the articulation of a discourse that addresses" both the vague and the immediate. Avoiding the discernment of representational meanings, the listening "can experience all manner of things heard and unheard." "Performing or hearing Bach can become an experience of being corporeally and spiritually affected by the singularity of the vibrant musical events he created. We cannot predict or control these affections: precisely this ungraspable, emergent quality is arguably the joy of listening to music" in a musical assemblage of Bach and us as "co-creators of affect" in "the vital folds of Bach's music."

Post Script: 20th Century Theatrical Affect

The related 20th century's experience with theatrical affect in acting is examined in Isaac Butler's The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, 2022; Amazon.com), reviewed by Alexandra Schwartz, "What's My Motivation," in The New Yorker, Feb. 7, 2022: 60-65), NewYorer. In 1931, director Lee Strasberg "conducted Stanislavski-style improvisations to help actors feels their way organically through a scene's action, and he taught exercises related to two kinds of memory: sense and affective," says Schwartz (65). Sense memory is related to concepts such as corporeal "muscle memory" (see also BCW: "Rethinking Bach, Bettina Varwig, Chapter 5, "Embodied Invention; Bach at the Keyboard," paragraph "Thinking (and) Matter," "Embodied Variations") and "body language." "Affective, or emotional, memory is trickier. Stanislavsi was convinced that people form emotional impressions as well as physical ones; the task, for actors, was figuring out how to conjure up specific feelings on command." "Strasberg had been taught to take note of his feelings, as they spontaneously arose, then to associate them with a stimulus from the past — a trigger." While the acting "Method" techniques widely varied among so-called practitioners (65) such as plumbing inner depth (Strasberg) or a "kind of imagination (Stella Adler), "The old method was about paring back, stripping down. In the new method, more is more," says Schwartz, who concludes: "Acting changes, and so do actors; so does realism."

ENDNOTES

¹Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), Amazon.com: "Look inside."
² Isabella van Elferen]: brief biography, Amazon.com: "Look inside": xiv; Bach Bibliography, Bach-Bibliographie. Van Elferen's major contribution to Bach studies is Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music, Contextual Bach Studies No 2, ed. Robin A. Leaver (Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), Amazon.com, see BCW: "Unio Mystica, Bach"; in her Chapter 6 essay (Ibid.: 141) van Elferen cites this book's Chapter 3 (71-81), "Affective Expression in Poetry and Music," which is an effective introduction to the topic.
³ The concept of a single emotion (affect) in music came from arias in Baroque opera seria, notably the genre of rage arias (Wikipedia) such as "Why do the nations" in Handel's Messiah (YoiuTube); a sub-genre is the "mock rage" aria, such as "Rase nur, verwegner Schwarm" (Rage on, presumptuous swarm), in Bach's profane congratulatory serenade, BW 215 of 1734, set as a da-capo satirical song against the Saxon King's detractors in a sprightly 3/8 bourrée (BCW); also, the sorrowful modified da-capo aria, "Es ist vollbracht!" (It is accomplished!), at Jesus death in the St. John Passion has a contrasting middle "B" section emphasizing the triumph of the Johannine Christus Victor, "Der Held aus Juda siegt mit Macht" (The hero from Judah triumphs in his might), ref. YouTube.
⁴ A recent study of one-affect theory is Robin A. Leaver's Chapter 5."Bach and the Cantata Controversy in the Early Eighteenth Century," in Bach Studies: Liturgy, Hymnology, and Theology (Abingdon UK: Routledge, 2021); Amazon.com; discussions, BCW BCW; paragraphs "Cantatas Libretto Disputes" and "Rhetoric To Move Emotions."
⁵ Stylized affects were traced back to Greek writers and part of the process could involve the four temperaments or humors (Wikipedia) with variant perspectives and applications.
⁶ Affektenlehre criticism is found in the Bach Bibliography listing under "Affektenlehre," Bach-Bibliographie.
⁷ See Bruce Haynes anGeoffrey Burgess, The Pathetick Musician: Moving an Audience in the Age of Eloquence (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2016), Amazon.com: "Look inside," and Oxford University Press. David Kjar's review of The Pathetick Musician, "A Revival for Bach Revivalists" in Bach Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, Vol. 49, No. 2 (2018), pp. 425-428), Jstor, finds the study of rhetorical devices in select recordings of Bach's vocal works yields "a growing reception history of mid- to late-twentieth-century 'early musicking,' rich in firsthand narratives and preserved soundscapes." "The interpretive endeavor will certainly resonate with early music performers and listeners who strive on a daily basis to reimagine music silenced long ago" (428).
⁸ Van Elferen also cites early composer-theorist Christoph Bernhardt (BCW), whose major work, Die Kompositionslehre Heinrich Schützens in der Fassung seines Schülers Christoph Bernhard (The Composition Theory of Heinrich Schütz in the Version of his Pupil Christoph Bernhard), ed. Joseph Maria Müller-Blattau (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1926), is available at Bärenreiter, Bärenreiter.
⁹ On the Improvement of the Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (new York : Dover, 1955); "The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural Critique 31 (1995: 83-109); Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham NC; Duke University Press, 2010.
¹⁰ Bettina Varwig, "Heartfelt Musicking: The Physiology of a Bach Cantata," in Representations 143 (2018: 35-62), University of Cambridge; Abstract: "This essay proposes a somatic archaeology of German Lutheran music making around 1700. Focusing on a single cantata [BWV 199] by Johann Sebastian Bach, it sets out to reconstruct the capacities of early modern body-souls for musical reverberation, affective contagion, and spiritual transformation." Varwig's Bach Bibliography (Bach-Bibliographie), also in Rethinking Bach, Works Cited (Ibid.: 383) are articles on Bach's Passions, Cantata 82, and related topics. Recent scholarship has accepted music's plural application as "musics" and musical activity as "musicking."
¹¹ One-affect theory, its Lutheran origins, and use in Bach's time is studied in Robin A. Leaver, "Bach and the Cantata Controversy in the Early Eighteenth Century," in Bach Studies: Liturgy, Hymnology, and Theology (Abingdon UK: Routledge, 2021), Amazon.com; see critique (BCW), paragraphs "Cantatas Libretto Disputes" and "Rhetoric To Move Emotions."
¹² Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle, "Introduction: Somewhere between the Signifying and the Sublime," in Music, Sound, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, eds. Thompson & Biddle (London: Bloomsbury: 2013: 6), Amazon.com; "Look inside."
¹³ Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibnitz, and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 1993: 3), Amazon.com: "Look inside"; University of Minnesota Press.

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To come: Varwig's Rethinking Bach, Part III, Meanings; Chapter 7, Jeremy Begbie, "Bach and Theology."

<<Rethinking Bach>>, Part III, Meanings; Chapter 7, Jeremy Begbie, "Bach and Theology"

William L. Hoffman wrote (March 9, 2022):
The first chapter in Part III, Meanings, in the recent essay collection, Rethinking Bach, is Chapter 7, Jeremy Begbie's, "Bach and Theology." The collection's editor, Bettina Varwig, frames the discussion in her Introduction (Ibid.: 3f): A "two-way process can be envisaged with regard to Bach and certain strands of theological thought. Notwithstanding the venerable tradition of theological Bach interpretation since the early twentieth century, Bach scholarship still has a lot to gain from paying more serious attention to the work of historical as well as systematic theologians; conversely, as Jeremy Begbie argues, certain musical qualities that are perhaps crystallized especially clearly in Bach's output can enliven key debates within theological discourse: for instance, (Ibid.: 4) about the "thinking together" of apparently non-congruent realities or beliefs. Once more, it becomes clear that Bach research can productively speak outward, as well as being reshaped substantively by that exchange with well-intentioned neighbors." From a historical theology perspective, Begbie's perspective is to emphasize "biblical exegesis and systematic theology (the study of the main loci of Christian belief and their interrelation)," he says (Ibid.: 170). Begbie in the first two sections examines two significant related topics in Bach theological scholarship "to enrich Bach studies" and "elicit a more nuanced and profound hearing of Bach's music": the sections on "Anti-Judaism and John's Gospel" (Ibid.: 170-75) and "Time and Eternity" (Ibid.: 175-79). "In the last part of the chapter [Thinking Together], I turn the tables and consider what Bach can bring to the theologian; ways in which exploring his music can enable theology to be more truthful and better attuned to the subject," he says (Ibid.: 170), in the sections "Creation and Creativity" (Ibid.: 180-83) and "Multiple Trajectories" (Ibid.; 183-85) with a final refection (Ibid.: 185f).

Bach and Theology

Bach followers have found the significant importance of theology in the shaping of Bach's works since his death in 1750, particularly in his sacred cantata legacy of more than 200 works, as well as the extended feast day and Passion oratorios, as "musical sermons." Begbie's provocative article advances this discussion beginning with a historical review of recent theological scholarship since the Bach tricentenary of 1985 (Ibid.: 169), citing Irish musicologist Harry White.² This Begbie points out, in light of the continuing "wariness of importing anything theological into Bach scholarship" "in some quarters," in contrast to previous debates concerning Bach's piety (dating to mid-20th century), as well "strained theological readings of his music." Begbie also cites the John Butt 2006 perspective³ of "returning to forms of expression and enquiry that were relatively recently outlawed by high modernism; biography, meaning, even religious elements in music." Specifically, Butt points to a restoration "to see him as a figure deeply concerned with his religious calling" (Ibid.: 13). "This is often connected to the articulation of theological points through his music and its interaction with the texts at hand." Now, says Begbie (Ibid.: 170), there are "profound and sensitive treatments of the theological dimensions of Bach appearing in recent years that deserve sustained attention and bode well for the future." Begbie, a trained theologist at Cambridge University who "specializes in the interface between theology and the arts" (Rethinking Bach: xi), first seeks to bridge the historical divide between "by far the majority of studies[that] have come down from historical musicologists, not from professionally trained theologians," while Bach scholars sometimes lack "the degree of theological expertise required to deal in depth with Bach's theology,⁴ and especially the texts he sets," needing "skills in biblical exegesis" and "in handing the distinctiveness and nuances of doctrinal and philosophical language." Second, Begbie finds theological interest in Bach has focused historically on Bach's indebtedness to Martin Luther and Lutheranism⁵ as well as related studies (Ibid.: 170) involving Bach's Lutheran Orthodoxy and Pietism (see Bach-Bibliographie), Lutheran liturgy,⁶ and "how various musical techniques employed by Bach (tonality, structure, rhythm, etc.) participate in the construction of theological meanings, using conventions of symbolism and signification current in his day."⁷ Two other recent Bach studies involve non-traditional pursuits:⁸ "to contextualize Bach's music amid technologically-charged social and cultural movements in 16th and 17th century Europe" by Karol Berger as well as Bach's relationship to the nascent early modern and the German Enlightenment by scholar-performer John Butt.

Anti-Judaism and John's Gospel

"One of the most contentious issues surrounding Bach in current scholarship is his attitude to and portrayal of Judaism," says Begbie (Ibid.: 170), who makes a distinction between "anti-Judaism" and "anti-semitism" (Ibid.: 187, FN 10). A thumbnail sketch of Lutheran theology in 19th and 20th century Germany, particularly as found in the Turbae crowd choruses⁹ of Bach's St. John Passion, suggests that disputes around "the ideology of modern anti-Semitism," says Begbie (Ibid.: 171), "have been hampered by anachronisms" involving the historical conflation and contiguity of chronology and attitude. Close attention to John's unique, non-synoptic Gospel text in Bach's musical meditation and enactment, not a "commentary," can "illuminate and clarify many of the contested matters in the debates," especially regarding "anti-Judaism," showing Bach "as a rather more subtle and independent figure in his time." Beyond a dualistic, "either-or" debate between "exegesis of text" against "affective impact," Begbie argues for a more integral, multifaceted approach such as the "homiletic context of the work," as found in Robin A. Leaver's essay.¹⁰ The matter of anti-Judaism has achieved "sustained attention" in the St. John Passion and other Bach works from Bach scholar Michael Marissen.¹¹ Begbie finds Marissen's "reading questionable," citing various authorities (Ibid.: 172, FN 25), and urging "a wider theological perspective assumed by John." "The figures and symbols of Israel are thus reworked around a person believed to have been active in and through them in the past, and who embodies them now in the flesh." Begbie questions conflating all Jews (Ibid.; 173) while observing that "the pattern of rejection" "was very much part of Israel's history." Begbie cites John 12:47 that Jesus is the light of the world "not to judge the world but to save the world," also known as the Christus Victor (Wikipedia) Theology of Glory, whose sacrificial death represents the satisfaction theory of atonement. Considering Bach alongside Luther's favorite Gospel translation in John's Gospel, Luther's Theology of the Cross (Wikipedia), and Bach's St. John Passion, Begbie urges debates more precise and theological which lead to "theological themes and accents we might otherwise miss" (Ibid.: 174).

Time and Eternity: Bach Cantatas, Berger, Butt Two important topics in Bach's theology, "Time and Eternity," are the subject of the second section. Contemporary symbolism in non-traditional studies with systematic theology "(often drawing upon philosophy)" (Ibid.: 175)¹² are explored (see FN 8) in Karol Berger's Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (175-78) and John Butt's Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (178f). Berger deals only with major Bach works supporting his intellectual premise of the 1750 pivotal end of one era and the beginning of another, from a cyclical spiritual world to a linear, rational, enlightened domain, essentially shifting from the sphere of traditional, repetitive connections and reaffirmations to the intellectual arena of presumed progress and seeming perfection. Butt's book is an intellectual exploration primarily involving the St. Matthew Passion in its three temporal levels (gospel narrative, Lutheran congregational chorales, and contemporary poetic commentary), as well as a general study of contemplative engagement in the world. Regrettably, neither author (Berger, Butt) refers to the textures of time so essential to Bach cantatas and oratorios as musical sermons, related to past, present, and future perspectives, while Begbie alludes to some topics such as the Johannine Cosmic Christ (Ibid.: 176) and theology in Cantata 103 (see below). Time is the theme of one of Bach's first, albeit old-fashioned, cantatas, BWV 106,¹³ with its title, "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit" (God's Time is the very best time, ref. Acts 17:28), a memorial vocal concerto of 1707 (Actus tragicus) in Bach's favored symmetrical form. Here are various biblical allusions and chorale quotations, as well as specific references to Simeon's canticle, Nunc dimittis (Luke 2:29), and two Lukan Passion quotations of Christ from the cross: "Into your hands I commit my spirit" (23:46) and "Today you will be with me in paradise" (23:42). Cantatas representative of the theme of eternity, based upon the chorale, "O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort" (O eternity, word of thunder) by Johann Rist (text, BCW), are BWV chorale Cantata 20 (BCW, YouTube) for the first Sunday after Trinity 1724 in a hymn-text meditation, and Dialogue Cantata 60 (BCW, YouTube) for the 24th Sunday after Trinity 1723 as a musical sermon on the day's Gospel, Jesus’ “Raising of Jairus’s daughter” (Matthew 9;18-26).

Berger's Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow

Begbie describes Berger's Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow (Ibid.; 175) as "an account of different perceptions of time in modernity, as played out in music. To summarize: between Bach and Mozart he detects a shift from 'circular' to 'linear time'." Begbie cites Berger's view of the monumental opening chorus in Bach's St. Matthew Passion, "Kommt, ihr Töchter" (Come, you daughters, YouTube), with its da capo return, "creating a synthesizing culmination" representing a "simultaneity of the present" in its three levels of time involving a "temporality of contemplation," i.e. "timeless eternity," also known as God's Time. "The earthly life of Jesus is understood by the New Testament writers as enclosed within eternity — he is the enfleshment of the eternal Logos," says Begbie citing Berger (Ibid.: 176). This Christological incarnation described in John's Gospel Prologue (Chapter 1, Bible Gateway) as that "He was with God in the beginning³"and "In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.⁵ '' [Here is the concept of the Cosmic Christ (Wikipedia) or, as Richard Rohr¹⁴ says, "Long before Jesus's personal incarnation, Christ was deeply embedded in all things."] Here is "Bach's fondness for cyclic structures," says Begbie (Ibid.), involving "his relative indifference to the temporal ordering of musical events" and "behind Bach's privileging of ha." [This "fondness" includes the Bach five cycles of church pieces (see BCW) with three cycles of church-year cantatas, the palindrome (mirror, symmetrical) rhetorical structure of many of Bach's major vocal works, and the da-capo repeat/return (ABA) in arias and instrumental music.] Begbie describes at length (Ibid.: 176-178) Berger's perspective on the Christian worldview and challenges to it and to advocate no arbitrary conflation of Christian perspective to Bach but "to suggest a greater sensitivity to a biblical-creedal construal of time and eternity" that can reveal certain "aspects of Bach's works," he says (Ibid.; 178). Begbie turns briefly to John Butt's Bach's Dialogue with Modernity (Ibid.: 179) to suggest that the contemplative sections of the St. Matthew Passion can encourage the listener "to be more fully involved with God's purposes in time." In contrast to Berger, Butt finds "that the sense of 'linear, passing time' is in fact vivid and pronounced much more than in the St. John Passion" while both Passions "exhibit a musical incompleteness that reaches out to a not-yet-realized fulfillment," says Begbie (Ibid.).

Thinking Together: "Creation and Creativity"

In the closing part of his essay, Thinking Together, Begbie seeks to "explore two ways in which the study of Bach might benefit theology" (Ibid.: 180), instead of the reverse previously considered. He suggests accepting various theological paradoxes such as "God and world, God's presence and absence, the divinity and humanity of Christ" [the Christus Paradox, "truly God and truly man"], etc." He advocates a "jolt of the intellectual imagination." Two thematic examples involving Bach's music are presented. In the next section, "creation and creativity," the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, he examines the "relation between the activity of human making," "such as forming and manipulating musical sounds), and the integrity of the materials out of which something is made (sound-producing bodies, vibrating strings, vocal chords, etc)," says Begbie (Ibid.: 180). Scholar-performer Peter Williams¹⁵ finds this exemplary, "special" harpsichord music with beauty that is both original and (rare in Bach) accessible, based on simple "truthful harmonies." This Aria with 30 Variations, "composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits" (Denen Liebhabern zur Gemüths- Ergetzung verfertiget) as the title page says, "is a world of experience otherwise unknown," especially in the repeat of the opening thematic aria at the end where its "aura is different," changing from "a greeting to a farewell, from elegantly promising to sadly concluding." From its conception to its realization, the music challenges assumptions of creativity, originality, and discovery. "Butt¹⁶ argues that Bach encompasses both premodern and modern sensibilities," says Begbie (Ibid.: 181), from Bach's traditional, pre-modern religious outlook to "a more typically modern accent on the immense possibilities of human making." Each third variation in the 30 is a canon, following an ascending pattern from unison to the ninth interval, "polyphonic music as an exemplar of the unity and diversity pervading the cosmos," suggests Begbie (Ibid.: 191, FN 69). Begbie cites Butt in another publication¹⁷ as seeking a balance "in conjecturing about Bach's own view of the task of composition (and performance) from a sparse array of verbal documents, and on the other in surmising what his music and certain tendencies in his compositional output may tell us," says Butt (1997, Ibid.: 46). Bach's "inventive, constructive powers" Butt stresses in Bach's Dialogue with Modernity (2010, Ibid.: 75), are "symptomatic of the emerging modernity of his time," says Begbie (Ibid.: 182), with a "fast-growing confidence that nature can (and requires to) be brought to new levels of splendor through human creativity and industriousness," "imitating not so much nature as the author of nature," with Bach's own spiritual underpinnings and while avoiding the slippery slope of human perfection and contemporary zero-sum thinking. Begbie offers two caveats in this discussion. First, that "cosmic order and human artifice are to be related in competitive terms is a quintessentially modern one." Second, "Bach's music itself constitutes its own kind of challenge to the assumption of an inherent tension between discovery and creativity, through its intense interweaving of coherence," Begbie citing Williams' assessment of the Goldberg Variations (see above, as well as "disclosure through elaborate artifice" (Ibid.: 183).

Multiple Trajectories

"Theologians have frequently wrestled with the problem of holding together different or contrasting dimensions of theological truth," says Begbie at the beginning of the last section, "Multiple Trajectories" (Ibid.: 183-185), especially in the New Testament Gospels. While the read-together synoptic accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are based upon a sole proto-source, the Q (Quelle) document, John's unique final Gospel begins in the Prologue with a wealth of traditions — "echoes of Genesis, Proverbs, Jewish Wisdom" and "(possibly) Stoicism" with "its multiple resonances" and "interplay between levels of meaning a writer like John so obviously intends," says Begbie (Ibid.: 183), that resonated with Bach. "There is good reason to believe that such mono-dimensional approaches would have been resisted by Bach," he says, citing Martin Petzoldt's article, "The Theological in Bach Research."¹⁸ Says the late Petzoldt, the leading Bach scholar-theologian: "The music, as an interpretive text, should suggest spiritually-associated thoughts to the hearers in its own sense and should open up and broaden the available realm of meaning" (Ibid.: 110). Bach "was compelled with his practice of music as given by God to push towards a fullness of understanding," and "this form of dialogical music making was extraordinarily typical for Bach." Begbie returns to the St. Matthew Passion opening chorus, "the curtain raiser" with its dramatic elements and multiplicity of "diverse currents" in "radically contrasting dimensions of textual reference, allusion, and commentary." Simultaneously, there are "four distinct yet concurrent levels of theological commentary, each evoked musically: the opening ritornello of the narrative of "the heavy trudging of Jesus to Crucifixion"; "Daughter Zion calling to witness the sacrifice of Christ"; "the Faithful responding with puzzled questions"; and the soprano singers of the heavenly Jerusalem singing the chorale, "O Lamm Gottes unschuldig" (O Lamb of God innocent), a metrical paraphrase of the "Agnus Dei." This is an expression of the "capacity of music," says Begbie (Ibid.: 184), such as simultaneous aural perception involving "the theological significance of musical simultaneity" and interplay (Ibid.: 192, FN 83) explored much further in Begbie, Music, Modernity, and God.¹⁹ Another work with complex theological commentary is Cantata 103, "Ihr werdet weinen und heulen" (You will weep and howl, John 16:20), for Jubilate (3rd Sunday after Easter), says Begbie (184), "replete with Luther's theology of the cross," and moving from sorrow to joy¹⁹ (see BCW, paragraph beginning "One of the von Ziegler texts, Cantata 103 . . . ."). Here is the integration of sorrow and joy as an "integrated theological perception."

Begbie concludes with "A final reflection" (Ibid.: 185). "There is an engrained wariness in the contemporary academy of 'universalizing the particular'," with theology "likely seen as suspect in this regard, "concerned as it inevitably is with matters universal." "Classical Christian theology — and the Lutheranism of Bach's day — does not downgrade or dissolve the particular in the name of 'universal' truth. What it does do is question any polarization of universal and particular; the assumption that to care about one is to downplay the other." "The contemporary staging of Bach's Passions are very instructive here," says Begbie (Ibid.: 186). "Indeed, I ththey probably tell us much more about our own belief than Bach." This is explored in the final essay in Rethinking Bach, Chapter 14, Michael Markham's "Bach Anxiety: A Meditation on the Future of the Past," says Begbie. In an era where the sacred is secularized and the profane made spiritual, Bach in his time saw no distinction; he readily transformed profane drammi per musica into sacred oratorios, much to the chagrin of some contemporary musicologists (parody is overrated).

ENDNOTES

¹Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), Amazon.com: "Look inside."
² Harry White, "Evangelists of the Postmodern: "Reconfigurations of Bach since 1985," in Understanding Bach 12 (2017: 85-107), © Bach Network UK, Bach Network UK: 87; critique, "Encountering Bach Today: Historical, Listening, Post-Modern," "New Bach Studies: Evangelists of the Modern," BCW.
³ John Butt, "The Postmodern Mindset, Musicology and the Future of Bach Scholarship," in Understanding Bach 1 (2006: 9-18), © Bach Network UK), Bach Network UK: 13).
⁴ Bach's Theology: several facets are explored in the essay, Theology (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/Theology[Hoffman].htm): subjects (sub-headings) with (paragraphs beginning): “Duke Heinrich’s Agenda,” Lutheran services with music, "Bach’s calling for the composition . . . ."; "Martin Petzoldt," leading Bach theologian-scholar, "In the past two decades . . . ."; "Bach's Spirituality and Friedrich Blume," "The impetus for Petzold’s undertaking . . . ."; 'Response," "This lead to many published . . . . " from the Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft für theologische Bach Forschung, cited in Bigbie (Ibid.: 186, FN 5).
⁵ Bach and Lutheranism: Bach bibliography lists 310 articles on Bach and Luther (Bach-Bibliographie) while Begbie cites Jan Chiapusso's Bach's World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968); Indiana University Press, see especially Chapter 3, "Theology in the Classroom (18-27), and Part 3, Bach's Liturgical Art Work (190-229), "Fulfillment of Lutheran Reform" and the chorale, cantata and Passions/oratorios (Indiana University Press); see also Robin A. Leaver, Bach Studies: Liturgy, Hymnology, and Theology (London: Routledge, 2021, Amazon.com), critique, BCW.
⁶ See Robin A. Leaver, Luther's Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmanns Publishing, 2007; Amazon.com).
⁷ "Eric Chafe is perhaps the most obvious example," says Begbie (Ibid.: 187, FN 7), based on these studies: 1. Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J.S. Bach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), Amazon.com; 2. Analyzing Bach Cantatas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Amazon.com; 3. J. S. Bach's Johannine Theology: The St. John Passion and the Cantatas for Spring 1725 (BWV 249, 6, 42, 85; 103, 108, 87, 128, 183, 74, 68, 175, 176) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Amazon.com; 4. Tears into Wine: J. S. Bach's Cantata 21 in its Musical and Theological (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) (plus Weimar Cantatas 61, 63, 152, 182, 12, 172), John Butt review (H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online), Amazon.com, Google Books.
⁸ Bach recent non-traditional studies: Karol Berger, Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), Amazon.com, review, Classical Net; and John Butt, Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Amazon.com, review, Project Muse. Two critiques of Berger and Butt are found at Berger's “There Is No Time Like God’s Time,” Chapter 3, and the forerunner of Butt's book, “Bach’s Passions and the Textures of Time,” in Matthäus-Passion BWV 244: Early History (A Selective, Annotated Bibliography), BCW: Nos. 31, 32.
⁹ Turbae crowd choruses in all Bach's three Passions (John, Matthew, Mark) show that the antagonists choruses (Jews, Chief Priests, Soldiers) are set as extended fugues while the protagonists (People, Disciples) are set homophonically. Crowd choruses unique to John's Gospel are: 16b(23), "Wäre dieser nicht ein Übelthäter" (If he weren't an evildoer); 16d(25), "Wir dürfen niemand töten" (We're not allowed to kill anyone); 18b(29), "Nicht diesen, sondern Barrabam!" (Not this one, but Barabbas!); 21f(38), "Wir haben ein Gesetz, und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben" (We have a law, and according to the law he shall die); 23b, (42.); "Lässest du diesen los, so bist du des Kaisers Freund nicht" ( If you let go of this one, you are not Caesar's friend); 23f. (46.), "Wir haben keinen König aber des Kaisers" (We have no king but Caesar); 25b(50), Schreibe nicht: Der Juden König" (Do not write: The King of the Jews); 27b(54), "Lasset uns den nicht zerteilen" (Let's not tear it).
¹⁰ Robin A. Leaver, "J. S. Bach as Preacher: His Passions and Music in Worship," Church Music Pamphlet Series (St. Louis MO: Concordia Publishing, 1984; cited in Matthäus-Passion BWV 244:
Spiritual Sources of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, BCW); Leaver calls (Ibid.: 32f) Bach's homiletic oratorio Passions "Sermons in Sound" that prepare for the actual preaching at the Good Friday Vespers with all five rhetorical elements of a sermon and without the need to read the Gospel account of the Passion before the sermon between the two parts of the music which contain the Passion gospel. Bach's Passions are kerygmatic, says Leaver (Ibid.: 25f), proclaiming Jesus as Christhrough the portrayal of his suffering, in contrast to the turbulent, vehement crowd choruses, particularly in Bach's St. John Passion.
¹¹ Michael Marissen: Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion: With an Annotated Literal Translation of the Libretto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Amazon.com, review, NY Times; in Bach and God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016: Amazon.com), "Bach's St. John Passion and the Jews" (151-157) and Cantata 46 in "Bach's Cantatas and 'the Jews' in the Gospel of John" (122-148); and "Johann Sebastian Bach Was More Religious Than You Might Think," in New York Times (March 30, 2018; NY Times).
¹²"I present a much fuller account of this theme in relation to Bach," says Begbie (Ibid.: 189, FN 39), with "Time and Eternity: Richard Bauckham and the Fifth Evangelist," in In the Fullness of Time: Essays on Christology, Creation, and Eschatology in Honour of Richard Bauckham, ed. Daniel M. Gurtner et al (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmanns, 2016: 29-48), Eeerdamword Blog.
¹³ For an in-depth understanding of the ingredients in Cantata 106, see Bach Cantatas Website Discussion, BCW; music, YouTube.
¹⁴ Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019: 13f), Amazon.com; see also, Center for Action and Contemplation.
¹⁵ Peter Williams, The Goldberg Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001: 1); (YouTube; article, Wikipedia).
¹⁶ See John Butt, Music Education and the Art of Performance in the German Baroque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Amazon.com.
¹⁷ John Butt, "Bach's metaphysics of music," in The Cambridge Companion to Bach, ed. John Butt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997: 46-59), Cambidge University Press.
¹⁸ Martin Petzoldt, "The Theological in Bach Research," trans. Mark A.Peters, in Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach, eds. Mark A. Peters & Reginald Sanders; Contextual Bach Studies No. 8, edited by Robin A.Leaver (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2018: 110), Amazon.com; commentary, BCW: "Theological Context," especially paragraph beginning "Finally, from an historical perspective . . . ."
¹⁹ Jeremy Begbie, Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening; chap 6, "Room of One's Own? Music, Space, and Freedom" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013: 141ff), Amazon.com.
¹⁹Another use of sorrow with joy involves the closing "rest in the grave" choruses from the Bach Passions, blending texts of grief with triple-time dance music: John, "Ruht wohl, ihr heiligen Gebeine" (Rest in peace, you sacred limbs), as a menuett YouTube; Matthew, "Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder" (We sit down with tears), as a saraband (YouTube), and Mark, "Bey deinem Grab und Leichen-Stein / Will ich mich stets, mein Jesus, weiden" (By thy rock grave and great tombstone, will I myself, my Jesus, pasture), as a gigue. Bach blends both time worlds, using Ecclesiastes 3:4, "a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;" (KJV), music, YouTube.

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To come: Rethinking Bach, Chapter 8, David Yearsley, "Bach the Humorist."

Zachary Uram wrote (March 10, 2022):
[To William L. Hoffman] Thank you William for another well-documented and in-depth post!

The topic of Bach and theology is of great interest to me as a Reformed Protestant. I think it's rather ridiculous to say Bach's music is anti-Judaism, this is like saying the moon is anti-sun. Christianity grew out of Judaism, Christ is a Jew, The 12 Disciples and later Paul were all Jews, but Christian faith represents a clear inflection point away from a strictly Judaic paradigm to something which is still Jewish yet altogether different. If Jesus really is the prophesied Messiah then the Apostles were the most fully realized Jews! And to discuss the Gospels, which form the libretto of Bach's music, as being anti-Judaic or even worse anti-Semitic represents in my view a flawed analysis and a shallow understanding of the Gospels and their authors. Paul clearly says he would even renounce his own personal salvation if it could save his fellow Jews whom he so loved. That doesn't sound like a man who is anti-Judaism. Functionally any serious departure from Second Temple Judaism would be, according to such critics as Michael Marissen, anti-Judaic. Which is itself an absurd position to take. In mathematics, we build on a foundation of knowledge to advance into greater knowledge. We don't say algebra is inferior to calculus. We don't say calculus is anti-algebra!

Some people are looking for some intent or dark motives of discrimination in the Biblical texts which just doesn't exist. Yes, one's Judaism would change substantially if they, as a Jew, became a Christian, but part of your fundamental identity is still rooted in Jewishness and the Judaism of your fathers. This reminds me of when Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ came out and some Jewish groups claimed it was explicitly anti-semitic since it portrayed Jews as being hateful towards Jesus and harsh in their judgment of him. I have seen this film several times, and have talked to some Jewish friends who saw it and they didn't see this "obvious" anti-semitism. If we become so sensitive in our discourse we cannot portray events in a historical and accurate way without seeing prejudice because of the cold hard facts, then we fall into a very dangerous place such as censorship and modern Cancel Culture. Where it's not sufficient to be opposed to racism, one must subscribe to anti-racism as codified by Critical Race Theorists.

Would these groups who see anti-Semitism in Bach be satisfied if Bach had butchered the Biblical text the way Thomas Jefferson did with his Bible? Would they be finally satisfied? I think not. Then we'd hear complaints of how Jews are not being given enough of a prominent role. It never ends. Such "critics" cannot be satisfied. Being Jewish was from the beginning about Abraham's covenant obedience before God, his faith in God's Word. By that frame of reference, every Christianis a spiritual Jew. In fact, we Gentiles are grafted into the tree. We don't have specific cultural practices or religious rituals. But I see Jews and Christians as being able to call upon the same God. To become truly one People in Christ whether born Jewish or Christian. Back to Bach's music. I think we must be sensitive to the feelings of various groups who have an interest at stake. We should welcome their respectful criticism and use it as a means of establishing greater mutual understanding and respect. This doesn't mean we label Bach personally or artistically as an anti-semite or even an anti-Judaite without very strong proof. Bach is not here to defend himself. I know that Bach loved a Jew above all others. I have not seen in Bach's Calov Bible even the faintest or remote hint of anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism. Nor in his extant letters. Bach's music speaks for yourself. If you are listening to this beautiful transcendent music of the St. John Passion and your strongest impression is "This is anti-Semitic!" then I posit that reveals far more problems with the listener than it does with Bach or his music.

So in summation, if you want to use such extremely damning (culturally, intellectually, religiously) accusations against a person whether it is Bach or a contemporary you better have a very sound case based on irrefutable proof! In my considered view, Bach was no anti-Semite or anti-Judaic (which is a very badly developed category error) in his personal beliefs, nor expressed in his music.

<<Rethinking Bach>>, Chapter 8, David Yearsley, "Bach the Humorist"

William L. Hoffman wrote (March 18, 2022):
While the recent essay collection in Rethinking Bach,¹ Chapter 7, Jeremy Begbie's "Bach and Theology", has strands of meanings that enhance certain musical qualities, the next essay, Chapter 8, David Yearsley's "Bach the Humorist," examines a radically different subject often avoided in Bach scholarship. In contrast to Bach's works' "supposed profundity, did the composer's music indeed lack a sense of humor?," asks the collection's editor, Bettina Varwig, in her "Introduction: (Still) Talking about Bach" (Ibid.: 4). She cites "a deliberate tuning out of the sometimes subtle, sometimes raucous hilarity that infused both Bach's social life and his musical vocabulary." This "not only delimits our listening experiences and range of performing styes, but also ultimately dehumanizes his music by divorcing it from the lived realities of its creation and reception." "Such challenges to certain long-standing tropes in Bach reception may well bring about gradual shifts in what 'Bach' can and does stand for in the Western cultural imagination." Yearsley's "Bach the Humorist" begins with an early historical reception history of the lighter side of Bach and selective Bach works, primarily keyboard works, as well as the contemporary moralists written perspective. Yearsley selectively reveals humor at length in the first Brandenburg Concerto, especially involving the hunting horns, and briefly the Goldberg Variations closing Quodlibet. The next section below, "Critique/Commentary," shows that contextual concerns provide a broader and deeper perspective on certain elements in the first Brandenburg Concerto, such as the original version, "Sinfonia in F," BWV 1046.1, opening Bach's first "modern" Cantata 208 of 1713 with its important ingredients representative of the interests at the duchy of Saxe-Weißenfels such as Tafelmusik, the Arcadian neo-classical literary style, the importance of the horn in German musical style and the use of the horn in other Bach's works. Also considered are the influential lyrics of poets Christian Heinrich Postel and Christian Friedrich Hunold (pen-name Menantes) on Bach's music and a concluding view below of "Bach and Mannerism."

Bach Humor: Historical Perspective, Selective Works

Yearsley's exploration of Bach humor begins with an early reception history² accounting by Bach's second son Emanuel in the 1754 Obituary (Nekrolog) of Bach's personality (NBR: 305) and the 1802 first biography of Nikolaus Forkel citing humorous works such as the Coffee Cantata (BWV 211). This "aspect of his artistic personality has found little resonance over more than two centuries since Forkel," says Yearsley (Ibid.: 193), with "Bach's musical wit" "symptomatic of a broader, though now slackening, musicological reticence toward humor, one shared by, or perhaps even inherited from philosophy" (Ibid.: 193f). "The emphasis on Bach the high-minded composer has long affected not only scholarly views of the composer, but also performances of his work," he says (Ibid.: 194). Yearsley, keyboard performer who has written three important Bach monographs,³ observes: "The tendency towards humorlessness in Bach studies has a venerable pedigree," beginning with Philipp Spitta, Bach first, exemplary, magisterial biographer, who berated Cantata 205 (YouTube, BCW) for the librettist Picander's mixture of styles, and "lofty framing choruses appropriate, Spitta implies, only for sacred music," says Yearsley (Ibid.: 195). Yearsley continues with the goal of "reanimating Bach as adept musical humorist" (Ibid.; (196), eschewing the usual comic works and Bach humor commentary,⁴ "to open up possibilities," focusing on the keyboard Partitas, BWV 825-31 (Ibid.: 197-200), and especially on the Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, BWV 1046 (Ibid.: 204-219), with passing references to the concluding quodlibet in the Goldberg Variations (Ibid.; 197, 199, 203, 219, 220n12), the Bach Family wedding Quodlibet, BWV 524 (Ibid.: 201, 203, 222n21 & 22),⁵ and the Art of Fugue Contrapunctus 6 (Ibid.: 219), as well as a catalogue of German contemporary criticisms of humor (Ibid.: 201, 210f, 218f).

Keyboard Partita Humor; Moralists Perspective

With his expertise in keyboard performing, Yearsley initially focuses on Bach's Partita No. 1 in B-Fat, BWV 825, with its "challenging hand-crossing games" (Ibid.: 197), notably the closing Gigue (YouTube: 18:22). The first of four Bach published Clavierübung (keyboard exercise) were "to delight the spirit" (Ibid.: 198). Yearsley calls it a bagatelle of "light music," "to borrow Emanuel Bach's adjective." Yearsley compares the music to Domenico Scarlatti's Essercizi 32 sonatas (London, 1738, YouTube), "possibly an inspiration" for the Goldbergs, and "full of hand-crossings and other flamboyances." In the Partita No. 3, BWV 827, the inserted Galanterien character dances (Wikipedia) are of particular note (Ibid.: 198), the Burlesca and Scherzo (YouTube). "Bach included in the Partitas plentiful portions of lighter jocose fare," says Yearsley (Ibid.: 199). The "alternation between the serious and the jocular was characteristic of comic suites of the period," with the Clavierübung series of "madcap gestures and unexpected juxtapositions." Forkel also "had heartily approved of the kind of fun that enlivened the Bach family reunions and wedding celebrations" that gave rise to the "ribald revelry of quodlibets" (Wikipedia), says Yearsley (Ibid.: 200). Various German moralist treatise writers, such as those with a Pietist bent, disapproved of offensive and excessive jokes and jests,⁶ as described in Yearsley (Ibid.: 201-04).

Brandenburg Concerto No. 1

Turning to "Bach's possible attempts at humor in the elevated style favored by moralists and commentators, and lauded by Forkel," Yearsley devotes the bulk of his essay (16 of 28 pages with 10 of the orchestral score) to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 1. He calls these concertos "a collection that I believe brims with sublime Bachian humor" (Ibid.: 203), citing Michael Marissen's study⁷ in part as "a critique of worldly hierarchies" with humor (Ibid.: 223n39). Yearsleycites the opening movement with the seeming discordant two hunting horn parts "as simply a picturesque evocation of the chaos of the hunt" with "Bach pushing the aural topography far beyond that of his contemporaries, and humor, it seems to me, is a fruitful, pleasurable way too hear the cantankerousness of the contending forces" (Ibid.: 204f). Various contemporary articles on courtly pursuits, feasts, cavaliers, and court jesters Yearsley cites (Ibid.: 205, 210f) to support his perspective. The third movement Allegro (YouTube: 8:24) is another jaunty gallop (Ibid.: 213) while the final movement, appended dance galanterie (ibid.; 216f: IV Menuetto - Trio I - Polacca - Trio II: 12:31) is "a colorful international procession," says Yearsley (Ibid.; 217), "a pageant of nations." This initial concerto is described as a concerto grosso with concertino soloists (three oboes, two hunting horns) and the string ensemble as ripieno while the structure is a traditional Vivaldian three-movement form of fast-slow-fast, with the hybrid form in the concluding dance movement. The "metrical mayhem and comic cacophony" "might well reveal a flamboyant and calculated desire to be heard as a musical jester," Yersley summarizes (Ibid.; 219), a "gallimaufry" (Ibid.; 213). In a brief appendix (Ibid.; 219), Yearsley cites the "physical humor of the Goldberg Variations, with their cross-handed pyrotechnics overlaid on canonic artifice, and concluding with a quodlibet that is both rustic and erudite." In a concluding side note, Yearsley, observes that the Goldberg Variations, instead of concluding (No. 30) with an erudite canon, ends with another playful quodlibet (YouTube; extended commentary, https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/BWV988-Quodlibet[Braatz].htm) which he calls "an incongruous contrapuntal stew using two folk melodies."⁸ Thus, Bach had his cake and ate it, too.

Critique/Commentary

Although Yearsley finds passages in the first Brandenburg Concerto that may have inferences of humor from a listening perspective, with imaginary flights of fancy, contextual concerns provide a broader and deeper perspective on certain elements in this work. The earliest version of this concerto was the Sinfonia in F, BWV 1046a=1071, now BWV 1046.1 (Bach Digital], copied in April 1760 (Bach Digital) by Bach ?student and major copyist Christian Friedrich Penzel (1737-1801, BCW). Penzel, who copied the first three Brandenburg Concertos from extant Leipzig sources, wrote out in full score the first, second and fourth movement (minus the polonaise). "This is the same key (F major) as the [homage Hunting] cantata (BWV 208) and is scored for an identical ensemble, except that it does not require flutes," says Malcolm Boyd in his Brandenburg Concertos monograph.⁹ "What is unusual for a homage cantata of such dimensions (YouTube, BCW), says Boyd (Ibid.: 12), is that, in the form in which it has come down to us [BWV 208.1, Bach Digital], it begins neither with an imposing chorus nor with an instrumental introduction, but with a simple recitative accompanied by continuo only." Cantata 208 was premiered on Monday, 27 February 2013 at the Jägerhof in Weißenfels, a former hunting lodge, for the birthday of Duke Christian of Saxe-Weißenfels (1682-1736. "Bach clearly felt that these three movements, as they stood, were hardly suitable for a volume of concertos, and he therefore set about making the work more concerto-like by introducing an extra movement [Allegro] placed third, with a solo part for the violino piccolo," says Boyd (Ibid.: 60). 'Presumably he did this at some time between 1719 and 1721, with the margrave's commission in mind . . . ." Later in Leipzig, Bach used the opening Allegro, BWV 1046.2/1,¹⁰ as a sinfonia opening soprano solo Cantata 52, "Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht!" (False world, I do not trust you!; YouTube) for the 23rd Sunday after Trinity 1726, "contrasting the world's speciousness with God's loyalty . . . the aristocratic elements become the word's vainglory," says Marissen (Ibid.: 26).

Various musical and dramatic elements are found in Cantata 208, "Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd" (What Gives Me Pleasure Is Only The Lively Hunt, librettist Salomo Franck of Saxe-Weimar) as representative of the duchy of Saxe-Weißenfels. It was part of the genre of Tafelmusik (table music for the feast), which in its most elaborate form as a profane vocal celebratory serenade was presented in the evenings as static opera for private court entertainment. The progressive Italian operatic style of original poetry was set as recitatives, arias, and occasional choruses. The literary elements showed the influences of the Italian Arcadian Academy (Britannica) neo-classical pastorale literary style and convention in song and dance, focusing on country life, simplicity in nature and the symbol of the shepherd. The hunting horn played a major role in the development of German style music. Because of "strong associations with aristocracy and the outdoor life of the privileged classes," says Marissen (Ibid.: 22), "the original effect of horns in early eighteenth-century concerted music was probably much more evocative than we might suspect today," he suggests (Ibid.; 23). "The fanfares in Reinhard Keiser's Octavia" [Wikipedia] at the Hamburg Opera in 1705, "provide an early example of the coloristic employment of horns for evoking the salubrity of the outdoors and grandeur of aristocratic life." (It is possible that pure-hymn Cantata 100, "Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan" (What God does that is well done), was premiered c1732 for Duke Christian at Weißenfels or Sangerhausen, according to recent findings.¹¹) The bass aria "Quoniam" in Bach's B-minor Mass (YouTube) shows that the "horn's affective connotations highlight the image of God's entry into the world as a human being in the form of Christ the King," says Marissen (Ibid.: 23). Other Bach uses of the horn include Birthday Cantata 213 (YouTube), the bass aria "Es nehme zehntausend Dukaten" in the Peasant Cantata BWV 212 (YouTube: 19:07), Cantata 205/1, 11, 15 (YouTube), and New Year's Cantata 143 (YouTube). At the Cöthen court where the Brandenburg Concertos were completed, records show (Friedrich Smend, Bach in Köthen, 1985 Eng. ed., p. 190) that guest instrumentalists (violinists, a lutenist, horn players) were employed. Meanwhile, two Arcadian-influenced poets were active: Christian Heinrich Postel (1658-1705) and Christian Friedrich Hunold (pen-name Menantes, 1681-1721), were librettists associated with the Hamburg opera.¹² Three numbers in the St. John Passion are based on texts of Postel: 19. bass aria "Betrachte, meine Seel" (Consider, my soul), 22. chorale "Durch dein Gefängnis, Gottes Sohn" (Through your imprisonment, Son of God), and 30. alto aria "Es ist vollbracht!" (It is accomplished!). While Capellmeister at Köthen, Bach collaborated with court poet Hunold on at least four annual celebratory serenades for Prince Leopold (BWV 1147=Anh.5, BWV 1151=Anh. 6, BWV 1153=Anh. 8, BWV 66.1, 134.1), as well as Cantata 204 in Leipzig.

Bach and Mannerism

Musical mannerism is a concept highly debatable. Historically, it involves consistent exaggeration and distortion of fundamental or progressive musical elements, particularly in transitional periods of musical styles. It is described in the “ars subitillior” rhythmic complexity movement of the late 14th century chanson transition from Medieval to Renaissance music; in the development of the motet and madrigal using “motivicity” in the Franco Flemish composers of the 16th century; in the harmonic audacity of Gesulado and the musical rhetoric and new style of Claudio Monteverdi transitioning to the Baroque period c. 1600; the late studied works and mixed styles of early modern Bach (1730-40); and in the Mannheim school with surging dynamics, rhythm and rising scales of the pre-Classical-Romantic era c.1770.¹³ Mannerism also is applied to the late-romantic music of Mahler, as well as current styles (William Hoffman, “Mannerism in Music,” paper for Mus 513, “Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music,” University of New Mexico, 2010). One notable recent study is Charles B. Lahan Jr. 2016 dissertation, Musical Mannerism: a Recurring Stylistic Phenomenon in Keyboard Variations by J.S. Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt (University of Oklahoma). His abstract (University of Oklahoma) addresses the history of mannerism and its recurring in classical keyboard works, including Bach's Goldberg Variations, Chapter 3, "Analysis of Bach's Goldberg Variations." Returning to Yearsley's "Bach the Humorist" and his findings in the Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, it is possible that as Bach in 1713 mastered the art of composition with his first "modern" cantata, BWV 208, he already was looking ahead stylistically while the extra-musical factors came into play. Imagine Bach at the Jägerhof in Weißenfels presenting the Sinfonia in F with the corni di caccia imitating the sounds outside while the rest of the hierarchical ensemble introduces the evening's presentation. We still have much to find and learn.

ENDNOTES

<<Rethinking Bach>>, Part III, Meanings; Chapter 9, Daniel R. Melamed, "Rethinking Bach Codes"

William L. Hoffman wrote (April 7, 2022):
Following essays on theology and humor, the new Bach essay collection, Rethinking Bach,¹ turns to Chapt9, Daniel R. Melamed, "Rethinking Bach Codes," where musicology in the past 100 years has established and probed speculative theories that involve Bach's hidden structural secrets in his works, particularly methods of numerology and symbolism. "But should we accept it as a given that Bach's music holds deep structural secrets expressed in notational symbols or numerical codes?," asks Bettina Varwig, editor of Rethinking Bach in her Introduction (Ibid.: 4). "Daniel R. Melamed suggests that some fundamental rethinking may be long overdue here, not least in order to counteract the removal of Bach's works from everyday life and concerns into a self-contained sphere of the occult." Whatever the original motivations were, "most speculative hypotheses are not subject to disproof," says Melamed in his conclusion (Ibid.: 245), engendering a pronounced skepticism towards "the origin of almost all of these theories in a small cluster of early-twentieth century studies" by various German musicologists, especially through circular, inductive and self-confirming, -fulfilling reasoning. Melamed, professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University (see Bach Bibliography, Bach-Bibliographie) finds these theories "fundamentally historically ungrounded," despite referring to "original musical sources or contemporary writings on rhetoric or proportions or numbers or symbols." (Perhaps what is needed is the concept of an "historically-informed" perspective as it relates to "critical," "authentic" musical performance [Wikipedia]). "And we can recognize the needs that these methods, which share so many features, appear to fill for those trying to understand Bach from a modern-day perspective." Thus the original motivations create special analytical methods that give rise to all manner of opportunities, thereby making the case, proving the validity of each theory. Says Melamed: "Bach, for many among the wider public, is a composer in symbols and codes, even if they [many among the wide public] do not know why they think so, thus creating a receptive audience for almost any theory." Bach as "a composer of symbols and codes," is Melamed's description, based upon his summary of speculative Bach theoretical studies in eight categories with supporting sources in the previous section of his essay, "What is Gained?" (Ibid.: 241-244). He cautions (Ibid.: 245): "It would be more encouraging to believe that rethinking this matter would make people more skeptical of speculative theories. But this image of Bach may be beyond thought by now, representing an unmovable conviction about who he was. That will be much more difficult to rethink."

Introduction: Past Bachian Written Theories

In his introduction, Melamed chronicles (Ibid.: 227) past Bachian written theories which involve "routinely count[ing] measures . . . to find hidden relationships" [Tatlow; Siegele WTC], "the shape of letters . . . in autograph scores to find pictorial and symbolic meanings" [Lehman "Extraordinary"], "embedded hymn tunes . . . to make them secret epitaphs for the departed" Thoene or "pythagorean relationships" in manuscripts [Dentler Art of Fugue]. Melamed's bill of indictment covers "seemingly endless deciphering, codebreaking, and revealing of hidden meanings" "to point outside music to theology, autobiography, classical writings, astronomy, mathematics, and countless other subjects." Thus, "abstract instrumental pieces carry theological meanings, and even religious works are not just exegeses of their texts; they are complex webs of mathematically constructed symbolism, making theological points with numbers, emblems, and coded scriptural references." Observing that "no speculative literature is remotely the size of that on Bach, Melamed (Ibid.: 227) asks various musicological/critical questions and provides answers in the essay. These involve how the trend started, why the studies proliferate with "new theories seemingly emerging every year," and "why Bach far more than other composers." Most important is Melamed's first query: "Why? What do the authors of these speculative interpretations believe they gain by them?" He suggests that the "minimal truth value of these theories . . . "is less instructive than their existence and tenacity." "If we are going to rethink our relationship to Bach we need to examine what these kind of interpretation mean to adherents and why they persist. At the least, we can point to patterns in the claims they make, the language they use, and in the implicit or explicit motivations behind them? Melamed begins his judgement (Ibid.: 228) with the generalization that these theories "are all speculative to a greater or lesser degree, that is they are not corroborated by firm historical evidence outside the notes (even though may delve into the historical context of they interpretations they espouse." He offers a personal caveat: "I am less concerned here with the correctness of individual hypotheses than with the need to adopt a more critical attitude to them altogether." He outlines his critical methodology: to "highlight the reasons why people take and accept these approaches, and consider the interpretive gaps the methods appear to fill, we can bring a healthier sense of skepticism to a musical world that appears all to eager to embrace speculative ideas about Bach and coded meaning in his music."

The Establishment of the Approach

Melamed begins in his first section, "The Establishment of the Approach" (Ibid.: 228-232), with a reception history account of German musicologists and Bach experts finding initial coded meaning from 1925 to 1950. He summarizes initial 1922-23 claims of Wilhelm Werker, followed by "criticism and challenges from several prominent writers" such as Arnold Schering, Georg Schünemann, Alfred Heuß, and Rudolf Steglich. The "first significant publication along these lines," says Melamed (Ibid.: 229) was Schering's essay "Bach und das Symbol" (1925 Bach-Jahrbuch), especially in canon technique emphasizing numbers and lost knowledge in religious works, bringing the "redirection of the focus towards Bach's sacred music." Melamed then cites selective examples of Karl Ziebler and Wilhelm Leutge, providing "context for field-defining studies by Martin Jansen (1937) on Bach number symbolism such as psalm numbers (Ibid.: 230) in Bach's "Aufbauplan" (structural plan)² for a large work, foreshadowing the importance of architecture and planning in many later studies." "The idea that musical or theological secrets lay behind compositions and that they were fundamentally puzzles quickly became essential to speculative Bach studies," says Melamed (Ibid.: 230). Melamed then turns at length (Ibid.: 231) to Friedrich Smend's bicentennial booklet, Johann Sebastian Bach bei seinem Namen gerufen: eine Notenschrift und ihre Deutung (Johann Sebastian Bach Called by His Name: a Notation and its Interpretation, 1950),³ beginning with the six-voice puzzle canon, BWV 1076, found in the 1748 portrait of Bach by Elias Gottlob Haussmann (Ibid.: 231).⁴ From this come lasting speculative theories that Bach puzzles (riddles) have clues to their solutions and unusual notations, says Melamed (Ibid.): To decode the intellectual content of these puzzles requires a familiarity with "the vocabulary and grammar of number symbolism," such as the number alphabet, also called gematria (Wikipedia), notably the numerical representation of Bach's name: B + A + C + H = 2 + 1 + 3 + 8 = 14. "With the publication of Smend's essay, the establishment of speculative Bach studies was complete," says Melamed (Ibid.: 232), with Bach's works "framed as puzzles to be solved and as carriers of symbolic meanings to be decoded." Melamed summarizes (Ibid.; 232) that since "1950, most new speculative theories have come from amateurs and non-Bach specialists," while "a few scholars known for academic scholarship on Bach htaken up these methods as well in the footsteps of Schering, Smend, and Jansen," and Wilibald Gurlitt on the keyboard suites in 1949 and Walter Serauky on Bach's cantatas in 1950. More recent are Walter Blankenburg on the B-minor Mass (1986); Ulrich Siegele on the BmM (2013) and the Well-Tempered Clavier and other instrumental collections (2006, see below, "Presumption and Pervasiveness"), and Ruth Tatlow (BmM, 2013; other vocal-instrumental works, and many instrumental collections, 2015), "have pursued these methods from within the academy."⁵ "The inclusion of their essays on speculative topics in scholarly collections and the appearance of books on respected publishers' lists have almost certainly contributed to the continued life of numerical and symbolic claims about Bach." Melamed repeats his allegation that esoteric scholarly and amateur work "rests on the same unproven foundation — "the belief that Bach worked in this way in the first place, a premise now taken as self-evident."⁶

Presumption and Pervasiveness

In the next section, "Presumption and Pervasiveness" (Ibid.: 233f), Melamed establishes Bach interest in the last decade involving "theoretical" musical creations of polyphonic self-theme and variations (see "Wolff Polyphony: Art of Fugue, BCW). "Integral to the composer's aim are several traits characteristic of his late style," says Alan Street,⁷ cited in Melamed (Ibid.: 233), "notably an exhaustive treatment of thematic potential and reliance upon seemingly mathematical — especially canonic abstraction." "Bach's exhaustive treatment of themes is widely considered self-evident in works like the Art of Fugue, the Goldberg Variations, and the canonic variations on Vom Himmel hoch; so, for Street, are his mathematical tendencies," says Melamed (Ibid.: 233). Again, Melamed turns to historical reception to "trace chains of this presumption" (Ibid.), beginning with scholar Ulrich Siegele in 1962, "of Bach's supposed use of the Golden Section" on divine proportions, followed by scholarly affirmations in 2001 and 2012. Siegele in his 2006 study of the Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) affirms the importance of the numbers of measures in Bach's keyboard music collections. "This view of Bach began to be incorporated into biographical thinking as well," says Melamed (Ibid.: 233), as well as mathematical symbolism, citing Ruth Tatlow's Bach's Numbers (Ibid.: 234). Various musicologists and Bach works Melamed cites (Ibid.): David Humphreys, Clavier-Übung III; Zoltan Göncz, Musical Offering Ricercar, BWV 1077 canon, St. John Passion; Ulrich Siegele, WTC, B-minor Mass; and Tatlow, "pieces and collections of every kind" in Bach's Numbers.

"Secrets" in Puzzles

In the next section, "Secrets" about puzzles (clues, devices, keys) that Bach deliberately hid to be decoded (Ibid.; 234-36), referencing Smend's Bach bei seinem Namen gerufen, Melamed cites (Ibid.: 235) pianist Cory Hall claiming a "secret system of tempo"; violinist Helga Thoene's hidden texts, names, and chorales in the Chaconne from the Violin Partita in D minor, BWV 1004 (YouTube; Göncz's Musical Offering Ricercar, BWV 1077 canon (YouTube); Ludwig Prautzsch's "a secret language" in Bach's works" (see Bach Bibliography);⁸ and Alberto Basso's foreword to Hans-Eberhard Dentler's Art of Fugue monograph.⁹ "The image of a Bach composition as a puzzle leads to a language of clues," says Melamed, citing the "formal structure of the ricercar provides a cue," says Göncz, cited in Melamed ('The secret codes of the Six-part Ricercar": 47; Ibid.; 235). "Along with puzzles goes a belief in the presence of keys to solving them," says Melamed (Ibid.). He cites the title of "harpsichordist Bradley Lehman's article¹⁰ on Bach's supposedly coded temperament calls the squiggle at the top of an autograph score [WTC I, Bach Digital] a "Rosetta stone." For Street (Ibid.: 108, "the key which unlocks Bach's seemingly [secretive, mystical] cabbalistic intentions is that of rhetoric," says Melamed (Ibid.). Taking Smend's and Jansen's original perspective on the six-voice puzzle canon, BWV 1076 (see above, "The Establishment of the Approach"), Melamed says that for Dentler (Ibid.: 39), "the puzzle of the portrait canon is the key to understanding Bach altogether." "Secrets and puzzles have keys, and one need only look carefully enough for them to grasp Bach and his music."¹¹ Other coding is explored that involves canons in abbreviated notation in Bach's hand (Ibid.: 235f), BWV 1072-1080 (Classical.net, BCW), particularly the portrait canon, BWV 1076, and the 14 various canons on the Goldberg Variations, BWV 1087. "Speculative writers often interpret these canons as evidence that all his music works this way — that something significant lies unnotated in every composition," says Melamed (Ibid.: 236). Another pervasive indicator is the number 14, Bach's name in number alphabet ( B + A + C + H = 2 + 1 + 3 + 8 = 14 ), which Bach did "attach personal significance to it," he says (Ibid.), as well as other numerical references, in a few vocal works such as Bach's intention to set the 11 of 12 disciples responding "Herr, bin ichs?" (Lord, is it I) in the St. Matthew Passion (YouTube). The sacred numbers 3 and 7 also are blanket indicators, says Melamed, while 3 representing the Holy Trinity "is everywhere in the collection of organ works Clavier-Übung III (1739), says Nicholas Kenyon.¹² Further, Melamed says there is "a tendency to assume the potential significance of any number, especially the numbers of measures in a work," such as "84" written at the end of "Patrem omnipotentem" of the B-minor Mass, which Melamed sees "as a routine aid in copying," not of symbolic significance. "This mode of thinking is quickly extended by many speculative writers who attribute meaning to implicit numbers (measure counts, chapters and verses of biblical quotations, and so on), said to be invoked in Bach's music." |

Science/Perfection/Unity; Strategies and Their Implications

In the next section, "Science/Perfection/Unity" (Ibid.: 237-39), Melamed reviews "Promoters of speculative theories about Bach, especially mathematical ones," such as John S. St. Marie, Prautzsch, Hall, Tatlow, Humphreys, Siegele, Lehman, Bernhard Kistler-Liebendörfer, and two controversial speculators, Martin Jarvis¹³ that Ana Magdalena Bach composed the Six Solo Cello Suites, and Helga Thoene¹⁴ that the Chaconne is a tribute to Bach's first wife, Maria Barbara, based upon the symbolism of the numerical patterns and hidden chorale quotations. Summarizes Melamed: "Here the mystical, the perfect, the superlative, and the transcendent all combine into a view of Bach that cannot be meaningfully challenged." In the next section, "Strategies and Their Implications" (Ibid.: 239-241), Melamed finds (Ibid.: 239): "Most speculative theories about Bach depend on relationships among numbers, notes, and texts, and writers employ some consistent strategies to connect them." These include enumerating musical elements such as Smend's number alphabet of notes and text — "a method of equating musical figures and literal textual meanings" and "another tool in the search for hidden meanings: references to chorale melodies," lead by Arnold Schering in 1925 "Bach und das Symbol." The "ability to 'translate' at will among notes, verbal texts, and numbers . . . opens infinite possibilities of interpretation," with measure/note counting determined through numbers and notes, chorales through texts and notes, and number alphabet through text and numbers (Figure 9.1: 240). "The search for the anomalous has flourished since" Smend, Melamed says, citing various writers (Ibid.: 40f).

What Is Gained?

In the substantial, summarizing final section, Melamed rhetorically asks, "What Is Gained?" (Ibid.: 241-245). "Speculative studies" of Bach with "commonalities of language, attitude, and approach" involve a "confluence of many factors" in eight procedural possibilities: 1. Studies "challenge to accepted and mainstream understandings of Bach," citing Dentler and Jarvis (241f); 2. Speculative methods provide "insight into Bach's otherwise largely unknowable compositional process,"¹⁵ citing Thoene and Jarvis (242); 3. Speculative approaches "offer explanations for the greatness of Bach's music, or potentially the true value of a composition," citing Dentler and Blankenburg (242f), 4. Some writers speculative approaches "find theological significance in works not obviously religious in character," another trend started with Smend (243), 5. Speculative approaches "allow Bach's music to be connected to extra-musical phenomena (243): Golden Section (Luetge, Power, St. Marie), Quintilian rhetorical treatise (Ursula Kirkendale, Street); 6. Speculative approaches "provide a way into music that is not well-understood in eighteenth-century analytical terms" with "speculative explanations of the organization of Bach's music as a substitute for historically relevant analytical understanding" (244); 7. Speculative studies, "especially theories of coded meaning, are often fundamentally non-musical" (244); and 8. Subjective speculative approaches "provide a means of understanding the expressive content of pre-romantic music" which "connect abstract music to extra-musical realms."

"At the same time, Bach's music has been absorbed into the modern repertory," observes Melamed (Ibid.; 244). "A lot of it, especially the instrumental music, is not quite 'early music'; it is seen rather as part of a common-practice continuum" (Wikipedia). "Bach's music is nonetheless resistant to Romantic interpretive approaches" in meaning but not as performance practice, while little is known of "his personal life in a way that allows for biographical explanations of the expressive content of pieces." "Esoteric interpretations" can "convey meaning . . . expressive to a degree sympathetic to Romantic ideals." 'In an age that expects emotional, political, or personal expressiveness and communication from music of all kinds, Bach's has the potential to disappoint when its goals are arguably purely musical; for example, in the demonstration of the possibilities of subject, genre, or technique." His closing paragraphs are personal commentary where he criticizes commentators seeking expressiveness that speculative "approaches are a tool for finding that meaning." He finds that "rhetoric" in the second half of the 20th century "as an analytic and interpretive tool for Baroque music may point to a desire to re-inject expressiveness into early-eighteenth century music after the authenticity movement self-consciously distanced itself from Romantic esthetics." In his closing commentary (245), Melamed repeats several criticisms about "speculative hypotheses" originating in a small group of early 20th century studies "historically ungrounded" and that the methods of rhetoric, proportions, numbers, or symbols still continue to fill untethered. Here is his last paragraph: "Bach, for many among the wider public, is a composer in symbols and codes, even if they do not know why they think so, thus creating a receptive audience for almost any theory. It would be encouraging to believe that rethinking this matter would make more people skeptical of speculative theories. But this image of Bach may be beyond thought by now, representing an unmovable conviction about who he was. That will be much more difficult to think."

Postscript

Based upon this last paragraph, Melamed's essay should be retitled "Dismissing Bach Codes," given his aversion to the topic, treated IMHO with cynicism, ridicule, and skepticism. Also read Melamed's 2021 companion essay cited in Footnote 5), "'Parallel Proportions' in J. S. Bach's Music," in Eighteenth-Century Music, Vol. 18 No. 1, Cambridge University Press. Here is Melamed's first ending Reference: "For a history of speculative Bach interpretation and a consideration of its significance see Daniel R. Melamed, ‘Rethinking Bach Codes’, in Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (New York: Oxford University Press, in press). In that essay I acknowledge ways in which numbers apparently were significant to early eighteenth-century musicians (the personal number 14 to Bach, for example) [see page 231], but to a degree much less than has been asserted in our time and in ways very different from the numerical codes that have been claimed for Bach. On this subject see also Tatlow, Ruth, Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Google Scholar. Melamed also derides the use of classical rhetoric in scholarly studies (see Bach Bibliography Bach-Bibliographie. He also has an aversion to parody (see "Parody": Obsession or Transformation, BCW).

I would cite three readings which offer other perspectives:

1. Ruth Tatlow's article, "Number Symbolism," in Oxford Composer Companions: J. S. Bach, ed.Malcolm Boyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999: 320ff), Amazon.com, discussion BCW.
2. Part II, Structure and Proportion, in Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass, eds. Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver & Jan Smaczny (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013: 142-62), Amazon.com: Chapter 6. "Some observations on the formal design of Bach's B-minor Mass," Ulrich Siegele; Chapter 7. Chiastic reflection in the B-minor Mass: lament's paradoxical mirror," Melvin P. Unger; Chapter 8. Parallel proportions, numerical structures, and Harmonie in Bach's autograph score, Ruth Tatlow.
3. Robin A. Leaver, "J. S. Bach as Preacher: His Passions and Music in Worship," Church Music Pamphlet Series (St. Louis, 1984: 27-35), Bach's Passion as "Sermons in Sound" rhetorical form: Exordium, Proposito, Tractatio, Applicatio, Conclusio (see also Spiritual Sources of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, "Sermon's in Sound," BCW.

ENDNOTES

¹Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2021: 193-225), Amazon.com: "Look inside."
² Bach's Aufbauplan (Structural Plan) goes by various symmetrically structural terms such as "chiastic" (cross-like), "arch-form," "palindrome," and reversible "mirror form." The best-known examples are Cantata 4, Cantata 106, the Magnificat, the St. John Passion (particularly its elaborate scheme of crowd-choruses with clusters of repetitive melodies, see Footnote 6 below), the Motet "Jesu, meine Freude," the Christmas Oratorio, and the Credo in the B-minor Mass; Bach's Passion symmetrical structures are discussed in William Hoffman, "Bach's Leipzig Passions: Common Features," in Narrative Parody in Bach's St. Mark Passion (Master's Thesis, University of New Mexico; May 2000, updated Mar. 2012), BCW.
³ "For a detailed discussion of the working relationship between Smend and Jansen," says Melamed (Footnote 11: 246), "see Ruth Tatlow, Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991: 20-34); for Smend's work not cited in Melamed, read Tatlow's "the Smend-Jansen working method" (35-ff, Google Books) and Tatlow's "B-A-C-H and other forms of in number alphabets" in Bach's Numbers: Compositional Proportion and Significance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015: 65-67, Google Books.
⁴ Six-voice puzzle canon, BWV 1076: Christoph Wolff's Bach's Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work (New York: Norton, 2020), discusses this work in his Prologue; "On the Primacy and Pervasiveness of Polyphony: The Composer's Business Card" (1-12), see Amazon.com: "Look inside" for the portrait facing page to title-piece and the original print of BWV 1076, a requirement for admission to the Mizler Scientific Society, to which Bach contributed annual musical exemplars, also read Bach Book Discussion on Wolff's "Bach's Business Card," BCW.
⁵ For a chronological accounting of Melamed's cited scholarly articles in Bach Bibliography, go to Bach-Bibliographie, and type in the full name of each author; Tatlow also has an article, "Parallel Proportions, Numerical Structures and Harmonie in Bach's Autograph Score," in the essay collection Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass, eds. Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver & Jan Smaczny (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013: 142-62), Amazon.com; Melamed also has recently published (5 February 2021) an on-line Cambridge University Press article, "'Parallel Proportions' in J. S. Bach's Music," in Eighteenth-Century Music, Vol. 18 No. 1, Cambridge University Press.
⁶ Sub-structure, sometimes called "Herzstück" (center-piece), is discussed in Friedrich Smend's "Johannes-Passion von Bach" (105-28) in Bach-Jahrbuch 1926 and in Walter Serauky's "Die 'Johannes Passion' von Joh. Seb. Bach und ihr Vorbild" (its role model, 29-39) in Bach-Jahrbuch 1954; notable also is Alfred Dürr's cautionary Appendices IV, "The problem of Symmetry in Bach's Work," in Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion: Genesis, Transmission, and Meaning, trans. Alfred Clayton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000: 124-26), Google Books; related is tonal allegory, a more contemporary term from scholar Eric Chafe (see "Tonal Allegory," in "Johannes-Passion BWV 245, General Discussions - Part 8, BCW.
⁷ Alan Street, "The Rhetorical-Musical Structure of the 'Goldberg' Variations: Bach's Clavier-Übung IV and the Institutio oratoria of Quintilian," in Musical Analysis 6 (1987: 90), Jstor.
⁸ Ludwig Prautzsch, Bach Bibliography, Baxch-Bibliographie; No. 9, Zeichen und Zahlenalphabet.
⁹ Hans-Eberhard Dentler, Art of Fugue monograph, Johann Sebastian Bachs Kunst der Fuge: Ein pythagoreisches Werk und seine Verwirklichung (A Pythagorean Work and Its Realization; Mainz; Schott, 2004: 13), Stretta Music.
¹⁰ Bradley Lehman, "Bach's Extraordinary Temperament: Our Rosetta Stone," in Early Music 33/1, 2005: 3-23; article Project Muse, abstract Project Muse.
¹¹ One Bach puzzle is the letter codes in the Schemelli Gesangbuch, a hymnal coding device described in Robin A. Leaver's "Letter Codes Relating to Pitch and Key for Chorale Melodies and Bach's Contributions to the Schemelli 'Gesangbuch'," in BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute Vol. 45, No. 1, 2014: 15-33; Project Muse, book MDZ.
¹² Nicholas Kenyon, "Bach and Numbers: A short note on 333 and the Holy Trinity" (219) as well as "Canons & Countertpoint" (173f), in Bach 333: Bach: the Music, J. S. Bach The Complete Edition, Deutsche Grammophon 2018; Bach 333: paragraph beginning "The set marks 333 years . . . ."
¹³ Martin Jarvis, see New Yorker) and his 2015 film with historical-biographical melodrama about an elicit affair of Sebastian and Ana Magdalena as well as the suicide of first wife Anna Maria (The Spectator); also Bach Network criticism: Yo Tomita, "Anna Magdalena as Bach's Copyist" ( Bach Network UK); Yael Sela, "Anna Magdalena Bach’s Büchlein (1725) as a Domestic Music Miscellany" (Bach Network UK), and Ruth Tatlow's "A Missed Opportunity: Reflections on Written by Mrs Bach" (Bach Network UK).
¹⁴ Helga Thoene, extended discussion of "Morimur," BCW, music download Amazon.com.
¹⁵ Compositional process "largely unknowable" actually was a field first considered in Robert L. Marshall's The Compositional Process of J. S. Bach: A Study of the Autograph Scores of the Vocal Works, Vol. 1 (ACLS Humanities e-Book), Vol. 2. transcriptions of complete sketch material (Ann Arbor MI: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), Amazon.com; very recent is Ulrich Siegele, "Compositional Technique," in The Routledge Research Companion to J. S. Bach, edited by Robin A. Leaver (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017: 398-434), excerpt Bach Network UK.; in process is Yo and Richard Rastall, The Genesis and Early History of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, Vol. 1 Genesis, Compilation, Revisions, Vol. 2, Aspects of Afterlife (Routeledge, 2024), BAM!; other recent books on elements of composition: Joseph P. Swain, Listening to Bach and Handel: A Comparative Study (Hillsdale NY: Pendragon Press, 2018), amazon.com), discussion BCW; Robert L. Marshall, Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019), Amazon.com, discussion Bach-Mozart Essays: Bach Music, Themes BCW; and Harry White, The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the European Musical Imagination, 1700-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Amazon.com, review, BCW.

Daniel R. Melamed wrote (April 9, 2022):
If members of this group would like to read what I actually wrote about this topic, in the tone in which I wrote it, in a form that attempts to deal with an interesting problem in the reception of Bach's music in a nuanced way, please send an individual note to my e-mail address (below). I will send you a copy of the essay for your private use.

You'll need to agree not to send it to others or to post it online, to respect the publisher's copyright.

The other essays in Rethinking Bach, each by people who are really well informed about Bach and Bach scholarship, offer thoughtful arguments expressed in readable prose. Every author in that collection wants those who also love Bach to think about his music and what it might mean. The best way to experience that, and to have your appreciation of Bach be stimulated and grow, is by reading what they have to say directly. I encourage everyone to choose that way of learning from them and with them.

Rethinking Bach, Meanings, John Butt's "Bach's Works and the Listener's Viewpoint"

William L. Hoffman wrote (April 24, 2022):
The Part III. Meanings, in the new Bach essay collection, Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig,¹ concludes with chapter 10, John Butt's through-composed, insightful "Bach's Works and the Listener's Viewpoint." It rounds out the exploration of Meanings involving major topics of theology, humor, and codes.² As book editor Varwig observes in her "Introduction: (Still) Talking about Bach" (Ibid.: 5): "One of the key developments that enabled Bach to become the celebrated 'Bach' of the Western canon was the absorption of his compositional output into the nineteenth century work concept and the classical concert culture it engendered." Musicologist Lydia Goehr's concept of musical works emerging around 1800, thus a "strategic deconstruction of Bach as a composer of musical works," is the lynch-pin for Butt's essay.³ "However, as Butt explores in his contribution, this was perhaps less the result of an act of retrospective imposition than a realization of particular qualities latent within Bach's compositional approach as well as current philosophical debates about hermeneutics." Butt, a distinguished Bach scholar and conductor,⁴ shows a "generosity of spirit" when he begins (Ibid.: 251) with the current, controversial, scholarly perspective of the "work-concept," which he describes as "work-hood," suggesting a "useful compromise" that "if a piece of music is treated as a musical work in its reception," such as the "significant" revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, "this treatment might be a reasonable reflection of its status, regardless of the original circumstances of composition."⁵

Variable Viewpoint Continually Unfolding

Thus, the music's "work-like" "qualities" are subordinate to a consideration of "the various viewpoints of the listener or critical reception,"⁶ says Butt (Ibid.: 251). The "various viewpoints" Butt calls "the issue of variable viewpoint, since this very concept was itself being theorized during Bach's lifetime. I suggest that, of the several characteristics that were to create the culture of the musical work, flexibility of viewpoint is be of particular importance." Musical "works" "do not have a single, fixed meaning but continually unfold according to the developing viewpoint (or perhaps listener point) of the receiving culture," he emphasizes (Ibid.). "Might it be," he asks, "that something of the present-day status of Bach's music is wound into the ways in which the concept of variable viewpoint is engaged, accommodated, or even manipulated within the composition?" Butt proceeds to suggest that "Another solution to the 'work problem'" in Bach's music, the "high-art definition of musical works is past its sell-by date" and that all who are engaged in Western art music "need to rework their criteria for categorization and judgment and, in the process, become much more inclusive of pieces and entire areas of repertoire that have customarily been undervalued." "Perhaps something of this attitude is even evident within certain areas⁷ of Bach scholarship, by which a texted religious work is analyzed not for its canonic 'greatness,' but rather according to its original purpose, regarded as a vehicle for theology, persuasion, or the various power relations that pertained at the time," he says (Ibid.: 251f).⁸ Meanwhile, But suggests (Ibid.: 252) "that we synthesize something of the assumed historical reception . . . to become both a new element of our appreciation" while reconsidering "in some cases a reason for disapproval and even proposed demotion of the work within the cultural canon."⁹ Butt eschews that "the concept of prestigious musical works should be retained at all costs, but that we try to understand a little more about how it [the enshrinement of great works] arose" decades or even centuries ago. Meanwhile, he advocates the contextual understanding of "the systems of value and meaning that sustained their appreciation" and "the criteria by which such prestige has been gained, together with the criteria that must have provided something of the basis for the composition in the first place (even if the prestige later to be gained was not fully anticipated at the time. Only Ince we have gone through such a process, I suggest, can we begin to conceive how such as musical culture might continue to survive into the future, perhaps within parameters that are considerably altered."

Three Interlocking Areas of Musical Work Concept

To analyze "the status of Bach's compositions in relation to any emerging concept of musical works," Butt says (Ibid.: 252), there "are three interlocking areas that need to be explored": 1. A "clarification of exactly which concept of musical works is under discussion at any point and the way [context] in which this might fit into the history and culture of Wester art music"; 2. An "outline of certain Bach pieces might be seen as problematic in the face of the work concept," specifically the Christmas Oratorio (see below) "as a sequence of six cantatas largely borrowed from preexisting cantatas honoring royalty, and therefore, in a certain sense, second hand"; and 3. The "ways in which metaphysical and interpretive textual hermeneutic theory of Bach's age may reflect the ways in which a musical work of this kind could have been conceived at the time, and — more importantly — how such developments might themselves have functioned as part of the emerging narrative of a musical work concept in Western music." The "crucial issue" is the "accommodation" of viewpoint "into how music is heard and judged" and "might have been anticipated at the level of composit." While Butt cautions against what Bach "may have thought about any emergent work concept or theorization of viewpoint" and "and any consistent attention to the cutting edge of critical thought in his age," "the latter may function as evidence of what it was possible to think within Bach's environment," he says (Ibid.: 252f). Butt issues two caveats on the culture of the musical work (Ibid.: 253): 1. Any "conception of musical works is historically and culturally conditioned and should not be considered distinct from specifically human concerns — a musical work is not a geologic specimen, after all"; and 2. The "definition of a piece of music as a 'work' inevitably requires the collusion of the receiving culture, and therefore cannot be categorized as if it were entirely independent of its potential audience." Conversely, "it would be problematic to insist that the effects and appreciation of music can be reduced solely to its cultural origins and reception," he says (Ibid.). Any "piece of music might elicit some sort of response, reaction, or thought that could have been anticipated from a purely cultural analysis — that something of the power of any music therefore lies in its unexpected influence on our feelings and thoughts," a "sense of 'circulation' between objects and human culture," he says in Footnote 5 (Ibid.: 265).

Historicizing Concept of Musical Works

Butt acknowledges Goehr's musical work concept based on common musical practice that yields "a more solidly 'work-like' work from, say, the late eighteenth century onward" (Ibid.: 253), however emphasizing that music previously could "be valued for the degree to which it provided an important precursor for the 'fuller' work" in a "progressive narrative, each new work having to represent, for most traditional historians of music, a 'step further' (in some parameters at least). Butt considers this "strong work concept is clearly associated with early Romantic aesthetics of music." "Defining features include the notion of the unique, original composer; a distinction between art and craft; a definitive written score of the unique work; a sense of musical autonomy distinct from other aspects of the world (especially the everyday); a formalist move toward inner rather than outer significance; a co-option of religion; stronger copyright laws; the construction of concert halls; and, most importantly perhaps, disinterested contemplation on the part of the listener."¹⁰ Butt in "historicizing the concept of musical works," finds that "in its more reified senses relates to the covering conditions of modernity,"¹¹ defining it from the beginnings in the era of the Renaissance and Reformation, and is fed by the scientific revolutions" of the 16th and 17th centuries, "reaching a peak and a crisis at the time of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and thereafter forging ahead with the Industrial Revolution and the increasing dominance of capitalism." "The development of modernity shows several parallels with the strong work concept," he says (Ibid. 254f): "the scientific revolution and the notion of empirical experimentation (paralleled by increasing complexity of harmonic parameters); the development of a stronger sense if subjectivity and individuality (each 'work' becomes more distinct in its own right); separation and specialization in different spheres of human endeavor (the composer as specialist, sitting apart from other musicians); instrumental reason (e.g., some degree of formalist coherence in an extended composition); and a division of labor (where the composer is 'served' by the performer, who in turn undertakes a specific task)." "The great musical 'work' in this context represented a further level of order, separated from immediate worldly concerns, and served by ancillary musical activities," he says (Ibid.: 254).

Beginnings of Modernity, Toward Autonomy

Butt finds (Ibid.: 254) in the Early Modern movement (Wikipedia) in "art and literature, the beginnings of modernity are marked by a rejection of the traditional veneration of models from the past (covered by the notion of imitatio), as encapsulated in general education, and a move toward the notion that creators should be original and actually depart from the past." "The increased emphasis on subjectivity and originality" in the 16th and 17th centuries "— and by extension the development of some notions of nineteenth-century work-hood —" is "a compensation for the increasing uncertainty of the natural order" and "a growing sense of individuality in musical composition does indeed parallel a stronger conception of human individuality and subjective presence." For music valued for its "natural" qualities by "humanist reformers" at the end of the 16th century "(together with many music critics well into the eighteenth century) . . . what was becoming increasingly effective was precisely its independent aspects, its deviation from and modification of supposed natural principles. Artifice, "viewed with less suspicion," became "a way of increasing human reach and deepening the qualities that made each piece more of an individual world." "With this potential for autonomy came the sense that musical compositions were actually like living individuals, following their own implications and potentials, and thus almost of a piece with the individuality of those who created them, and potentially those who were listening with the greatest attention."¹²

19th Century Perspective: "Secondhand Music."

The 19th century concept of the musical work (as formulated by Goehr), could view the concept of transcription and arrangement as seeming "at odds with the stronger work concept, for which uniqueness [originality] and individuality are at such a premium," says Butt (Ibid.: 255). "A transcription — perfectly acceptable in a world where everything should be derived from respected models — now brings the connotations of secondhand material, breaking with the imperative for originality." Further, considering Bach's Christmas Oratorio, where "virtually all the substantive movements are harvested from recently composed cantatas in honor of the local royal family," this "music that performs a function of homage and veneration does not easily fit into the nineteenth century concept of the musical work insofar as this stresses the independence and autonomy of each work." To render the six cantatas more "work-like" in modern performance, Butt suggests performing all as a "substantial 'concert'" "to accentuate unifying factors (such as matching scales, design and contrasting moods, tonalities, and instrumentations across the cantatas) that would probably have been far less of a concern to the original listeners." The "secondhand" "problem" "is further complicated by some of the contrasts of text between the two versions, which go far beyond the expected matching of affect or sense."

Two Christas Oratorio Aria Parodies

By comparison, Butt examines two arias from the original profane Cantata 213, "Laßt uns sorgen, lasst uns wachen" (Let us take care, let us keep watch; Eng. trans. Francis Browne), composed a year before the Christmas Oratorio as a birthday dramma per musica for "the story of Hercules at the crossroads as an allegory for the young [Saxon] prince, who is also choosing the path of virtue over that of worldly pleasure." One parodied alto aria (no. 9, text Picander) is Hercules' rejection of Wollust (Pleasure), "Ich will dich nicht hören, ich will dich nicht wissen" (I will not listen to you, I will not know you; Butt Eng. trans. Butt), "a defiant aria in triple time, marked staccato (YouTube). Bach transforms it into the first (alto) aria (no. 4, text presumably Picander) in Part 1, Christmas Day the Nativity, of the Christmas Oratorio, "Bereite dich, Zion, mit zärtlichen Trieben" (Prepare yourself Zion, with tender desire; Eng. trans. Butt), "a tender, sensual affect, given the direct allusion to the Song of Songs [3;11] in the text" incipit, with the addition of the oboe d'amore and slurred articulatio(YouTube). "The sense of the two arias is almost contradictory — the first defying sensuality and the second cultivating it — yet the music molds itself almost shockingly effortlessly," says Butt (Ibid: 256). As "high art," "one might point to a more absolutist conception of music as something transcending its original texts and music. The multiple signification could be testament to a type of music that facilitates multiple contexts." An even more surprising aria in Part 2, December 26, the Annunciation, is the alto aria (no. 19), which begins with the same line as its original, "Schlafe, mein Liebster, genieße der Ruh" (Sleep, my most beloved, enjoy the rest, Eng. trans. Butt), is a lullaby to the infant Jesus, while in congratulatory Cantata 213, no. 3, soprano aria "Schlafe, mein Liebster, und pflege der Ruh" (Sleep, my most beloved, and take tour rest; Eng. trans. Butt) where Pleasure "tempts the young Hercules," observes Butt (Ibid.: 256f). While the "change of meaning is almost laughable," says Butt (Ibid.: 257), "the music seems conceived to be equally affective in both cases, in the first version bringing a sense of elicit temptation to the fore, and in the second encapsulating both the action of rocking an infant to sleep and our own feelings of tenderness." The resulting "relationship between words and music" can "be interpreted as an act of blasphemy on Bach's part, since a musical evocation of wanton sexual license has become associated with the infant Jesus," as happened in the 19th century.¹³ Some "revisions of older materials were motivated by text," others as "continuous improvements of his compositions," as well as "motivic connections" reflecting "the theological landscape of Bach's time" and providing "pathways for understanding Bach."

Melamed: Interpretive Generic Expectations, Genetic Fallacy

To better relate to Bach's borrowings, Butt suggests (Ibid.: 257) a better understanding of the genre and style of each work involved, based on the approach of Daniel R. Melamed, through connections between two different pieces: "Parody here represents more than a reuse of notes; the liturgical and secular words overlap," such as "parallels and resonances."¹⁴ Butt finds "Melamed draws a common-sense sort of conclusion that is perhaps rare in Bach scholarship: the parody origin of various well-known piece by Bach is interesting enough but of 'little consequence compared with what a piece tells you by its musical style and construction' and a movement's origins do not necessarily explain 'what is interesting about it" (Melamed, Ibid.: 126). Melamed, says Butt, "sees a commonality between historical and modern listeners" with how the music "accords with one's exposure to the ruling generic expectations," not "dependent on knowledge of its genesis." Melamed says (Ibid.: 24): "The whole argument clearly hinges on questions of viewpoint" (perspective) where "original meaning" derives from the viewpoint of the "genetic fallacy" of interpretation that affects music , , , , the idea that we can discern a work's meaning by knowing the process by which it was created."¹⁵ Butt traces the purpose of music beginning with the premodern Lutheran view of "music to delight the heart" (Ibid.: 258), to "the way music relates to texts, human affects, and their regulation," from the "musical figure or harmony, to a more complex network of allusions and sedimented practices, as implied by Melamed's approach, which involves analyzing generic traditions." "There is no shortage of writings, from Joachim Burmeister to Johann Kuhnau, and Johann Mattheson, that give us a whole range of ways in which composers could rhetorically manipulate musical figures to influence the presentation of a text." Lutheran writings of Bachs time, notably involving the "foretaste of eternity," citing Eric Chafe's conclusion,¹⁶ "the relation of the affective power of music to spirituality was actually something that had strong resonances with the Romantic era , when the religious element of music was essentially incorporated into a work-oriented aesthetic of music." Thus Butt suggests that musical reception "within traditional Lutheranism of Bach's time was actually closer to that associated with the nineteenth-century work concept than music's supposed articulation of specific theological concepts and levels of spiritual meaning . . . ." After reviewing traditional views of Mattheson, Butt finds the Christmas Oratorio (Ibid.: 259) is acceptable because of transcription. "Perhaps the very durability of the same piece of music in different contexts is actually evidence of a form of autonomy (over and above it original purposes) that could somehow become recognizable within the later culture.¹⁷ Such autonomy might lie in obvious features of cohesion, development, and balance, together with the way specific configurations of notes evoke a range of emotions."

Autonomy, Individuality, Uniqueness

"How does such a form of self-standing musical material relate to concepts of autonomy, individuality, and uniqueness that are specific to its early eighteenth-century context?," asks Butt (Ibid.: 259). The starting point is the metaphysics of polymath Gottfried Wilhlem Leibnitz (1664-1716, Wikipedia) and his disciple Christian Wolff (1679-1754, Wikipedia). Leibnitz flourished in a period of "increasing individuation" (Ibid.: 259) and a sense of progress, (260), yet "the growing separation of spheres and knowledge" (261). Following optimist Leibnitz came another Leipziger, the philosopher and historian Martin Chaldenius (1710-59, Wikipedia), who developed a universal theory of language beyond the interpretation of traditional interpretive texts. Finally is philosopher and aesthetician Georg Friedrich Meier (1718-77, Wikipedia) with "a system of signs beyond language" (263). Leibnitz and Caldenius Butt discusses within the context of the Christmas Oratorio. The Leibnitz-Wolffian method of knowledge achieved the great German encyclopedia while "Leibnitz, like Bach in music, seems to combine in almost equal proportion a grounding in archaic conceptions of the cosmos with the ideas of the most immediate modernity, pointing toward modern mathematics and physics," says Butt (Ibid.: 259). In the development of a strong musical work concept is Leibnitz's "principle of discernibles," from the Medieval nominalist tradition" where "no two portions of matter are alike, at any level," which is the basis for "his theory of monads, by which the soul is an individual entity."

Increasing Individuation, Critical Turn

This "increasing individuation suggests that it was possible to conceive of artificial entities, such as musical pieces," Butt says (Ibid.; 259f), as being both unique while having universal significance in reflecting the broader world in which they inhere." This also applies to the human individual. "Individuation, reception, and viewpoint are built into both entities [individual and artificial] simultaneously," says Butt (Ibid.: 260). Leibnitz's view of "the world as the best of all possible worlds and as representing God's pre[-]established harmony suggests a direct correspondence between spiritual and physical substances." The analogy with music suggests both specific sounds as well as the impact on "human consciousness in subtle ways." Adding the dimension of time, "through the notion of soul-memory, brings with it a sense of progress" within "the universe as a whole toward beauty and perfection," which is a sense of animism seems both archaic and "points toward some of the foundations of modern science" (as empiricism). Simultaneous is a Deistic "distributed divinity," a "re-grounding of divinity in the human world — a secularization of a sort — that would later account for part of the nineteenth-century strong concept of musical works." Whpublic education developed, so did different languages among various authorities, a "growing separation of knowledge and expertise in the early modern era," says Butt (Ibid.: 261), involving concepts of "natural theology" and the "little divinity" of the individual. "Leibnitz comes surprisingly close to the so-called critical turn" of the late 18th century, "by which perceptions and awareness of the outside world [?extrinsic] are entirely mediated by human subjectivity, so that nothing is known 'in itself'." (Other concepts such as "pre-destined," "self-sufficient," and "harmony of the spheres" also existed.) "The critical turn is surely a significant element in both the production and reception of musical works in the nineteenth century," says Butt (Ibid.: 261). The "universalist particular of the individual monad, constantly unfolding, remains seductive, and the notion of internal autonomy was hardly to be discarded in the future, least of all in the thickening concept of musical works."¹⁸ Possibly, the Christmas Oratorio is reminiscent of one of Leibnitz's complex organisms, which is constituted out of individual monadic movements that themselves preserve their own sense of independence, over and above the text, and regardless of the context in which we find them," says Butt (Ibid.: 261f).

Development of Universal Hermeneutic Thought

"An aspect of Leibnitz's thought that had a particular resonance with the next generation specifically relates to the development of hermeneutic thought," says Butt (Ibid.: 262). Whether a tangible object seen from varied perspectives or "as many different universes as they are the points of view of a single monad," the concept of "point of view" "Leipzig philosopher Martin Chalednius inaugurated in his 1742 book on hermeneutics." Beyond the hermeneutic interpretation of "traditional biblical, legal, or classical texts," Chaldenius attempts "to develop a universal approach, which can be tailored to the genre of the text concerned." Thus, "we gain glimpses of an enormous semiotic system, not unlike Leibnitz's preestablished harmony," says Butt (Ibid.). "Chaldenius, drawing on traditional rhetoric, also devotes considerable attention to the role of performance in spoken texts, since this can have a significant effect on an audience's inference of meaning." To "anticipate all the meanings" that an author's text might evoke, he sketches the beginning of a theory of reception" involving "the continual changes of time and place" in language, particularly "allusive or oblique language, multiple meaning, and ambiguity, all of which could be easily adapted to an understanding of music." He observes "that what an author presents is itself an interpretation and, further, that readers or listeners being in a further unfolding of meaning through their own acts if interpretation." From pre-critical thought, these points, "like so much thought of this time, are on the edge of a much more modern conception of meaning — one that is traditionally attributed to the post-Kantian approach of Friedrich Schleiermacher at the end of the [18th] century — and one that creates a particularly rich environment for the strong concept of the musical work." Beyond the conception of "pieces of music merely relating directly to a text" based on a particular, preestablished emotion or concept," a piece of music has the potential "to contain sedimented emotions and illusions, all of which relate to a universal sense of 'feeling,' and which are therefore set into flux by a listener's own disposition," says Butt (Ibid.: 262f). Chaldenius finds multiple interpretations of a single event such as were possible on a battlefield, from an actual physical position to a personal, interpretive perspective, says Butt (Ibid.: 263). "Seemingly total contradictions are possible — just like those between the secular and sacred texts in Bach's Christmas Oratorio arias — but these could all be explained by consideration of point of view, performance, and occasion." Finally, "the extension of hermeneutics to the world as a whole" is found in Meier's 1757 writing, applying "the notion of a system of signs beyond language." Beyond arbitrary significance such as Augustine's "referential function of smoke as a sign of fire, Meier "evoke Leibnitz's belief that "everything can be a sign for everything else and everything contains an inbuilt intention to signify." Related to "Leibnitz's ultra-logical concept of sufficient cause," antecedents "would form an infinite chain of causation," thus "to hear something much more than a simple signification in a piece of music, and indeed to liberate music from its subservient function to verbal meaning." From a spiritual perspective "the music conjures up a depth of feeling that supplements the theological meanings and purposes (something that is not so distant from the Lutheran vies of music); or a specialized one — where music attaches to ideas, feelings, and complexes beyond those of the original purpose."

Conclusion: Christmas Oratorio Strong Work Concept, Beyond

Can Bach's Christmas Oratorio represent "the strong concept of the musical work, both as this stood in Bach's time and as it became fully developed in the next century?," asks Butt (Ibid.; 263f). In its time, the music could involve a more developed, "most traditionally Lutheran" view, "a vehicle for emotion, appropriate for text but concretized only by the specifics of each text," says Butt (Ibid.: 264). "Here, then, it might act like an emotional chameleon, mirroring and molding itself to the text." Thus, it could "mimic the insinuating strokes of a seducer, but equally well the tender rocking of a baby." "This adaptability might fit in well with the Lutheran view of music as adiaphora" (Wikipedia).¹⁹ Moving "toward music's evoking and actualizing a sort of world in its own right, is perhaps not as distant as commonly thought." That the Christmas Oratorio seems so successfully to defy its petty monarchial origins may well have been one of the factors that earned it a degree of work-hood in a later age." Butt suggests the "combination of features that struck such resonance with later generations:" "a marked religious intensity" in "a supercharged sense of compositional coherence," and, "the focus of the present study — a depth of potential unfolding meaning that is often capable of resonating and reinforcing the different viewpoints a listener might bring, particularly in the light of the changing circumstances of performance, text, and context," Butt concludes (Ibid.: 264f). "This notion of semantic and emotional flexibility, coupled with the increasing individual coherence of musical works, is a challenge within cultures that demand absolute distinctions," he says (Ibid.; 265). "But that may well be precisely where their value resides, particularly in environments inflected by modernity in its multiple guises."

Postscript

In this century several new studies of Bach's Christmas Oratorio have opened a whole new world of understanding: Ignace Bossuyt's Johann Sebastian Bach: Christmas Oratorio, trans. Stratton Bull (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven Univ. Press, 2004; Amazon.com) with its many layers of meaning; Marcus Rathey's Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio: Music, Theology, Culture (see Footnote 13), with Bach’s compositional practice and within the religious and social landscape of 18th century Germany; Daniel R. Melamed, Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and The Christmas Oratorio (See Footnote 14 and above, "Melamed: Interpretive Generic Expectations, Genetic Fallacy"; and John Butt, Bach Christmas Oratorio liner notes, BCW. scroll down to V-4, Liner Notes + : 10-12.

ENDNOTES

¹ Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2021: 193-225), Amazon.com: "Look inside."
² Part III. Meanings: Chapter 7, Jeremy Begbie, "Bach and Theology," BCW; then Chapter 8, David Yearsley, "Bach the Humorist"; and Chapter 9, Daniel R. Melamed, "Rethinking Bach Codes."
³ See Lydia Goehr's The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, rev. edn. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000: 128-152), Amazon.com; this "strategic deconstruction" is the response of Irish musicologist Harry White, Evangelists of the Postmodern: Reconfigurations of Bach Since 1985, Understanding Bach, 12, 85–107 (Bach Network UK 2017: 87), BachNetwoirk UK, cited at "New Bach Studies: Evangelists of the Modern," in "Encountering Bach Today: Historical, Listening, Post-Modern," BCW.
⁴ John Butt, biography, Wikipedia, Bach Bibliography, Bach-Bibliographie, discography instrumental https://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVP/Butt.htm,vocal https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Performers/Butt.htm.