Bachtalk: Thinking Through Music

The following is part of the Project 232, a series of essays and reflections leading up to the April 2026 performance of J. S. Bach’s B-Minor Mass, by The Bach Ensemble at St. Thomas. These posts go to paid subscribers of BachTalk or patrons who have made in gifts in support of the BEST’s performance.

The following reflection was shared at Bach Vespers, October 13, 2026 at St. Thomas Episcopal Church (Terrace Park, Ohio). The cantata for that evening was Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele, BWV 180.

There is a beautiful icon by Andrei Rublev, Russia’s most famous iconographer of the medieval period. Painted in the early 15th century, it is called The Trinity. It depicts three figures seated at a table, with a cup at the center. The figures sit around three sides of the table, but the fourth side is left open toward the viewer. It is a striking representation of the communion of God, with a place left for us.

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We are not made for isolation. In Genesis, God repeatedly names the parts of creation “good,” but the one thing he calls “not good” is being alone. This sentiment is not the exclusive property of the Christian faith. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a Sanskrit text composed around the 7th or 6th century BCE, the lone cosmic being, the Universal Self, finds no delight in being alone. It grows to the size of a man and woman embracing, and divides its body into two halves. A few centuries later in Greece, Plato tells nearly the same story. In his Symposium, human beings were once whole, double creatures, until Zeus split them in two. Ever since, we have wandered the earth searching for our other half. Love, he says, is simply the name we give to that longing for wholeness.

We are made for community. Ubuntu is an African philosophy summed up as “a person is a person through other persons,” or “I am because we are.” The Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō wrote of ningen, which defines a human being not as an isolated individual, but as the relational, lived space that exists between people. Think, too, of the word companion, which comes from the Latin com and panis, “with bread.” Our companions are those with whom we share bread, and that leads us to the table.

Every culture associates belonging with shared meals: weddings, holidays, the sharing of food after a funeral. The Eucharist, the central Christian sacrament, takes that most human act and sanctifies it. There we find physical, social, and spiritual communion at the same table.

Tonight’s cantata, Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele, BWV 180, was written for the 20th Sunday after Trinity and first performed on October 22, 1724. The Gospel reading for that day, and for this evening, is the wedding banquet in Matthew 22, where the invited guests are too busy to come, and the king instead fills his hall with everyone from the streets, “both bad and good.” The cantata is based on Johann Franck’s hymn of the same name, which many of you may know as “Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness.” The hymn depicts the soul dressing for its wedding, and in it the feast is transformed into the communion table, and the parable widens into a symbol of sacred connection.

Among the wonderful music in this cantata, two movements are worth highlighting. The opening chorus is something between a pastorale and a gigue, with a lilt in 12/8 time that dances with the sound of a feast already underway. The flutes and oboes create a festive sound as they weave a transparent texture over the dancing string melody. Floating above it all is Johann Crüger’s chorale tune from 1649, the hymn carried along by the dance. Bach’s choice to set a solemn sacramental hymn as a wedding dance is evocative, and it brings out the celebratory nature of communion. The lavishness of this music reminds me of the 1987 film Babette’s Feast, in which a sumptuous, extravagant banquet breaks down the rigidity and fear of a small village in Denmark. At Babette’s table, and at Bach’s, grievance becomes grace.

The music welcomes us, but the words of the chorale carry the awe of such an invitation. Later in the cantata, the alto recitative reinforces this idea, as she sings, “My heart feels fear and joy within it.”

The chorale returns in the final movement, and Bach has stripped away the feast to leave the simplicity of the bread: “Jesu, wahres Brot des Lebens,” “Jesus, true bread of life,” in a simple four-part setting that the Leipzig congregation would have known by heart. Here all three communions meet: the physical (the bread), the social (the congregation united in song), and the spiritual (Christ, the one sung to).

George Herbert, the seventeenth-century poet and Anglican priest, wrote about this same table. His poem “Love (III)” begins:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

The guest hangs back, certain he doesn’t belong. But like the guests in Matthew, gathered from the streets, both bad and good, he is welcomed anyway. Love answers every objection, gently, one after another, until at last:

“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”

So I did sit and eat.

Think again of Rublev’s open side of the table. Tonight’s Vespers is our wedding feast, our communal banquet, our evening of companionship, as we share song, prayer, and attention. The place has been set. And now, we sit and eat.

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The following reflection was shared at Bach Vespers, September 20, 2026 at St. Thomas Episcopal Church (Terrace Park, Ohio).

The writer Wendell Berry died on August 31, 2026, at the age of ninety-two. He spent most of his life working the same farm in Henry County, Kentucky, and writing steadily about it for the better part of sixty years. I want to share a few of his words, in his memory, and because they say something close to what I want to share in this essay.

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It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

At the start of each new Vespers season with the Bach Ensemble, I like to write not about the first cantata of the season, Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes, BWV 76, but rather about this larger endeavor we call the Bach Vespers, the principal mission of the Bach Ensemble.

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer I have come to enjoy immensely. He has written several wonderful novels, but my favorite book of his is called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It is a reflection on his twin passions of long-distance running and writing. His central insight is that running trains the discipline underneath his writing. It isn't a metaphor for effort in general. It's a metaphor for sustained, unglamorous repetition.

Pain in running, he learns, is inevitable; suffering is optional. The parallel to writing is to dispense with the notion of magical, mystical inspiration, and instead view discipline as the secret to sustained excellence. The daily mileage of running becomes the substance of value; and the daily mileage of writing becomes the core of a creative life.

I cannot help but take this framing and apply it to what we know of the life of J. S. Bach. His Leipzig cantata cycles, written over the course of many years, were his training log: a new work nearly every week. Tonight’s cantata, in fact, represents the beginning of this effort: it was the second cantata of the first Leipzig cycle, premiered in 1723. It would mark the start of a sustained pace of creativity that would last for years.

Years earlier, Bach had already described his goal of a “well-regulated church music,” a long-term vision that by its nature requires sustained excellence. Those weekly deadlines were the source of Bach’s discipline, and not an obstacle to it. That weekly discipline, with all its difficulty, wasn’t separate from the cantatas’ spiritual content—it was the devotion, worked out in real time.

As he aged, Murakami realized that the times and distances he once achieved became more elusive. At first, he pushed back against this clear indication of his own frailty. Over time, though, he learned that the most productive and indeed gratifying choice was to accept these changes and adjust his own expectations, rather than push beyond his capability or quit altogether.

Late in life, Bach’s creative shift mirrored what Murakami described. Bach moved away from weekly production toward synthesis. He was content to reuse older cantatas — a byproduct of his well-ordered church music — but also turned his focus to more legacy-defining works like the Art of Fugue, the Musical Offering, and the Mass in B Minor. These works were a natural reaction to a new season of life, one defined not by decline but by reflection, refinement, and an attempt to answer a philosophical question: what was this all for?

So when we find ourselves at our monthly Vespers, we find an opportunity to come together, to be a witness to beauty, to think about our lives, to humble ourselves, and to share in peaceful community. 2026 marks the seventeenth year of this service; that is quite a training log. Our goal as an organization, and as a community, is not to perform one cantata, nor, honestly, is it to perform all of them. The real goal is only to perform the next cantata. And the next. And the next. In this way we are building a rooted community committed to the flourishing of art, spirituality, and each other.

If we return our thoughts to Wendell Berry, this idea is at the heart of just about all that he stood for. He lived his life as a messenger for rooted and embodied living. This fall we began another season of Vespers — not because a calendar told us to, but because sustained practice is the work itself. Bach never really finished his cantata cycles. How could he? And we, even if we perform every single one, will not finish ours either. What is asked of us is exactly what was asked of Bach at his desk each week: to show up, and to do the work in front of us.

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This reflection was given at the first Bach Vespers of the 2026-2027 season. With references to Wendell Berry, Haruki Murakami, and Bach.

I have neglected BachTalk for several months, but I am getting back after it. There have been several work-related and personal projects that got in the way, but I’m looking forward to sharing more in the near future.

The most substantial event was the announcement of my retirement from St. Thomas Episcopal Church (Terrace Park, OH) as Director of Music, effective in May 2027. I plan on continuing with the Bach Ensemble, but I will be stepping away from my weekly duties at St. Thomas. While this decision was largely driven by family responsibilities and opportunities, one side benefit is that I can spend more time focused on my writing, in a more serious way. I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and now it appears that I will have the time.

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We’ll see where all that goes. For now, look for more Vespers reflections/essays (including the one from September up soon; also my posts for Project 232 (the special blog just for patrons who have made gifts in support of the Bach Ensemble’s performance of the Mass in B Minor next April) should start appearing more frequently. And I hope to also return to the BachTalk podcast with a mix of interviews, spoken versions of my reflections, and more.

If you’re receiving this, I thank you for your interest. I hope you’ll enjoy what I share in the months ahead.

Thanks.

-Carlton

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Summer has a way of seeping into my habits, and I find myself napping on the porch more, both literally and figuratively. But the time comes when I start to feel the need to work. As a result, I find my hands on music scores more frequently. At first I just hold them, and turn through the pages. I know there will come a time when I have to kick-start my study. For this, the best way I know to gain focus is simply by numbering the measures. It is relatively mindless work, but it lets my eye move across the page, and I know my mind is taking notes.

What struck me first about Cantata 76, the first cantata for this new season of Bach Vespers, was its scope. It is big, dramatic, and ambitious. It has a lot to say. This grandeur is notable, in part, because it was one of two works he wrote to begin his new tenure at Leipzig. To quote the great baseball movie Bull Durham, Bach was “announcing his presence with authority.”

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But like the great facade of a cathedral, the work has form and structure that, if we are open to it, shape the way we listen. It feels like there are two pieces here, dividing along the lines Bach gave us. The two parts were separated by a sermon. There is a record of Bach performing each part as stand-alone works. What binds them together?

We humans love duality: the two sides of a coin, light and darkness, tension and resolution. I remember learning what dolce pena (“sweet pain”) was from Monteverdi. Here, Bach’s unknown librettist pits the grandeur of creation, the sense of wonder we encounter in the natural world, what tradition calls the ‘glory of God’ against the moral requirement for such gifts: the love of neighbor. The implication is that you can’t have one without the other. That alone is a lesson worth sharing, and so I am glad we start our season here.

There is so much more to learn for me. Interestingly, Bach seems to be drawing from both readings of the day, the Epistle and the Gospel. He does not always do that. The emotional range of the arias is something to behold. He is even up to his old tricks of burying hidden meaning by including a reference to the Ten Commandments that appears nowhere in the prescribed texts of the day. There is the uncommon use of the viola da gamba and oboe d’amore. What does he mean here?

The measures are numbered. The questions have only just begun.

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This newsletter will take you behind the scenes with the Bach Ensemble as we prepare to perform Bach’s Mass in B Minor, BWV 232, in April 2027.

Over the coming year, I hope to give you a window into what it means to prepare a work of this scale: the study, the decisions, the questions, the discoveries, and the inevitable surprises along the way. The Mass…

The following reflection was shared at Bach Vespers, March 22, 2026 at St. Thomas Episcopal Church (Terrace Park).

Sailing experience comes in many forms, but two have shaped my thinking — ocean sailing and lake sailing — and the contrast between them turns out to be a surprisingly useful lens for tonight’s cantata.

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I have done some cruising on a large sailboat — in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean about a half dozen times — and have taken a few courses with the American Sailing Association.

One thing I know about sailing larger vessels is that wind conditions in the ocean often stay consistent for longer periods of time relative to lake sailing. In good weather, a captain must know the day’s forecast, observe local conditions, and then choose a route and set the sails appropriately. Depending on your destination, you might find yourself sailing on the same tack for 30 minutes, an hour, several hours, or even perhaps several days. If you get the right wind and you’re crossing an ocean, you might make small adjustments but not really change course for a week.

Lake sailing, as I mostly do on Cowan Lake near Wilmington, Ohio, is very different. The winds on Cowan Lake are anything but consistent. Gusts can sometimes double the apparent wind in an instant and then drop down just a few seconds later. Wind direction can shift constantly, often between 90 or even 180 degrees on the compass. These changes can sometimes be anticipated, but they require some diligence on the part of a good skipper in order not to lose momentum, or worse, dump yourself into the water.

My time on the water has convinced me that the ancient philosophical connections between sailing and life are valid and insightful. You no doubt have heard the adage:

A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.

Our lives are in constant change. The rate of change may differ. We might have long passages of happiness or sadness, with little or no change. We might also experience the unsettling and disquieting feeling of constant change, struggling to anticipate the next high or low. In this way, the differences between what I have painted with a broad brush as lake and ocean sailing can be helpful metaphors as we consider our lives.

This is the lens I would invite you to bring to tonight’s cantata, BWV 150. Bach wrote this early in his compositional life, and it bears the hallmarks of his earlier cantatas. As Bach Vespers patrons, you may have become accustomed to the usual assortment of choruses, recitatives, arias, and chorales that define Bach’s mature style. The ebbs and flows of this structure — with the recitatives giving us narrative, the arias points of reflection, and the chorales amplifying the teachings of the Christian church — allow us to set our sails at the start of a cantata knowing roughly where we are headed.

Bach’s earlier cantatas were decidedly more like lake sailing. As you listen this evening, you may note that things change quickly in this work. The tempo changes mid-movement, the emotions range from sadness to hope to fear to resignation, all within the span of a few minutes. While Bach would adapt this style over the years to his more mature work, these juxtapositions aid in interpreting the text for tonight’s cantata.

Take for example the second movement. In just two sentences, taken from the first two verses of Psalm 25, we have four distinct emotional and spiritual qualities:

Lord, I long after you.

My God, I hope in you.

Let me not be put to shame.

Lest my enemies rejoice over me. (fear)

Longing, hope, shame, and fear. As you listen, notice the choices Bach has made to convey this text tonight. How would you expect music of longing to sound? What about hope? And shame? The emotional gusts come quickly and abruptly, leaving you needing to trim your emotional sails rapidly.

The fourth movement also presents such an example. Here the psalm asks to be led by God. The path is presented to us in a long, rising scale set in a slow tempo, suggesting awe and humility. The scale begins in the bass and ascends through the other voices and even to the two violins. But then, unexpectedly, the tone changes and the music becomes excited and uncontained. Here we feel the same text — “Lead me in your truth and teach me” — in two very different emotional states, like a sudden gust shifting everything at once.

It is helpful to reflect on music like this, particularly in times of instability and adjustment. This cantata meets us in flux — which is especially fitting in Lent, but there are plenty of other occasions that call for it too: personal struggles and life changes, societal uneasiness and discord. These moments weigh on us, particularly when they arrive faster than we can fully process them.

Lent is a season of reflection and recalibration, and this cantata seems especially appropriate for that work. Its restlessness does not distract us from what is constant — it calls us back to it. We must stay alert to the changes around us but keep trimming our sails toward what endures.

As the old saying goes: you can’t control the wind, but you can adjust your sails. My hope is that tonight’s music helps you do exactly that.

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The following reflection was shared at Bach Vespers, April 26, 2026, at St. Thomas Episcopal Church.

Human beings, from our beginnings, have been pattern-seeking creatures. We look at the stars and find constellations. We organize pitch and rhythm and discover music. We are drawn to symmetry and balance, whether in faces, architecture, poetry, or the stories we tell.

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Patterns are not merely pleasing, though. They help us remember. Plainchant in the Christian Church developed, in part, to aid in the memorization of biblical texts, psalms, and prayers. Culture is largely preserved through patterns: the stories, the rituals, and the songs we pass down. These things can hold a community together across centuries. At the most fundamental level, our instinct for pattern helps us answer the question: What comes next?

Patterns also help us make meaning. We need to know whether grief has a shape, whether suffering can become wisdom, and whether death is the end. Patterns do not necessarily answer those questions, but they give us a way to ask them.

Chiasm is one of the oldest patterns we find in human art and literature. The word comes from the Greek letter chi, shaped like an X. A chiastic structure is one in which ideas move toward a central point, or axis, and then reflect back in reverse order. We cannot point with certainty to the earliest example of chiastic art, but we find structures deep in the ancient world — in Mesopotamian, Semitic, Greek, and biblical texts. By the time we encounter chiasm in Scripture, it is already an established way of shaping meaning.

Bach seems to have been especially drawn to this kind of structural and symbolic thinking, from his earliest works to his latest. Next year, the Bach Ensemble’s performance of his Mass in B Minor will illustrate chiastic structure in one of his final works. But tonight we can find the same kind of structure in what is perhaps the very first cantata he composed: Christ lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4.

Although its exact origin is uncertain, the cantata is generally thought to have been written for Easter Day in or before 1707. To modern ears, it may not seem particularly “Easter-like.” It is austere, severe, and ancient-sounding. But this is not a piece about Easter morning. It begins in the tomb.

The cantata is based on a chorale by Martin Luther, whose text draws on the ancient Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes — “Praise to the Paschal Victim” — and its image of a battle between Life and Death. Luther also chose a familiar and beloved medieval tune associated with the older Easter hymn Christ ist erstanden, or Christ is risen. Luther’s aim was to expand that Easter acclamation and open it to the deeper metaphysical drama hidden inside it.

The older hymn says: Christ is risen; therefore rejoice.

Luther’s hymn says: Christ was captive to death. He entered death. Death and Life waged war. And in taking Christ, Death itself was undone.

If you listen carefully, the structure of this drama is chiastic in nature. Bach intensifies this by arranging the vocal movements of the cantata in a similar form:

Chorus — Duet — Solo — Chorus — Solo — Duet — Chorus

It all turns on the fourth movement, which presents the heart of the Easter mystery:

Es war ein wunderlicher Krieg —
“It was a wondrous war.”

This is the center of the chi, the crossing point of the X. Death binds Christ, but Christ breaks Death. The grave swallows Life, but Life swallows the grave. Easter joy is not the opposite of sorrow. Easter joy is sorrow turned inside out.

The deepest transformations we know do not happen by escape, but by passage. Sometimes the way forward is not around the obstacle, but through it.

When my church choir complains about a piece they do not particularly enjoy, I sometimes tell them, “You can do almost anything for three minutes.” Here, Christ does not conquer death by avoiding it, but by entering it. This is a severe message, reflected in the severity of the music.

That severity is part of the cantata’s gift. We live in a world marked by grief, anxiety, loss, and the recurring fear that darkness may have the final word. In every age, people are tempted to believe that their own moment is uniquely troubled. But history suggests otherwise. We are alive in a flawed and fearful world, as all who came before us were, and we are challenged to make meaning, courage, and faith within it.

Bach does not answer our fear with denial or easy consolation. He answers it with passage. This may be why the chiastic structure feels so fitting: chiasm is the shape of reversal, the shape of transformation, the shape of a story turning at its deepest point. For Christians, that great crossing point is the cross itself — the great chi, the first letter of Christos. But even for those who may not share the Christian faith, there is something worth considering. Great art does not merely entertain; it proposes a way of seeing, a way of making meaning, and a way through. Tonight’s music suggests that darkness need not have the final word, and that the place of greatest suffering may also become the place of deepest revelation.

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The following reflection was given at Bach Vespers, January 18, 2026, at St. Thomas Episcopal Church.

I recently learned about an influential thinker who, before his death, had grave concerns about an emerging technology. He worried that this new technology encouraged us to outsource memory, to confuse access to information with understanding, and to mistake efficiency for wisdom. He feared that it might weaken habits of deep learning, producing people who appear knowledgeable without truly knowing, fluent without being formed. While it promised intellectual power, he suggested, it risked leaving the human mind thinner rather than richer.

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Interestingly, this thinker was Socrates, and the emergent technology was reading and writing.

I read about Socrates in the book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf, which explores how human beings learned to read and how that learning has changed our brains. Wolf begins with an obvious but surprising claim: we were never born to read. While speech is innate to us, there is no built-in reading center in our brains. Reading is a cultural invention: something that must be taught, practiced, and sustained over time.

That reading is learned is not so remarkable, but how the brain responds to the process is. To learn to read, the brain adapts areas meant for vision, language, memory, and emotion, and weaves them together in a new network. Nothing is erased or replaced. Older capacities are retained and repurposed. It is akin to the scene in Apollo 13 where the engineers dump a box of materials onto the tabletop and try to reuse them to make a new connection. In learning to read, the brain literally reorganizes itself.

One consequence of this reorganization is that deep reading teaches us to hold time together. To read well requires memory of what has been read, attention to what is unfolding now, and anticipation and prediction of what is yet to come. Meaning arises only when the past, present, and future are held together in the mind. The reading brain becomes a temporal instrument training us in patience, reflection, and sustained attention.

It is here where my own thoughts turn to music. Sound by itself is immediate and fleeting. Music, it seems to me, is something more than sound. A single note has limited meaning on its own. Its meaning emerges only in relationship to what came before and what the listener expects to hear next. Music unfolds across time, and to listen deeply is to hold multiple moments together at once.

Like reading, music is learned. We are born with extraordinary auditory capacities, but the systems that give music structure–scales, harmony, meter, form–are cultural inheritances. They are taught, practiced, and internalized over time. Deep listening is not passive; it is not inherent; it is a skill, shaped by repetition and experience.

This ability to hold time together, the past within the present, the present with the future, is a distinctive human capacity. There is, perhaps, no time when this is more apparent than the New Year. The turning of the year is more than just a date. It is a ritual act that depends on memory and imagination. We look back on what has been, with gratitude or regret. We look forward to what may happen, with hope or uncertainty. And we stand in the present, aware that something old is giving way to something new.

Tonight’s cantata, BWV 143, was written for the sacred feast of the New Year, a day Christians have marked for centuries as a significant threshold. These observances are communal acts of temporal awareness, reminding us that new beginnings do not erase what came before, and that hope cannot exist apart from memory.

So, what should we think about as we listen to Bach’s music this evening? The question is not whether new technologies change how we learn or remember—they always do—but whether we allow them to replace the deeper human work of remembering itself. Memory is not merely the storage of information; it is the slow, lived practice of holding meaning over time, of returning to what matters most. Bach’s Cantata 143, written for the turning of the year, stands within that tradition of sacred remembrance: a musical act of praise that looks backward with gratitude and forward with trust. As the calendar turns and tools evolve, the deeper calling remains unchanged—to remember who we are, whose we are, and to treasure and sustain those great and beautiful things handed down through memory.

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