Twenty Kids? Bach needed Cable!
Gentle reader, if you have not enjoyed the commentary on Bob 'trout-man'Dylan, please visit my gracious neighbor's blogspot 'http://bestpony.blogspot.com/. Here you get no Bob. Nada. Zip. Unless he dons powdered wigs now and has taken up harpsichord.I'd love to see Joan Baez in one.In any case you might get a little Pat Benatar later on, but for now get your wheatgrass and enjoy the Baroque Bob. As we're starting off the week in a musically conscious way, gander at the article below by artist Uwe Siemon-Netto, he has a great sensibility about post-modernism and the aesthetic mind, and has a few things here and there on-line. Credit:'www.ourredeemerlives.com'--and for those of you in dire need of escape from the harangue of life and family-- try to picture eternity and grab a copy of Bach's "Sleeper's Awake", it will remind you in a methodical quiet way why you're in the fight.. or encourage you to join us if you haven't made the decision yet. one step at a time, remember, as you go your way this week...Enjoy!
PS, If you have been living under a freeway and NOT heard of 'P.D.Q. Bach', run now to B&N or Amazon and grab any CD you can find. Do the same thing if you haven't heard of Dr. Dimento. Peter Schickele fans will fondly know of the 2006-7 concert series including "Bach: The Vegas Years" and the "Whats Your Sign" tour. LOVE YA PETE and our staff editor wants to know if you're taken...
http://www.schickele.com/concerts/pdqvegas.htm
The Gospel According to J. S. Bach
(Two hundred fifty years ago, he was known as a civil servant, a coffee drinker, and a second-rate composer.
Today, his music is Christianity incarnate.)
By Uwe Siemon-Netto
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bach has been a part of my life since I was four years old, when my mother first took me to Thomaskirche, Bach's primary workplace in Leipzig, Germany. Leipzig is where I was born and where Bach died, in 1750, after two botched eye operations. He had lived there for 27 years, during which he wrote the Art of Fugue, the Passions of St. Matthew and St. John, and most of his 300 cantatas (only 190 of which have survived).
Every week we attended the motet service on Friday or the cantata service on Saturday, both sung by the Thomanerchor, which Bach once directed. The composer's portrait dominated the music room in my parents' apartment, where an amateur ensemble of local notables fiddled fugues once a month and where my mother sang "Willst du dein Herz mir schenken," a love song Bach wrote for Anna Magdalena, his second wife.
Now, 250 years after his death, at the birth of a new century, an enormous Bach resurgence is underway--particularly in Japan. There, in one of the most unreligious countries in the world, thousands of people are converting to Christianity after listening to Bach's cantatas. On a recent visit to Tokyo, I was astounded at the enthusiasm there for music that seems to me to have such a specific, and alien, genesis.
My Japanese interpreter came to me one morning and said, "Let's hear some Bach to start the day." She pulled out a CD of the cantata Vergnuegte Ruh, beliebte Seeleenlust, whose lyrics say that God's real name is Love. "This has taught me what these two words mean to Christians," she said. "And I like it very much."
Around the turn of the century, the Lutheran archbishop of Uppsala, in Sweden, called Bach's cantatas the "fifth gospel"; today, such religious terms are just as likely to be applied to Bach by the founder of the Bach Collegium Japan, Masaaki Suzuki, who has said, "Bach is teaching us the Christian concept of hope," and Yoshikazu Tokuzen, of Japan's National Christian Council, who has called Bach "a vehicle of the Holy Spirit."
An air raid destroyed our house in 1943, and when we moved into my grandmother's flat to hide from further assaults, Bach's presiding likeness moved with us. As blockbuster bombs detonated outside, Grandmother Netto sang Bach's chorales in my ear. They have remained in my head ever since, and they have kept me in touch with my distant hometown during decades of exile. (I fled Leipzig as a child soon after its occupation by the Red Army.)
Now Bach's city is free again, thanks to a peaceful revolution that began here at the Nikolaikirche. In 1989, the peace marches around Leipzig's medieval town center triggered the collapse of communism in East Germany. Now I return every year to marvel at the city's rebirth.
For an expatriate on a pilgrimage to the city of Bach, arriving at Leipzig's Hauptbahnhof--the largest railroad station in Europe, and one of the most elegant--is an emotional experience. Two rival kingdoms, Prussia and Saxony, built the station together at the beginning of this century, each installing its own staff, complete with mutually hostile cleaning men who pushed rubbish back and forth between their respective territories. There was never much love between Saxons and Prussians. We Saxons deemed the Prussians stiff and uncultured; they considered us shifty and militarily inadequate—rather like the French.
There is some truth to every cliche. We do regard the French as our soul mates. "I praise my Leipzig," wrote Goethe, who studied there for three years. "It is a little Paris and educates its people." In my childhood, the Hauptbahnhof catered to our Francophilia, even while we were at war with France; it housed the best French restaurant in central Germany until the station was all but flattened. Now it is home to one of Germany's flashiest shopping centers.
A tour of Bach's city begins with caffeine. Leipzig has been a coffee town ever since the first shipment arrived in 1693. Saxon soldiers are known to have refused to fight when the army ran out of their preferred beverage. "No coffee, no combat," they growled, which is why the Prussians call us Kaffeesachsen. It was at Zimmermann's Kaffeehaus that Bach and his Collegium Musicum performed his harpsichord concerti and, presumably, the "Coffee Cantata," the amusing choral work whose title, Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, admonishes listeners not to spoil the enjoyment of their favorite drink with chatter. Bach knew well his fellow Saxons, who coined the verb maeren to describe their propensity to spend hours spinning endless shaggy-dog stories, jaws frozen in grins.
Bach's duties also often took him to the Markt, a lively square in the virtual center of Europe. For more than a millennium, the continent's two key roads crossed here: the via Imperii, which connects Rome, Vienna, and Prague with northern cities; and the via Regia, which links Madrid, Paris, Frankfurt, Warsaw, and Kiev. The intersection made Leipzig a natural site for what is now the world's oldest trade fair, established eight centuries ago.
On the Markt's eastern flank stands the Altes Rathaus, the former town hall, where Bach's bosses reigned; he was a municipal civil servant hired to oversee the music in four downtown Lutheran churches. At one point, he was responsible for writing a cantata every week, directing the Thomanerchor, and serenading visiting royalty. The visitors stayed in the Koenigshaus next door, and Bach and his musicians performed on the cobblestoned square below. In Bach's day, the town hall's Renaissance splendor was not matched by its occupants' wisdom: Bach had not been their first choice, and after hiring him they grumbled about having to make do with "the mediocre" because "the best," Georg Philipp Telemann, had turned them down.
Being governed by fools was no rarity for Leipzig. The most noteworthy exception was, ironically, a Prussian, Lord Mayor Carl Goerdeler. Elected before Hitler came to power, Goerdeler resigned in 1937 after the Nazis blew up a monument to Felix Mendelssohn. The Leipzigers loved Mendelssohn, a Protestant of Jewish descent; it was thanks to his 1841 performance of the almost-forgotten St. Matthew Passion that the musical world was awakened to Bach's genius, and it was Mendelssohn who in 1843 founded Germany's first music conservatory, which now bears his own name. He started the tradition of the rich string sound that distinguishes Leipzig's Gewandhaus, Europe's oldest municipal philharmonic orchestra; many of its musicians are graduates of the conservatory--as were, in some cases, their fathers and grandfathers.
After his resignation, Goerdeler became the civilian head of Germany's conservative resistance against the Nazis; he was hanged shortly before the end of the war, and is now revered as a local hero. Not so another Leipziger, Walter Ulbricht, the East German party leader and creator of the Berlin Wall. Ulbricht loathed his hometown's bourgeois, academic, and Christian way of life so much that he ordered the destruction of virtually every symbol of these traditions. Thousands of Leipzigers filled the Augustusplatz (then Karl Marx Platz) on May 30, 1968, weeping when a blast of dynamite lifted the late-Gothic Universitaetskirche off the ground. For a moment, the structure hung suspended in midair, before collapsing into a heap of rubble and dust. The church's organ, built by Johann Scheibe and beloved by Bach--he claimed that it alone in all of Leipzig met his standards--perished along with the sanctuary.
For the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, Leipzig has treated itself to a new $1.2 million organ that resembles, at least in appearance, Scheibe's murdered instrument. It has four manuals, 60 registers, and 4,800 pipes, and now dominates the northern balcony of the Thomaskirche, opposite stained-glass windows dedicated to Luther, Bach, and Mendelssohn. "It was our aim to create the perfect instrument for the performance of Bach's work," says Ullrich Boehme, the church's senior organist.
As I sat in this stark but beautifully restored church, my mind wandered back to the early 1950s, when Ulbricht launched a singularly vicious attack against East Germany's Christians. I was on a Christmas break from my boarding school in West Germany and had gone to the New Year's Eve motet service. The Thomanerchor had finished singing, and everybody had already gotten up to leave.
Suddenly Guenther Ramin, then the Thomaskantor, went to the massive late-Romantic Sauer organ, which is still there today. Quite unexpectedly, he started to improvise on the wonderful hymn "Abide, O Dearest Jesus." When he came to the point where the hymnal says, "Satan may not harm us; nor we to sin give place," he dispensed with all frills and let the instrument roar. This musical message sent shivers down our spines--for if there was one thing Leipzigers knew in those days, it was the Lutheran chorales.
No longer, claims Johannes Richter, recent superintendent, or dean, at the Thomaskirche. "Secularizing this part of Germany has been Communism's only success. For many, the motet and cantata services are the only contact with our Christian traditions." Moreover, the few who have kept their faith have lost the lust to cheerfully belt out the chorales. They sit silent and embarrassed, moving their lips. Richter sees this refusal to sing as "a symptom of a national soul in disarray."
This is why Georg Christoph Biller, the 16th successor to Bach as Thomaskantor, states, matter-of-factly, "I am a missionary." In this belief he is joined by other musical luminaries in Leipzig, notably Herbert Blomstedt, the Swede who is Kurt Masur's successor as musical director of the Gewandhaus orchestra. "I am fully behind Biller," he says, "and I have discovered that Bach often provides a road to faith."
The road from Bach to faith--and from Tokyo to Leipzig--is well trafficked these days. The Japanese convert then converge: They go to Thomaskirche, in front of whose altar Bach is now buried. They follow the opulent liturgy performed by the Thomanerchor and Gewandhaus. They fill the classes of the Felix Mendelssohn academy.
Johann Sebastian Bach was a theologian; his compositions have been called "theology set to music." Twenty years ago, several members of the Thomanerchor told me that the composer worked as a missionary among them; today, Bach preaches to many more than just the choir. Musicologist Keisuke Maruyama once undertook the eccentric study of Lutheran lectionary cycles and how they influenced Bach's cantatas; it soon became more than merely an academic exercise. When Maruyama finished, he went to Johannes Richter and said, "It is not enough to read Christian texts. I want to be a Christian myself. Please baptize me."
PS, If you have been living under a freeway and NOT heard of 'P.D.Q. Bach', run now to B&N or Amazon and grab any CD you can find. Do the same thing if you haven't heard of Dr. Dimento. Peter Schickele fans will fondly know of the 2006-7 concert series including "Bach: The Vegas Years" and the "Whats Your Sign" tour. LOVE YA PETE and our staff editor wants to know if you're taken...
http://www.schickele.com/concerts/pdqvegas.htm
The Gospel According to J. S. Bach
(Two hundred fifty years ago, he was known as a civil servant, a coffee drinker, and a second-rate composer.
Today, his music is Christianity incarnate.)
By Uwe Siemon-Netto
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bach has been a part of my life since I was four years old, when my mother first took me to Thomaskirche, Bach's primary workplace in Leipzig, Germany. Leipzig is where I was born and where Bach died, in 1750, after two botched eye operations. He had lived there for 27 years, during which he wrote the Art of Fugue, the Passions of St. Matthew and St. John, and most of his 300 cantatas (only 190 of which have survived).
Every week we attended the motet service on Friday or the cantata service on Saturday, both sung by the Thomanerchor, which Bach once directed. The composer's portrait dominated the music room in my parents' apartment, where an amateur ensemble of local notables fiddled fugues once a month and where my mother sang "Willst du dein Herz mir schenken," a love song Bach wrote for Anna Magdalena, his second wife.
Now, 250 years after his death, at the birth of a new century, an enormous Bach resurgence is underway--particularly in Japan. There, in one of the most unreligious countries in the world, thousands of people are converting to Christianity after listening to Bach's cantatas. On a recent visit to Tokyo, I was astounded at the enthusiasm there for music that seems to me to have such a specific, and alien, genesis.
My Japanese interpreter came to me one morning and said, "Let's hear some Bach to start the day." She pulled out a CD of the cantata Vergnuegte Ruh, beliebte Seeleenlust, whose lyrics say that God's real name is Love. "This has taught me what these two words mean to Christians," she said. "And I like it very much."
Around the turn of the century, the Lutheran archbishop of Uppsala, in Sweden, called Bach's cantatas the "fifth gospel"; today, such religious terms are just as likely to be applied to Bach by the founder of the Bach Collegium Japan, Masaaki Suzuki, who has said, "Bach is teaching us the Christian concept of hope," and Yoshikazu Tokuzen, of Japan's National Christian Council, who has called Bach "a vehicle of the Holy Spirit."
An air raid destroyed our house in 1943, and when we moved into my grandmother's flat to hide from further assaults, Bach's presiding likeness moved with us. As blockbuster bombs detonated outside, Grandmother Netto sang Bach's chorales in my ear. They have remained in my head ever since, and they have kept me in touch with my distant hometown during decades of exile. (I fled Leipzig as a child soon after its occupation by the Red Army.)
Now Bach's city is free again, thanks to a peaceful revolution that began here at the Nikolaikirche. In 1989, the peace marches around Leipzig's medieval town center triggered the collapse of communism in East Germany. Now I return every year to marvel at the city's rebirth.
For an expatriate on a pilgrimage to the city of Bach, arriving at Leipzig's Hauptbahnhof--the largest railroad station in Europe, and one of the most elegant--is an emotional experience. Two rival kingdoms, Prussia and Saxony, built the station together at the beginning of this century, each installing its own staff, complete with mutually hostile cleaning men who pushed rubbish back and forth between their respective territories. There was never much love between Saxons and Prussians. We Saxons deemed the Prussians stiff and uncultured; they considered us shifty and militarily inadequate—rather like the French.
There is some truth to every cliche. We do regard the French as our soul mates. "I praise my Leipzig," wrote Goethe, who studied there for three years. "It is a little Paris and educates its people." In my childhood, the Hauptbahnhof catered to our Francophilia, even while we were at war with France; it housed the best French restaurant in central Germany until the station was all but flattened. Now it is home to one of Germany's flashiest shopping centers.
A tour of Bach's city begins with caffeine. Leipzig has been a coffee town ever since the first shipment arrived in 1693. Saxon soldiers are known to have refused to fight when the army ran out of their preferred beverage. "No coffee, no combat," they growled, which is why the Prussians call us Kaffeesachsen. It was at Zimmermann's Kaffeehaus that Bach and his Collegium Musicum performed his harpsichord concerti and, presumably, the "Coffee Cantata," the amusing choral work whose title, Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, admonishes listeners not to spoil the enjoyment of their favorite drink with chatter. Bach knew well his fellow Saxons, who coined the verb maeren to describe their propensity to spend hours spinning endless shaggy-dog stories, jaws frozen in grins.
Bach's duties also often took him to the Markt, a lively square in the virtual center of Europe. For more than a millennium, the continent's two key roads crossed here: the via Imperii, which connects Rome, Vienna, and Prague with northern cities; and the via Regia, which links Madrid, Paris, Frankfurt, Warsaw, and Kiev. The intersection made Leipzig a natural site for what is now the world's oldest trade fair, established eight centuries ago.
On the Markt's eastern flank stands the Altes Rathaus, the former town hall, where Bach's bosses reigned; he was a municipal civil servant hired to oversee the music in four downtown Lutheran churches. At one point, he was responsible for writing a cantata every week, directing the Thomanerchor, and serenading visiting royalty. The visitors stayed in the Koenigshaus next door, and Bach and his musicians performed on the cobblestoned square below. In Bach's day, the town hall's Renaissance splendor was not matched by its occupants' wisdom: Bach had not been their first choice, and after hiring him they grumbled about having to make do with "the mediocre" because "the best," Georg Philipp Telemann, had turned them down.
Being governed by fools was no rarity for Leipzig. The most noteworthy exception was, ironically, a Prussian, Lord Mayor Carl Goerdeler. Elected before Hitler came to power, Goerdeler resigned in 1937 after the Nazis blew up a monument to Felix Mendelssohn. The Leipzigers loved Mendelssohn, a Protestant of Jewish descent; it was thanks to his 1841 performance of the almost-forgotten St. Matthew Passion that the musical world was awakened to Bach's genius, and it was Mendelssohn who in 1843 founded Germany's first music conservatory, which now bears his own name. He started the tradition of the rich string sound that distinguishes Leipzig's Gewandhaus, Europe's oldest municipal philharmonic orchestra; many of its musicians are graduates of the conservatory--as were, in some cases, their fathers and grandfathers.
After his resignation, Goerdeler became the civilian head of Germany's conservative resistance against the Nazis; he was hanged shortly before the end of the war, and is now revered as a local hero. Not so another Leipziger, Walter Ulbricht, the East German party leader and creator of the Berlin Wall. Ulbricht loathed his hometown's bourgeois, academic, and Christian way of life so much that he ordered the destruction of virtually every symbol of these traditions. Thousands of Leipzigers filled the Augustusplatz (then Karl Marx Platz) on May 30, 1968, weeping when a blast of dynamite lifted the late-Gothic Universitaetskirche off the ground. For a moment, the structure hung suspended in midair, before collapsing into a heap of rubble and dust. The church's organ, built by Johann Scheibe and beloved by Bach--he claimed that it alone in all of Leipzig met his standards--perished along with the sanctuary.
For the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, Leipzig has treated itself to a new $1.2 million organ that resembles, at least in appearance, Scheibe's murdered instrument. It has four manuals, 60 registers, and 4,800 pipes, and now dominates the northern balcony of the Thomaskirche, opposite stained-glass windows dedicated to Luther, Bach, and Mendelssohn. "It was our aim to create the perfect instrument for the performance of Bach's work," says Ullrich Boehme, the church's senior organist.
As I sat in this stark but beautifully restored church, my mind wandered back to the early 1950s, when Ulbricht launched a singularly vicious attack against East Germany's Christians. I was on a Christmas break from my boarding school in West Germany and had gone to the New Year's Eve motet service. The Thomanerchor had finished singing, and everybody had already gotten up to leave.
Suddenly Guenther Ramin, then the Thomaskantor, went to the massive late-Romantic Sauer organ, which is still there today. Quite unexpectedly, he started to improvise on the wonderful hymn "Abide, O Dearest Jesus." When he came to the point where the hymnal says, "Satan may not harm us; nor we to sin give place," he dispensed with all frills and let the instrument roar. This musical message sent shivers down our spines--for if there was one thing Leipzigers knew in those days, it was the Lutheran chorales.
No longer, claims Johannes Richter, recent superintendent, or dean, at the Thomaskirche. "Secularizing this part of Germany has been Communism's only success. For many, the motet and cantata services are the only contact with our Christian traditions." Moreover, the few who have kept their faith have lost the lust to cheerfully belt out the chorales. They sit silent and embarrassed, moving their lips. Richter sees this refusal to sing as "a symptom of a national soul in disarray."
This is why Georg Christoph Biller, the 16th successor to Bach as Thomaskantor, states, matter-of-factly, "I am a missionary." In this belief he is joined by other musical luminaries in Leipzig, notably Herbert Blomstedt, the Swede who is Kurt Masur's successor as musical director of the Gewandhaus orchestra. "I am fully behind Biller," he says, "and I have discovered that Bach often provides a road to faith."
The road from Bach to faith--and from Tokyo to Leipzig--is well trafficked these days. The Japanese convert then converge: They go to Thomaskirche, in front of whose altar Bach is now buried. They follow the opulent liturgy performed by the Thomanerchor and Gewandhaus. They fill the classes of the Felix Mendelssohn academy.
Johann Sebastian Bach was a theologian; his compositions have been called "theology set to music." Twenty years ago, several members of the Thomanerchor told me that the composer worked as a missionary among them; today, Bach preaches to many more than just the choir. Musicologist Keisuke Maruyama once undertook the eccentric study of Lutheran lectionary cycles and how they influenced Bach's cantatas; it soon became more than merely an academic exercise. When Maruyama finished, he went to Johannes Richter and said, "It is not enough to read Christian texts. I want to be a Christian myself. Please baptize me."
posted by Napoleon at 8:52 AM
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