Analyzing Bach Cantatas

Analyzing Bach Cantatas PDF Author: Eric Chafe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199882975
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Bach's cantatas are among the highest achievements of Western musical art, yet studies of the individual cantatas that are both illuminating and detailed are few. In this book, noted Bach expert Eric Chafe combines theological, historical, analytical, and interpretive approaches to the cantatas to offer readers and listeners alike the richest possible experience of these works. A respected theorist of seventeenth-century music, Chafe is sensitive to the composer's intentions and to the enduring and universal qualities of the music itself. Concentrating on a small number of representative cantatas, mostly from the Leipzig cycles of 1723-24 and 1724-25, and in particular on Cantata 77, Chafe shows how Bach strove to mirror both the dogma and the mystery of religious experience in musical allegory. Analyzing Bach Cantatas offers valuable information on the theological relevance of the structure of the liturgical year for the design and content of these works, as well as a survey of the theories of modality that inform Bach's compositional style. Chafe demonstrates that, while Bach certainly employed "pictorialism" and word-painting in his compositions, his method of writing music was a more complex amalgam of theological concepts and music theory. Regarding the cantatas as musical allegories that reflect the fundamental tenets of Lutheran theology as established during Bach's lifetime, Chafe synthesizes a number of key musical and theological ideas to illuminate the essential character of these great works. This unique and insightful book offers an essential methodology for understanding one of the central bodies of work in the Western musical canon. It will prove indispensable for all students and scholars of Bach's work, musicology, and theological studies.

Analyzing Bach Cantatas

Analyzing Bach Cantatas PDF Author: Eric Chafe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199882975
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bach's cantatas are among the highest achievements of Western musical art, yet studies of the individual cantatas that are both illuminating and detailed are few. In this book, noted Bach expert Eric Chafe combines theological, historical, analytical, and interpretive approaches to the cantatas to offer readers and listeners alike the richest possible experience of these works. A respected theorist of seventeenth-century music, Chafe is sensitive to the composer's intentions and to the enduring and universal qualities of the music itself. Concentrating on a small number of representative cantatas, mostly from the Leipzig cycles of 1723-24 and 1724-25, and in particular on Cantata 77, Chafe shows how Bach strove to mirror both the dogma and the mystery of religious experience in musical allegory. Analyzing Bach Cantatas offers valuable information on the theological relevance of the structure of the liturgical year for the design and content of these works, as well as a survey of the theories of modality that inform Bach's compositional style. Chafe demonstrates that, while Bach certainly employed "pictorialism" and word-painting in his compositions, his method of writing music was a more complex amalgam of theological concepts and music theory. Regarding the cantatas as musical allegories that reflect the fundamental tenets of Lutheran theology as established during Bach's lifetime, Chafe synthesizes a number of key musical and theological ideas to illuminate the essential character of these great works. This unique and insightful book offers an essential methodology for understanding one of the central bodies of work in the Western musical canon. It will prove indispensable for all students and scholars of Bach's work, musicology, and theological studies.

Analyzing Bach Cantatas

Analyzing Bach Cantatas PDF Author: Eric Thomas Chafe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780197727461
Category : Cantatas, Sacred
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Analytical Studies of Selected Cantatas by J.S. Bach

Analytical Studies of Selected Cantatas by J.S. Bach PDF Author: Owen Belcher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Musical analysis
Languages : en
Pages : 856

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Book Description
Johann Sebastian Bach is considered by music historians, music theorists, performers, and audiences among the most significant composers of the Western world. Yet, the genre in which he was most prolific--the church cantata--has received little attention from the music-theoretical community beyond corpus studies of aria forms.\, listener's guides, and listings of madrigalisms. Crucially, there is very little detailed musical analysis of cantatas, other than chorale harmonizations abstracted from cantatas and passions. After speculating about some reasons for the discrepancy between Bach's priviledged position in the Western canon and the lack of analyses of arguably his most important works, my dissertation will develop a framework for analyzing Bach's cantatas, drawing primarily on the analytical philosophy of David Lewin, enriched by the literary theories of Northrop Frye and Frederic Jameson.

Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach

Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach PDF Author: Mark A. Peters
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498554962
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach collects seventeen essays by leading Bach scholars. The authors each address in some way such questions of meaning in J. S. Bach’s vocal compositions—including his Passions, Masses, Magnificat, and cantatas—with particular attention to how such meaning arises out of the intentionality of Bach’s own compositional choices or (in Part IV in particular) how meaning is discovered, and created, through the reception of Bach’s vocal works. And the authors do not consider such compositional choices in a vacuum, but rather discuss Bach’s artistic intentions within the framework of broader cultural trends—social, historical, theological, musical, etc. Such questions of compositional choice and meaning frame the four primary approaches to Bach’s vocal music taken by the authors in this volume, as seen across the book’s four parts: Part I: How might the study of historical theology inform our understanding of Bach’s compositional choices in his music for the church (cantatas, Passions, masses)? Part II: How can we apply traditional analytical tools to understand better how Bach’s compositions were created and how they might have been heard by his contemporaries? Part III: What we can understand anew through the study of Bach’s self-borrowing (i.e., parody), which always changed the earlier meaning of a composition through changes in textual content, compositional characteristics, the work’s context within a larger composition, and often the performance context (from court to church, for example)? Part IV: What can the study of reception teach us about a work’s meaning(s) in Bach’s time, during the time of his immediate successors, and at various points since then (including our present)? The chapters in this volume thus reflect the breadth of current Bach research in its attention not only to source study and analysis, but also to meanings and contexts for understanding Bach’s compositions.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach PDF Author: Colleen Joan Magee Snyder
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description


Bach & God

Bach & God PDF Author: Michael Marissen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190606967
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Bach & God explores the religious character of Bach's vocal and instrumental music in seven interrelated essays. Noted musicologist Michael Marissen offers wide-ranging interpretive insights from careful biblical and theological scrutiny of the librettos. Yet he also shows how Bach's pitches, rhythms, and tone colors can make contributions to a work's plausible meanings that go beyond setting texts in an aesthetically satisfying manner. In some of Bach's vocal repertory, the music puts a "spin" on the words in a way that turns out to be explainable as orthodox Lutheran in its orientation. In a few of Bach's vocal works, his otherwise puzzlingly fierce musical settings serve to underscore now unrecognized or unacknowledged verbal polemics, most unsettlingly so in the case of his church cantatas that express contempt for Jews and Judaism. Finally, even Bach's secular instrumental music, particularly the late collections of "abstract" learned counterpoint, can powerfully project certain elements of traditional Lutheran theology. Bach's music is inexhaustible, and Bach & God suggests that through close contextual study there is always more to discover and learn.

Research Essay, MA, Music, 1976

Research Essay, MA, Music, 1976 PDF Author: Theodore Robert Baskin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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J. S. Bach's Cantata 56

J. S. Bach's Cantata 56 PDF Author: Anne Heider
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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The Cantatas of J. S. Bach

The Cantatas of J. S. Bach PDF Author: Alfred Dürr
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191058130
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 984

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Book Description
This is the only English translation of this important book by the world's most distinguished Bach scholar. This work is widely regarded as the most authoritative and comprehensive treatment of the Bach cantatas. It begins with a historical survey of the seventeenth-century background to the cantatas, and performance practice issues. The core of the book is a work-by-work study in which each cantata in turn is represented by its libretto, a synopsis of its movements, and a detailed analytical commentary. This format makes it extremely useful as a reference work for anyone listening to, performing in, or studying any of the Bach cantatas. All the cantata librettos are given in German-English parallel text. For the English edition the text has been carefully revised to bring it up to date, taking account of recent Bach scholarship.

J.S. Bach Cantata No. 52

J.S. Bach Cantata No. 52 PDF Author: Janette Cook Williams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description