Bach Society Houston is grateful to the American Bach Society for sponsoring this episode.
In our final episode of the season, we hear from Dr. Stephen Rose, Professor of Music at Royal Holloway University of London, about his recent book, Musical Authorship from Schütz to Bach (soon available in paperback). Dr. Rose joins us to discuss how people in early modern Lutheran Germany thought about musical creativity, authorship, and ownership in economic, cultural, theological, and philosophical terms.
On June 6, 2021, Bach Society Houston will present a concert called “Music in the Americas at the Time of Bach," which can be streamed online. The concert’s theme—“eighteenth-century music” outside the European geographical context and repertoire typically implied by the term—might raise questions for BSH audiences. Our episode today will explore some of those questions with Dr. Glenda Goodman, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book Cultivated By Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press). Dr. Goodman joins us to discuss how her book—and concerts like the one I just mentioned—can help us consider, and then expand, some of our assumptions, definitions, and labels around European-derived music during Bach's lifetime and in the generation or two following him.
Resources mentioned in the show:
Image from an 18th-century American music notebook at Dr. Goodman’s website
“Notes on Bach” episodes with Dr. Andrew Talle about his book Beyond Bach and the Anna Magdalena notebooks
Vast Early America episode of the history podcast “Ben Franklin’s World,” featuring Dr. Karin Wulf and other scholars
Dr. Candace Bailey, Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South (University of Illinois Press)
This episode is generously sponsored by the American Bach Society (ABS), which supports the study, performance, and appreciation of the music of J.S. Bach in the U.S. and Canada. The ABS produces publications and a video lecture-concert series, sponsors conferences, and offers research grants and prizes. Information on membership, open to all, is available here.
This month we hear from Dr. Christina Fuhrmann about the history, mission, activities, personnel, and holdings of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (RBI) at Baldwin-Wallace University, which recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The RBI houses rare sources related to J. S. Bach, his family, and contemporaries; historical reference materials; scores; recordings; and sources related to other noted figures in Western classical music. The Institute also sponsors conferences and performances, supports and collaborates with scholars at many career stages, and publishes musical editions and research. Dr. Fuhrmann is editor of the journal BACH, the RBI's important English-language journal, and gives us an inside look at the workings of a key site for Bach studies in the United States.
In our conversation, Dr. Fuhrmann references some virtual exhibits that indicate the breadth of the RBI's holdings:
1) RBI librarian Paul Cary’s virtual exhibit on the manuscript copy of the Well-Tempered Clavier, in the hand of Bach’s student H. N. Gerber, and
2) Dr. Fuhrmann's class’s virtual exhibit on Classical and Romantic era items at the RBI.
In this episode, Dr. Bettina Varwig of Cambridge University joins us to discuss a wide range of Bach-related topics, starting with Cantata BWV 131 (Aus der Tiefen rufe ich), which Bach Society Houston will present in a streamed Passiontide concert later this month (March 2021). We also hear about Dr. Varwig's recent research into how Bach’s Leipzig congregants listened to his cantatas in ways that differ from the “attentive listening” model now associated with Western classical music culture. The conversation concludes with a preview of the essay collection Rethinking Bach, which Dr. Varwig is currently editing for Oxford University Press.
Read more about Dr. Varwig here.
Instrumentation, text and translation(s), and additional resources for BWV 131 can be found here and here.
Stream Bach Society Houston's Passiontide Vespers performance of BWV 131 and other works on March 28, 2021, at their webpage or Facebook page.
Audio example used in episode is from an archived Bach Society Houston performance of BWV 131.
In this month's episode, we hear from noted scholar and harpsichordist Dr. David Schulenberg of Wagner College. He joins us to discuss his new biography of Bach, recently published by Oxford University Press. We'll hear about the process of researching and writing this kind of book--including challenges and surprises--as well as why we need an updated biography of this formidable subject.
We also draw on aspects of Dr. Schulenberg's new biography to discuss J.S. Bach's Violin Sonatas and Partitas, which Bach Society Houston will perform in Spring 2021. Listeners will hear about the historical context and notable stylistic features of these six works, aspects of which Dr. Schulenberg helps us hear by playing excerpts of his own harpsichord transcriptions.
For more about Dr. Schulenberg, including recordings and scholarship, visit here. For Bach Society Houston's upcoming concerts, including Bach's complete solo violin works which you can stream beginning in late February, visit here.