March 21, 2007
Gratuitous Musickal Posting (TM)
Happy birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach, born this day in 1685 in Eisenach, Germany. Frankly, I can't come up with sufficient superlatives to describe his music. Instead, I will simply restate my belief that he was the single greatest composer ever to live, the one whose ear was most attuned to the Music of the Spheres and the choirings of the cherubim and seraphim.
Or, as I put it rayther more eclectically last year,
I consider him to be the absolute mack-tastick grandaddy champeen of serious musickal thought, bar none. Bach inhabits a plane of musicality so high, so nearly infathomable and so closely attuned to the fundamental workings of the cosmos, that Douglas Adams felt the need to use a time machine, a dead alien ghost and a millenia-old space-borne supercomputer to explain his existence in our world, one of the greatest back-handed literary compliments I've ever come across.
On a more serious note, here's a post I did on the comfort of hearing and playing Bach's music back in October when Dad started seriously going downhill. Rereading it now, I'd say it's even more true than ever.
I agree 110%. I'll never forget the first time I was exposed to the music of Bach: I said, "It sounds so logical." It did, and it is, so I learned a bunch of it.
Just got through playing a few Lute Suite and Cello Suite pieces a few minutes ago, in fact.
BTW: Did you know that modern scholarship has basically proven that Bach DID NOT write the Minuet in G from the 1725 Anna Magdalena Notebook? True: Christian Petzold - a guy Bach used to jam with - wrote it and the following Minuet in G Minor. There's also suspicion that he didn't compose the Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor for Organ (Which wouldn't surprise me at all, since I did a guitar transcription of it and thought it was kinda lame for a Bach fugue - No usual Bachian bump and grind in the counterpoint). Turns out the guy who "discovered" the work was a notorious loon who passed off a lot of crap as stuff Bach wrote. Amazing.
I love modern musical scholarship. It keeps on redefining things we've taken for granted for hundreds of years, making fools of all the right people in the process.
Posted by: Hucbald at March 21, 2007 03:48 PMI seem to recollect reading about the D-Minor somewhere (via a comment from JohnL at TexasBestGrok, as I recall), but I hadn't heard about the other pieces.
I've a recording of some music that includes a Trio Sonata in C (BWV 1037) that is now attributed to Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (of Variations fame). It's got a lively Gigue which, although it doesn't sound very Bachish, is well done and pleasant to hear.
Posted by: Robbo the LB at March 21, 2007 03:59 PMYes! John was the one who clued me in to that as well. I had forgotten.
You want to get into a musicological fistfight? Look into some of the controversies over Mozart's juvenalia: Many think Leupold wrote almost all of it (I tend to side with them, because I looked at his notbooks from when he studied counterpoint with Padre Martini as a teen, and he was nearly hopeless). Others, of course, are convinced Wolfgang had almost no help at all with it. The two sides feud quite vociferously sometimes. Bring popcorn. LOL!
Posted by: Hucbald at March 21, 2007 04:47 PM
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