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Author: John Butt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-01-14
Total Pages: 331
ISBN-13: 0521883563
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A detailed 2010 analysis of Bach's Passions which demonstrates how they reflect and constitute priorities and conditions of the western world.
Author: John Butt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-01-14
Total Pages: 331
ISBN-13: 1139485423
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Providing a detailed analysis of Bach's Passions, this 2010 book represents an important contribution to the debate about the culture of 'classical music', its origins, priorities and survival. The angles from which each chapter proceeds differ from those of a traditional music guide, by examining the Passions in the light of the mindsets of modernity, and their interplay with earlier models of thought and belief. While the historical details of Bach's composition, performance and theological context remain crucial, the foremost concern of this study is to relate these works to a historical context that may, in some threads at least, still be relevant today. The central claim of the book is that the interplay of traditional imperatives and those of early modernity renders Bach's Passions particularly fascinating as artefacts that both reflect and constitute some of the priorities and conditions of the western world.
Author: John Butt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002-05-30
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 9780521013581
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This challenging 2002 study examines and ultimately defends the case for historically informed musical performance.
Author: Michael Marissen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-04-20
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 0190606975
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Bach & God explores the religious character of Bach's vocal and instrumental music in seven interrelated essays. Noted musicologist Michael Marissen offers wide-ranging interpretive insights from careful biblical and theological scrutiny of the librettos. Yet he also shows how Bach's pitches, rhythms, and tone colors can make contributions to a work's plausible meanings that go beyond setting texts in an aesthetically satisfying manner. In some of Bach's vocal repertory, the music puts a "spin" on the words in a way that turns out to be explainable as orthodox Lutheran in its orientation. In a few of Bach's vocal works, his otherwise puzzlingly fierce musical settings serve to underscore now unrecognized or unacknowledged verbal polemics, most unsettlingly so in the case of his church cantatas that express contempt for Jews and Judaism. Finally, even Bach's secular instrumental music, particularly the late collections of "abstract" learned counterpoint, can powerfully project certain elements of traditional Lutheran theology. Bach's music is inexhaustible, and Bach & God suggests that through close contextual study there is always more to discover and learn.
Author: Jeremy Begbie
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2013-11-22
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 0191611816
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →When the story of modernity is told from a theological perspective, music is routinely ignored—despite its pervasiveness in modern culture and the manifold ways it has been intertwined with modernity's ambivalent relation to the Christian God. In conversation with musicologists and music theorists, this collection of essays shows that the practices of music and the discourses it has generated bear their own kind of witness to some of the pivotal theological currents and counter-currents shaping modernity. Music has been deeply affected by these currents and in some cases may have played a part in generating them. In addition, Jeremy Begbie argues that music is capable of yielding highly effective ways of addressing and moving beyond some of the more intractable theological problems and dilemmas which modernity has bequeathed to us. Music, Modernity, and God includes studies of Calvin, Luther, and Bach, an exposition of the intriguing tussle between Rousseau and the composer Rameau, and an account of the heady exaltation of music to be found in the early German Romantics. Particular attention is paid to the complex relations between music and language, and the ways in which theology, a discipline involving language at its heart, can come to terms with practices like music, practices which are coherent and meaningful but which in many respects do not operate in language-like ways.
Author: Jeremy S. Begbie
Publisher: Baker Academic
Published: 2018-08-21
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 1493414526
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →World-renowned theologian Jeremy Begbie has been at the forefront of teaching and writing on theology and the arts for more than twenty years. Amid current debates and discussions on the topic, Begbie emphasizes the role of a biblically grounded creedal orthodoxy as he shows how Christian theology and the arts can enrich each other. Throughout the book, Begbie demonstrates the power of classic trinitarian faith to bring illumination, surprise, and delight whenever it engages with the arts.
Author: Peter Mercer-Taylor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004-10-21
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780521533423
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book surveys the life, work, and posthumous reception of nineteenth-century German-Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn.
Author: Michael Marissen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-04-07
Total Pages: 201
ISBN-13: 0197669514
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Many scholars and music lovers hold that J.S. Bach is a modern figure, as his music seems to speak directly to the aesthetic, spiritual, or emotional concerns of today's listeners. But, by eighteenth-century standards, Bach and his music in fact reflected and forcefully promoted a premodern world and life view. In Bach against Modernity, author Michael Marissen offers a new look at Bach that considers problems of inattentiveness to historical considerations in academic and popular writing about Bach's relation to the present. He also puts forward interpretive reassessments of key individual works by Bach and examines problems in modern comprehension of the partly archaic German texts that Bach set to music. Lastly, he explores Bach's music in relation to premodern versus enlightened attitudes toward Jews and Judaism and enquires into the theological character of Bach's secular instrumental music. Throughout, the book provides overlooked or misunderstood evidence of Bach's private engagement with religious and social issues that he also addressed in his public vocal compositions. Marissen ultimately argues that, while we are free to make use of Bach and his music in whatever ways we find fitting, we ought also to guard against miscasting Bach in our own ideological image and proclaiming the authenticity of that image, and hence its prestige value, in support of our own agendas.
Author: Erling E. Guldbrandsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-10-26
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 1107127211
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the composition, performance and reception of musical modernism.
Author: Mark A. Peters
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2020-07-06
Total Pages: 355
ISBN-13: 1498554962
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach collects seventeen essays by leading Bach scholars. The authors each address in some way such questions of meaning in J. S. Bach’s vocal compositions—including his Passions, Masses, Magnificat, and cantatas—with particular attention to how such meaning arises out of the intentionality of Bach’s own compositional choices or (in Part IV in particular) how meaning is discovered, and created, through the reception of Bach’s vocal works. And the authors do not consider such compositional choices in a vacuum, but rather discuss Bach’s artistic intentions within the framework of broader cultural trends—social, historical, theological, musical, etc. Such questions of compositional choice and meaning frame the four primary approaches to Bach’s vocal music taken by the authors in this volume, as seen across the book’s four parts: Part I: How might the study of historical theology inform our understanding of Bach’s compositional choices in his music for the church (cantatas, Passions, masses)? Part II: How can we apply traditional analytical tools to understand better how Bach’s compositions were created and how they might have been heard by his contemporaries? Part III: What we can understand anew through the study of Bach’s self-borrowing (i.e., parody), which always changed the earlier meaning of a composition through changes in textual content, compositional characteristics, the work’s context within a larger composition, and often the performance context (from court to church, for example)? Part IV: What can the study of reception teach us about a work’s meaning(s) in Bach’s time, during the time of his immediate successors, and at various points since then (including our present)? The chapters in this volume thus reflect the breadth of current Bach research in its attention not only to source study and analysis, but also to meanings and contexts for understanding Bach’s compositions.
