Notes on Bach

This month we hear from historian Dr. Tanya Kevorkian, Associate Professor of History at Millersville University, about her forthcoming book, Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany, which documents and explores the rich variety of everyday sounds and music that characterized life in German Baroque cities. This episode is sponsored by the American Bach Society, which supports the study and performance of the music of J.S. Bach in the U.S. and Canada, with membership open to anyone interested.

In this episode of “Notes on Bach,” we hear from musicologist and violinist Dr. Noelle Heber about J.S. Bach’s attitudes towards, experiences with, and cantatas related to the ideas of spiritual and material wealth. Dr. Heber's book, J.S. Bach's Material and Spiritual Treasures, can be ordered here. For more about her book, check out Dr. Heber's blog post.

Resources Mentioned in the Show

For recent research about Anna Magdalena Bach, visit Eberhard Spree's English-language blog and check out our earlier Notes on Bach episode with Dr. Andrew Talle.

To hear about how scholars have used Bach's Calov Bible in their research, check out our Notes on Bach episode with Dr. Robin Leaver. To learn more about the Calov Bible and see facsimile pages, visit here.

To kick off Season 6 of “Notes on Bach,” we hear from musicologist and BBC radio host Dr. Hannah French about how conductor Sir Henry Wood, long associated with the BBC Proms, shaped Bach reception in twentieth-century England. Her book, Sir Henry Wood, Champion of J.S. Bach, was recently published by Boydell and Brewer. For more, check out “Henry and Seb,” Dr. French’s podcast miniseries on the book. 

Image above: Wood’s final conducting score of J.S. Bach, Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor: For Orchestra, orch. Henry J. Wood [Klenovsky] (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 39. Property of Dr. Hannah French.   

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 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.

Earlier in November, Bach Society Houston performed works from the two Anna Magdalena Bach Notebooks; you can watch the concert here. These notebooks, which originated in 1722 and 1725, respectively, were owned by Anna Magdalena Bach, J.S. Bach’s second wife. These two manuscript collections contain keyboard and vocal works of varying levels of complexity, composed by multiple people and entered into the notebooks by different scribes, including Anna Magdalena herself. In our own time, some of the more elementary pieces in the books are still well-known as teaching pieces for piano students. The notebooks are one of the few surviving sources related to Anna Magdalena Bach, who has been the subject of research, conjecture, devotion and fiction across centuries and continents. With us to talk about Anna Magdalena's musical and domestic life, her Notebooks and other sources related to her, and how we know what we think we know about her is Dr. Andrew Talle. Dr. Talle is Associate Professor of Musicology at Northwestern University and a scholar of music and society in eighteenth-century Germany. He is author of the book Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century. Stay tuned at the end of the interview to hear more about his new research into popular music in the Leipzig of Bach's time.

To finish Season 4, we hear from Dr. Erin Lambert, Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She joins us to talk about her book, Singing the Resurrection: Body, Community, and Belief in Reformation Europe, published by Oxford University Press. Our conversation covers how the Reformation fragmented late medieval belief about the body, resurrection, and community into a kaleidoscope of differing confessional notions which then found expression in song. We also talk about Erin’s research process and where her book fits with, and how it interrogates, existing Reformation historiography.

This month, we're diving into the world of Jewish salon culture in late-18th- and early-19th-century Berlin, a setting where women such as Sara Levy shaped the transmission and reception of Bach family music. Our guest on this episode is early music scholar and performer Dr. Rebecca Cypess, who joins us to discuss new research about Sara Levy in the book Sara Levy's World along with two related recordings by the Raritan Players: In Sara Levy's Salon and Sisters, Face to Face: The Bach Legacy in Women's Hands. Together, these projects provide new perspectives on the complicated musical and cultural agency of a notable upper-class Jewish woman in Enlightenment Germany.

If you can identify the sound of the harpsichord but know very little about its history and performance practice, this is the episode for you. Join us as Mark Kroll, internationally-known harpsichordist, noted scholar, and Emeritus Professor of Music at Boston University, tells us about a comprehensive new book on the harpsichord, the Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord. Kroll edited the collection, which includes essays covering various national/geographical harpsichord traditions, key composers for the instrument, and 20th-century harpsichord music. Houston listeners who plan on attending Bach Society Houston's upcoming concert of Bach's Concertos, which includes the harpsichord showpiece Brandenburg No. 5, will be especially interested in this episode.