Theology, Music, and Modern Myths

with Michael Marissen | Bach scholar & author of Bach Against Modernity

Who was Johann Sebastian Bach really?

When we talk about Bach, it’s so easy to slip into big claims — greatest composer ever, universal genius, before and after Bach. And while there’s truth in all of that, this conversation reminded me how much richer the music becomes when we stop trying to make Bach look like us, and instead let him be who he actually was.

In 2023, I had the chance to sit down and chat with Michael Marissen, one of the most thoughtful and probing Bach scholars working today, at the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival—an annual festival devoted to the music of Bach that takes place at Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio. Michael’s work asks difficult and deeply illuminating questions about Bach’s theology, historical context, and the modern stories we’ve built around his music.

In our conversation, we talk about Bach as a profoundly pre-modern thinker, about why joy and sorrow so often coexist in his music, and about the temptation to turn Bach into a kind of personal hero who conveniently reflects our own values. What I found most refreshing is how generous this perspective is — it doesn’t take anything away from the music. If anything, it helps the music feel deeper, stranger, and more alive.

ARIA

Was unser Gott geschaffen hat from Lob sei und Ehr dem höchsten Gut, BWV 117

PERFORMERS

Nicholas Phan, tenor

Bach Collegium San Diego | Ruben Valenzuela, director

  Oboes: Kathryn Montoya, Stephen Bard

  Bassoon: Anna Marsh

  Violins: Elizabeth Blumenstock, Janet Strauss

  Viola: Aaron Westman

  Cello: Alex Greenbaum

  Bass: Malachai Bandy

  Theorbo: Kevin Payne

  Organ: Ruben Valenzuela

SOUND (BWV 179 only): Daniel Rumley | VIDEO: Clubsoda Productions

This episode was filmed in partnership with Bach Collegium San Diego.

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

BACH AS CONNECTION 

COMMUNAL MUSIC MAKING

with Kate Sheeran

‍  ‍former executive director, Kaufman Music Center

‍  ‍Dean, Eastman School of Music

What if Bach was never intimidating — just music? Grammy-winning tenor Nicholas Phan sits down with Kate Sheeran, Executive Director of New York City's Kaufman Music Center and incoming Dean of the Eastman School of Music, for a wide-ranging conversation about the power of communal music-making, what music education can look like when barriers are removed, and how Bach became the unlikely soundtrack of a teenager's summer camp experience. 

Kate traces her relationship with Bach from singing chorales at Kin Haven music camp as a teenager — not knowing they came from cantatas and passions, just knowing they sounded beautiful — to leading one of New York City's most extraordinary music institutions, where over 2,500 students study each year, including one of only 14 high school baroque orchestras in the United States. Their conversation touches on the difference between music being "performed by everyone" versus "for everyone," the way music education develops leadership and collaboration, and why Bach, of all composers, might be the best model for the 21st-century musician. 

This episode also features a performance of the tenor aria from Cantata 157, Ich lasse dich nicht — described by Nick as perhaps the most difficult tenor aria Bach ever wrote, spare in orchestration and relentless in its upward reach, depicting a soul grasping desperately for comfort.

Full episode details and credits: https://www.bach52.nicholas-phan.com/episodes/ep9

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

with 
Pamela Dellal, 
 Bach Institute Director & Intellectual Resources Curator 

This week on BACH 52, Nicholas Phan sits down with Pamela Dellal — alto, master translator, and director of the Bach Institute at Emmanuel Music — for a conversation about death, doubt, and why Bach's cantatas still speak to us today.

Pam has translated Bach's cantata texts for Emmanuel Music for decades. She talks about the history of the ensemble under founder Craig Smith, how she became the church's "intellectual resources curator," and her vision for making Bach's music accessible to musicians and non-musicians alike. The conversation turns to two themes that run through nearly all of Bach's music: his fearless meditation on mortality (including the story behind Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's unforgettable final performances of "Ich habe genug") and his surprisingly modern portrayal of doubt.

This episode's featured aria is "Komm, du süße Todesstunde" from Cantata 161, composed in Weimar in 1716.

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Reginald Mobley on Race, Access & Why Bach Belongs to Everyone

with Reginald Mobley

‍  ‍Grammy-nominated countertenor

  programming consultant, Handel & Haydn Society

Grammy-nominated countertenor Reginald Mobley joins tenor and host Nick Phan for a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to belong in classical music — and who gets to decide. 

Reginald grew up in Gainesville, Florida, raised by grandparents who told him that classical music "wasn't for us." Yet a badly-played fugue in sixth-grade band set off an obsession with Bach that has defined his career ever since. In this episode, Reggie traces his path from a church choir to a barbershop quartet gold medal, from a trumpet scholarship he never used to discovering he was a countertenor — and how Bach has been his constant companion through all of it. 

Their conversation moves from the personal to the philosophical: why calling Bach's music elitist is itself a form of gatekeeping, what it's like to bring Bach into a small Black Adventist church in the deep South or a jazz club in New Orleans, and how microaggressions in classical spaces compare to the reception he gets outside of them. Reggie also reflects on the parallel between Bach's music and the African American spiritual tradition — both born out of the same era, both using song to process grief, build community, and sustain human dignity. 

The aria for this episode is the third movement of BWV 36, Schwingt freudig euch empor, composed for the first Sunday in Advent — a duet for tenor and oboe d'amore whose text meditates on the soul's longing to be united with Christ, like a bride approaching a bridegroom.

ARIA

Die Liebe zieht mit sanften Schritten from Schwingt freudig euch empor, BWV 36

PERFORMERS

Nicholas Phan, tenor

Debra Nagy, oboe d’amore

Elisabeth Reed, cello 

Corey Jamason, organ

This episode was filmed in partnership with Les Délices and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

with Steven Zohn

‍  ‍general editor, American Bach Society

  musicologist, Temple University

Is it possible to separate great art from the flawed men who made it? In this episode of BACH 52, I sit down with Steven Zohn, General Editor of the American Bach Society and Professor of Musicology at Temple University, to talk about Bach, Shakespeare, and what we owe the canon.

Steven and I get into why Bach's music resists becoming a museum piece, the surprising parallels between Bach and Shakespeare as two men who remain fundamentally unknowable to us, and how to teach centuries-old work by canonical white men in a moment that is, rightly, reckoning with the sins of the past. It all lands on the old idiom that gives this episode its name: are we in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Stick around after the conversation for the aria, "Ich eile, die Lehren des Lebens zu hören" from Cantata 148, recorded with violinist Katie Hyun and Ruckus Early Music.

This episode was filmed in partnership with Noe Music.

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Bach, Community, the International Pride Orchestra

with Michael Roest

‍  ‍founder & director, International Pride Orchestra

  former Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, San Francisco Conservatory of Music

Nicholas Phan sits down with Michael Roest — former Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and founder of the International Pride Orchestra — to explore what Bach's music has to do with identity, community, and belonging. 

Michael shares how music became foundational to his life from fifth grade in Kenosha, Wisconsin, through Oberlin and Juilliard — and how that sense of belonging through music eventually led him to create the IPO, a global ensemble bringing together LGBTQ+ musicians to perform, commission new works, and celebrate queer artistry on a world stage. 

Along the way, they dig into what makes Bach's music so singularly adaptable — why it can be played on practically any instrument, why it keeps sounding fresh no matter how many times you've heard the Cello Suites, and why Bach might just be the rare composer who doesn't over-notate, even with so many notes on the page. 

The episode closes with an aria from Cantata 90 — a terrifying, virtuosic tenor piece about the end of times, filmed with the SFCM Baroque Ensemble.

ARIA

Es reißet euch ein schrecklich' Ende from Es reißet euch ein schrecklich' Ende, BWV 90

PERFORMERS

SFCM Baroque Ensemble | Elisabeth Reed & Corey Jamason, directors

  Violin 1: Carla Moore (leader), Alexandra Santon, Cynthia Black, Eliana Estrada

  Violin 2: Pauline Kempf, Annemarie Schubert, Luke Chiang

  Viola: Jennifer Redondas, Caitlin Keen

  Cello: Octavio Mujica, Hasan Abualhaj

  Bass: Farley Pearce

  Organ: Yunyi Ji

SOUND (BWV 90 only):  Chanho Han & Jason O'Connell | VIDEO (BWV 90 only): Clubsoda Productions with Edgar Garcia assisting | VIDEO (Interview): Nicholas Phan

This episode was filmed in partnership with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Carla Dirlikov Canales and I have known each other since we were teenagers growing up in the twin towns of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan — we even sang together as fellow voice majors at the University of Michigan. Since then, Carla has built a career turning music into a tool for cultural diplomacy: a State Department cultural exchange mission to Mexico led her to found The Canales Project in 2016, and in 2023 she became the National Endowment for the Arts' first Senior Advisor and Envoy for Cultural Exchange. She's currently a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School.

In this episode, Carla and I talk about identity, curiosity, and how Bach — a working musician employed by the city of Leipzig — offers a surprising model for thinking about music's power to build bridges between people and cultures today.

Stick around to the end for the aria: the tenor aria "Bleibt, ihr Engel, bleibt bei mir" from Cantata BWV 19, Es erhub sich ein Streit, featuring Dominic Favia on period natural trumpet.

NOTE ABOUT THE TRUMPET:
Dominic Favia, our trumpet player for this aria, played this on a true period instrument, which is to say that it has no valves and no finger holes. These instruments, which is how trumpets were designed in Bach’s time, are only able to play notes that occur naturally in its own overtone series, which means that some of these notes don’t quite line up in the same ways our ears are accustomed to hearing in our time of equally-tempered modern pianos. This is not a mistake by any means, but just the physics of the instrument and is what we imagine would have been the same sound Bach’s own trumpeters would have made and what Bach himself would have been accustomed to hearing.

Learn more about BACH 52 at bach52.nicholas-phan.com.
Learn more about Dominic's trumpet at https://www.dominicfavia.com/about-the-natural-trumpet

BACH 52 Episode 21
Bach as a Bridge-Builder
with
Carla Dirlikov Canales,
  mezzo-soprano;
  founder, The Canales Project  ⁨@thecanalesproject2624⁩  
& Nicholas Phan, tenor

ARIA 
Tenor Aria from Es erhub sich ein Streit, BWV 19
PERFORMERS
Nicholas Phan, tenor
Dominic Favia, trumpet
San Francisco Conservatory of Music Baroque Ensemble
  Corey Jamason & Elisabeth Reed, directors

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Violinist Owen Dalby (St. Lawrence String Quartet, Stanford artist-in-residence) on why Bach's music works like a Rorschach test — and how it became his spiritual home.

Owen Dalby has spent a lifetime leading an extraordinarily multifaceted musical life — performing at the highest levels while pushing the bounds of how classical music relates to community. For much of the last decade he toured the world as a member of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Before that, he co-founded Decoda, a Carnegie Hall–affiliated collective formed around a single question: how do we make this art as relevant, as meaningful, as helpful to as many people as we can?

That question runs through everything else in this episode: his early training with Anne Crowden at Berkeley's Crowden School, where chamber music was treated as a foundation for social-emotional learning; his discovery of baroque instruments and historical performance practice; the St. Matthew Passion, which he calls his "spiritual home" despite not being a believer; and his current work as co-director of Noe Music, the San Francisco chamber series he runs with his wife, violist Meena Bhasin.

The aria for this episode is taken from BWV 177 featuring Owen Dalby, violin and Ruckus Early Music, recorded LIVE at Noe Music in San Francisco, CA in May 2022.

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

with Ellen Exner

‍  ‍doctor of musicology

  former Vice-President, American Bach Society

Is Bach's music really for everyone? Musicologist Ellen Exner — vice president of the American Bach Society and a student of Christoph Wolff at Harvard — argues it isn't, and that the honest answer is more interesting than the comforting one. 

Recorded in Philadelphia while I was performing with the Philadelphia Orchestra, our conversation traces how Bach's sacred vocal music went nearly forgotten for fifty years after his death, only re-entering the concert world through Mendelssohn's Berlin revival of the St. Matthew Passion and the slow, complicated process of divorcing these cantatas from the Lutheran liturgy they were written for. We talk about canon, curriculum, and who gets to decide what belongs in it; what it means to perform theology you don't personally believe; and why Bach never imagined his music traveling beyond the small Leipzig world he wrote it for — let alone into a Hong Kong concert hall centuries later. Ellen's answer to the episode's central question — "Bach is for everybody who wants it" — reframes the whole project.

The episode closes with the aria "Und du von Not erhörte Kreatur" from Cantata BWV 121, Christum wir sollen loben schon, written for the second day of Christmas 1724. Scored for tenor and oboe d'amore, it turns the shepherds' encounter with the infant Christ into a meditation on scale — the vast creator made small and pitiable to save the flesh through flesh. It's a fitting close to a conversation about music built for one specific time, place, and purpose that somehow keeps finding new listeners who want it.

Full episode credits, transcript, and video can be found at: https://www.bach52.nicholas-phan.com/episodes/ep3

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Is the music of Bach for everyone?

In Episode 2 of BACH 52, I sit down with oboist and artistic director Debra Nagy to explore this question through the lens of historical performance, personal belief, and the universal human emotions that Bach's music somehow captures across centuries and cultures.

Debra is the artistic director of Les Délices and one of the most thoughtful advocates for baroque music I know. Raised in the conservative Jewish tradition and now identifying as culturally Jewish and agnostic, she shares something deeply personal with me: how Bach's profoundly Christian music still resonates with her experience of humanity, grief, loss, and connection. We talk about why the St. Matthew Passion moves non-believers to tears, how baroque instruments create colors and emotions that modern instruments simply can't access, and what it means to find your life's calling through the intimate dialogue between voice and period instruments.

We also explore the fascinating world of the baroque oboe and oboe d'amore, instruments that Debra describes as having "more color, more humanity, more emotion" than their modern counterparts. You'll hear the difference in our featured performance of BWV 166 "Ich will an den Himmel denken," a rarely-heard aria that showcases exactly why these historical instruments matter so much.

This conversation is about more than just music. It's about how Bach builds community across time, how his cantatas speak to our deepest experiences of mortality and love, and why engaging with this music on its own terms opens up something profound and universal.

Watch the episode and see full episode credits at https://www.bach52.nicholas-phan.com/episodes/ep2

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects