Notes on Bach

Bach's music was seldom appreciated in his lifetime; and it seems an opinion of 20th/21st century musicologists that his pieces, even once they began to be posthumously performed, did not receive admiration in a manner relative to, as it were, an original performative character until arguably the late-19th/20th century. This topic interests me, because I think the popular consciousness often assumes that, based on his current standing, Bach was a contemporary star, or that, upon his death, the European world suddenly wept for its own ignorance and maltreatment of a treasure and inserted Bach into the musical canon. A weak, although doable, parallel to this in the visual arts may be the person and work of Leonardo da Vinci. Today, Leonardo stands upright among culture as a legend, yet when alive he completed very few projects (rather than his art, I think the more impressive legacy is his observational writings), and even fewer of those projects remain for us now. We understand Leonardo to be a legend because his personhood has been branded as such through a vox populi loop: he is "a legend because he is a legend." This is the real parallel between the two -- only, with Bach, the loop of legend-status erroneously folds back hundreds of years.

Bach was an anachronism in his own time. Although he was respected as an organ player, his music, an elaboration on the blending of North-European/German music & Italianate elements, was treated with condescension and hand-waving. After Bach died, his music lived on only through his sons and fringe musical groups or single persons with deviant taste. The most well-known of Bach's sons, C. P. E. Bach, did not play his father's music, outside of borrowing parts for a Mass. C. P. E. subscribed to the style of the day, and was critical of his father's material. As Glenn Gould put it, Rationalistic music took pleasure in the cadence, in termination. Bach's music was tirelessly unfolding and unresolved, too "irrational" and "complex" for the Age of Reason. Its time came upon the advent of the Romantic sentiment, one that prized the ineffable and the sublime. Exposure started with vocal music and motets; then, cantatas, Masses, and Passion music. Note, though, that Goethe was one of the first and few people in this period to try and come to terms with Bach's art in a way that did not judge it for not being "modern" -- even the so-called romantics tried to remove Bach's pieces from the astringent rigidity of the clavier, coupling them instead with the lush emotionality of strings and making "palatable" compositional adjustments.

As the 18th century came to a close, the bourgeoisie started to become the bearer of culture. Here, the citizen was the interpreter of their art, assuming the roles of the musician and singer. One such example would be the Berliner Singakademie, founded by Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch. This development illustrates music's evolution from an occasional and privatized existence to something that increases in dissemination. Looking at history, one notes that art of every kind detaches more and more from its marriage to religion. Bach's music was written as church music, and Bach was a dogmatic Lutheran, lending the angle that Bach's music was to be for the glory of God, and that Bach wished for this glory to be filtered through a Lutheran perspective. But the religious standards changed, and so too did the musical practices. Bach's music, in part, was passed down through amateur enthusiasts. Today, as far as church is concerned, Bach's music is performed in a variety of denominational settings. Past the religious housing, our most popular conception of Bach's music is as concert music, where it takes the shape of a secularized (and, in a way, museum-ified) music of the cultured.

To form a fuller picture of where Bach's music was taken, and to really substantiate my claim of others' claims re: the arrival of an "original performative character" in pieces' renderings/playings, more reading and thought on my part is required.
Until then, these notes (yes, brisk) are incomplete.