January-March 2012

Johann Sebastian Bach is the great prism of European music history. A keen student of musical traditions and styles, Bach studied all the major trends in western music that preceded him. He synthesized various aspects of those genres, forging his own distinct musical language from the raw material of a tradition that he venerated. Even if we are not familiar with the models he studied, we encounter through Bach the many facets of the European Baroque: the sober counterpoint of the North Germans, the florid ornamentation of the French, the brilliant virtuosity and melodic invention of the Italians. But going further back, we also encounter in Bach’s music the stolid chorales of Martin Luther’s Reformation, the strict polyphony of the Italian Renaissance and even the ethereal beauty of Roman plainchant—music from the dawn of the common era. Johann Sebastian Bach was the keeper of the flame, a natural encyclopedist whose ability to synthesize all forms of western music ensured that his legacy would be forever entwined with his heritage.

In the same way that all earlier musical styles were refracted by Bach’s compositional prism—reinterpreted, renewed and reinvigorated—so too has Bach’s music been refracted by the prism of each successive generation of composers. J.S. Bach has remained the touchstone of western music for two and a half centuries, the authority figure that composers would either seek to please or defiantly reject. From the time of Bach’s own sons until today, musicians have grappled with Bach’s legacy. Many have been drawn to his mastery of counterpoint; others have been attracted to his depth of musical expression, his ability to convey a wide range of emotions, his peerless melodies, and the sheer joy of his music. By exploring Bach’s legacy through the music of the past 260 years, we are experiencing at once Bach’s reflected genius and the musical Zeitgeist of every generation.

I. Opening Festival Lecture: Why Bach Matters

Tuesday, January 31, 2012, 7:30 p.m.
Liederkranz Hall
6 East 87^th Street
George Stauffer, lecturer

II. Choral Concert: Stile Antico

Friday, February 3, 2012, 8:00 p.m.
St. Paul the Apostle Church
405 West 59^th Street
The Dessoff Choirs

As he drew together a catalog of all the musical styles that existed up to his own day in the B Minor Mass, Bach paid particular homage to the past through the use of the stile antico—the “ancient style” of composition that drew upon Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony. In this concert, we present the incomparable Missa sine Nomine by Palestrina, a work that Bach himself performed in Leipzig, but so too do we sing works composed well after Bach’s time by musicians who also found inspiration in earlier styles—Bach’s creative impulse reflected through the lens of later composers. In two solo instrumental works by Ingram Marshall, fragments of Bach’s music appear but remain ephemeral—beams of Bach’s light refracted through the stained glass of the 21^st century.

Renaissance Polyphony
Missa Sine Nomine a 6 24’ [chamber choir] G.P. da Palestrina
Sepulto Domino 3’ [men] Grzegorz Gorgzycki
Stabat Mater 2’ Grzegorz Gorgzycki
Tota Pulchra es Maria 3’ [women] (premiere) William Hawley
O Magnum Mysterium 3’ William Hawley
Two Motets 4’ William Hawley

Bach Refracted
Holy Ghosts 10’ [solo oboe d’amore] Ingram Marshall
Komm Jesu, Komm 6’ Sven-David Sandström
September Canons 13’ [solo violin] Ingram Marshall

Bach as Model
O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden 18’ Max Reger
Warum toben die Heiden, Op. 78 No. 1 7’ Felix Mendelssohn

III. Robin Holloway: Gilded Goldbergs

Tuesday, February 7, 2012, 7:30 p.m.
Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall
881 7th Avenue
Steven Ryan and Catherine Venable, pianists

It is possible that no single composer’s music has been more arranged and re-arranged than that of J.S. Bach. Some composers are content simply to render Bach’s music more or less verbatim, but transformed into the aesthetic of their time. Others absorb Bach’s musical language and then allow a piece to emerge from the chrysalis of their own voice, a new work outwardly divergent from Bach’s, but with Bach’s music in its DNA. Robin Holloway’s Gilded Goldbergs combines both approaches. The project, a reimagining of the Goldberg Variations for two pianos, began life as a straightforward reworking of the original music so that Holloway, a Cambridge music professor and Spectator music critic, could play the variations with his friends. But as the work took on a life of its own, the British composer “gilded” the original with flights of fancy and spectacular virtuosity.

IV. Bach Cantata Sing-in

Saturday, February 11, 2012, 2-4 p.m.
Immanuel Lutheran Church – Sanctuary
122 East 88^th Street

Not only did Bach turn to the works of earlier composers for inspiration and compositional models, he also reworked his own compositions throughout his life. This practice—called “parody” by musicologists—was very common in the Baroque period. It reflected the station of the composer as artisan, rather than artist; it was a way of consolidating the vocabulary of Baroque musical gestures and their related meanings; and it was a by-product of the all-important “Doctrine of Affects”, which insisted that each movement of music communicate one over-riding emotion. In this way, a cantata movement about giving thanks was transformed into the “Gratias agimus tibi” and a cantata chorus about weeping and lamentation became the “Crucifixus”. In this Sing-In, open to singers from outside Dessoff as well, we will read five choral movements from the B Minor Mass and the original cantata movements they were based on, examining how Bach reworked the original while keeping its emotional and theological meaning intact.

V. J.S. Bach: Mass in B Minor, BWV 232

Saturday, March 3, 2012, 8 p.m.
Church of St. Mary the Virgin
145 West 46^th Street
The Dessoff Choirs & Arcadia Players

Many questions have long surrounded Bach’s monumental B Minor Mass: Why would a Lutheran church composer write an ostensibly Catholic Mass? Why would one of the most inventive composers in western music history resort to reusing so many of his own compositions in the setting of the Mass? And why does it seem that the work was never performed in Bach’s lifetime—or even, as some suggest, never even intended to be performed at all? Perhaps the most convincing answer is that Bach compiled the B Minor Mass to stand as a catalog of all the musical styles known at that time, from the earliest Gregorian chants to the newly fashionable style galant. In creating a work that has come to be regarded as the apex of human artistic expression, Bach also left a musical catalog for future generations.