John Butt Research Articles

Rethinking Bach ed. by Bettina Varwig

Reviewed by: Rethinking Bach ed. by Bettina Varwig Markus Rathey (bio) Bettina Varwig, ed. Rethinking Bach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 414 pp. Responsible scholarship needs occasional course corrections, moments in time when leaders in the discipline come together to reevaluate methodologies, reassess long-held assumptions, and find new paths to approach their subject of study. These course corrections can be minor, but they can also amount to major paradigm shifts. The Oxford University Press series "Rethinking . . . " has provided a forum for new ideas in the study of major composers, and the volume on Johann Sebastian Bach, edited by Bettina Varwig, is a welcome addition to the series. It reflects a shift in Bach scholarship over the past decade that highlights the emotional qualities of Bach's works while downplaying the view of Bach as a mathematical composer. The inclusion of essays by fourteen authors (the number of Bach's name: B(2)+A(1)+C(3)+H(8)) might have been unintentional, but the fact that this reviewer noticed the significance of the number shows that Bach has been the subject of both valid and highly speculative methodologies in the past. Daniel R. Melamed's essay "Rethinking Bach Codes" provides an interesting and illuminating overview and demonstrates the historical and intellectual framework in which this scholarship emerged. He shows how most of the speculative theories are non-musical (such as the fascination with the number fourteen) and that they often provide a window for listeners into the foreign sonic and intellectual world of Bach's music. What Melamed's essay clearly shows is how modern listening conventions and difficulties lead to scholarly approaches that sometimes prove to be ahistorical or even wrong. A stronger focus on the listener and their perspective is also at the center of John Butt's brilliant essay on "Bach's Works and the Listener's Viewpoint." Using Bach's Christmas Oratorio as a case study, Butt shows how the emerging work concept in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has influenced the way modern listeners (and scholars) perceive a piece that consists of six seemingly independent cantatas. By mining the philosophical discourse of Bach's time (without suggesting that Bach had to be familiar with every single detail of it), [End Page 129] Butt provides a new understanding that culminates in the suggestion that "a Leibnizian would see a well-crafted piece of music as realizing something of God's reality in an infinite causal chain, connecting meanings and emotions in ways that a composer intuits in the mathematical relationships of notes in time" (264). While Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his philosophy have been referenced occasionally by Bach scholars, Butt's innovative approach offers a new path that students of Bach can take to understand his music within the intellectual landscape of his time. A proper understanding of Bach and his music has to be based on reliable editions of his works; and, just as in the theological and philosophical interpretations explored by Melamed and Butt, misconceptions and misreadings have sometimes obscured important details. Joshua Rifkin's essay, "Rethinking Editions: Mass, Missa, and Monument Culture," provides a fundamental reassessment of practices of editing Bach's works in the twenty-first century. It is a laudable strength of the book that it takes the idea of "Bach's time" from a broad and wholistic perspective. Bach's time is the philosophical discourse of the eighteenth century, it is the influence of contemporary theology on his works (as discussed in the essay by Jeremy Begbie), it is Bach's humor (brilliantly explored by David Yearsley), and it is also the material culture that surrounded Bach. Stephen Rose, whose work on the literary culture of Bach's time has shed new light on the status of the musician and his place in the literary imagination,1 makes a strong case in his essay that Bach's works are more than simply "products of his mind" (11). Rather, Rose shows that the material culture of Bach's time had a significant impact as well. In Leipzig, Bach lived in one of the primary trading hubs in Germany and he participated in and engaged with contemporary consumer culture. Rose rightly...

The Digital Dickens Notes Project

The Digital Dickens Notes Project

The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist by John Mullan

Reviewed by: The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist by John Mullan John Batchelor The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist. By John Mullan. London: Bloomsbury. 2020. ix+428 pp. £16.99. ISBN 978-1-4088-6683-2. The bibliography of major secondary works on Dickens is now huge. As with Shakespeare, where the bibliography is as extensive as the sea, the task of reading through enough secondary works on Dickens to arrive at a sound judgement of a new one is daunting. For my money the best work on Dickens begins with John Forster's indispensable Life in three volumes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872–74), and has been followed by valuable critical studies from Humphrey House, F R. and Q. D. Leavis, John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, John Carey, Vincent Newey, J. Hillis Miller, Harry Stone, and others. A cluster of biographical studies coincided with the second centenary of Dickens's birth, including especially those by Michael Slater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Claire Tomalin (London: Viking, 2011), and most intriguingly Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011). There is no shortage of good books on Dickens. So do we need a book like this, which focuses sharply on Dickens's methods? The answer to that is: read it, and you will discover that we do indeed need it. This book by John Mullan is a careful, painstaking, and thoughtful unpicking of Dickens's narrative strategies, exploring in detail the different ways in which each of his modes—including the rhetorical, comical, moral, Gothic, and riotously farcical—contributes to the impact of his work. John Mullan is right to say that Dickens is an 'epicure of fear' (p. 319) and drowning, the terror of drowning and the effect of drowning on the human body. In David Copperfield, the emotionally charged death by drowning of Steerforth, David's friend and little Em'ly's seducer, stirs in David a deep homoerotic Liebestod for his flawed dead hero. Earlier in the same novel, drowning threatens the sexually awakened Em'ly in what Mullan rightly describes as an extraordinary passage in which Dickens violates all narrative conventions. David as narrator anticipates Em'ly's future as a fallen woman. The little girl runs along a 'jagged timber' and is in danger of falling into the sea. Looking forward into a future that only he as first-person narrator can know, David wonders whether 'if the life before her' (that is, her seduction by Steerforth) 'could have been revealed to me at a glance', he would not have done better to have allowed her to drown (p. 287). Drowned humans can also be pillaged, as they are by Gaffer Hexham in Our Mutual Friend, and drowning is a fit punishment for the sexually violent schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone, whose name recalls that of Murdstone, David Copperfield's brutal stepfather. These names evoke a chain of significance: a headstone marks a grave, while sex, shit (merde), and death link these two narratives. Much lighter and funnier meanings appear in Flora Finching's blushingly confused banter with her former suitor, Arthur Clennam, in Our Mutual Friend. [End Page 290] Mullan rightly finds this foolish character good-hearted and generous, and finally sympathetic. Flora Finching is based on a woman Dickens had once loved: 'In 1855 he had eagerly arranged a reunion with the former Maria Beadnell, whom he had unsuccessfully courted more than twenty years earlier.' He was disappointed to find her 'now in her mid-forties, stout and silly' (p. 153). Stout and silly though she may be, she is also good-hearted and generous-spirited, and as Flora she emerges as a 'rounded' figure in more than one sense. Although crazed, Flora is well worth listening to. She erupts into an unpunctuated monologue which has a central theme: 'The withered chaplet my dear,' said Flora, with great enjoyment, 'is then perished the column is crumbled and the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what's-his-name call it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly I must now retire into privacy and look upon the ashes...

BACH at 50: Some Anniversary Thoughts

BACH at 50: Some Anniversary Thoughts Steven E. Plank (bio) BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute made a modest first appearance in the winter of 1970, although as the founding editor, Elinore L. Barber, expressed at the time, “we of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute and Library find ourselves in a chronic state of feverish excitement.”1 In that first issue, readers would find an enthusiastic editorial asserting Bach’s relevance in the “year of the moon”—Barber arrived at Baldwin-Wallace College in 1969, the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing—a previously unpublished paper and analytical charts by Barber’s mentor, Hans T. David, and a descriptive account of some of the holdings in the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (RBI).2 A number of things in the first issue foreshadow prominent elements in the years ahead, such as the promotion of the cause of Bach, a mindfulness of elder voices in the field, the reprising of earlier writings, the promotion of the RBI, and source studies. If these are familiar throughout the half century, a look at the span of the journal’s first fifty years nevertheless reveals significant change along the way, as well. ________ The many changes derive from different influences. There are the natural growing pains and growth spurts, of course, but more prominent are the shaping hands of different editors—Elinore L. Barber (1970–1998), Melvin Unger (1999–2015), Mary Greer (2015–2017), and Christina Fuhrmann (2018–present)—the emerging of new areas of interest, both in Bach studies and more broadly in the field of musicology itself, and the forging of new relationships, [End Page 177] most notably the quondam alliance with the American Bach Society that began in 1989. The world of 1970 was far different than our own. Barber’s reference to the “year of the moon” gives us a convenient temporal landmark, but other things allow us to measure the difference, as well. For example, the journal appeared ten years before the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and its striking anglicization of music scholarship, eleven years before Joshua Rifkin’s landmark Boston performance of the Mass in B Minor with one-to-apart vocal ensemble, fourteen years before the rediscovery of the Neumeister Collection, fifteen years before Joseph Kerman’s pivotal challenge to the field of musicology in Contemplating Music, fifteen years before the spate of now-standard Bach studies arising in the commemorative zeal of the tercentenary of Bach’s birth, and thirty years before the redefining work of Christoph Wolff’s Bach: The Learned Musician.3 An American student working on Bach in 1970 would likely still be relying on volumes like Philipp Spitta’s Johann Sebastian Bach: His Work and Influence on the Music of Germany, 1685–1750 in a well-worn copy of the Dover 1951 edition.4 That same student’s knowledge of the sound of Bach’s music would most likely derive from the recordings of conductors like Fritz Werner, Helmuth Rilling, Wilhelm Ehmann, and Karl Richter, and ensembles like the Gächinger Kantorei, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, Kantorei Barmen-Gemarke, Westfälische Kantorei, and Munich Bach Choir, a very different sound world from that of the period ensembles pervasive in Bach recording today.5 Who in 1970 might have envisioned the vast resources of the online database Bach Digital, the astounding array of choice in period Bach performance today, or even two [End Page 178] volumes of BACH devoted to “Bach on Screen”?6 And with “Bach on Screen,” we have at hand a dramatic way of illustrating the journal’s responsiveness to changes in the field of musicology and its commitment to keeping the study of Bach vibrant and current. Part of the vibrancy derives from a roster of contributors that includes venerated scholars of the mid-twentieth century. Georg von Dadelsen, Hans T. David, Alfred Dürr, Gerhard Herz, Hans Lenneberg, Alfred Mann, and Paul A. Pisk are all represented; some of these were émigré scholars who became founding pillars of American musicology. With subsequent generations, the roster continues to comprise major figures of Bach scholarship, including John Butt, Howard H. Cox, Stephen A. Crist...

Leonhardt’s Role in the Invention of Historically Informed Performance

Leonhardt’s Role in the Invention of Historically Informed Performance John Butt (bio) Gustav Leonhardt is a figure who has had a tremendous influence on me and my outlook as both a performer and scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music. I met him first during several visits he made to Cambridge University in the 1980s while I was a graduate student working on Bach’s notation of articulation. Both Leonhardt’s lecture recitals and a number of our conversations were of great value to me, not just because of his immense experience and knowledge of the area in which I was working (“don’t study Bach’s staccato marks too much or you’ll go dotty,” he said), but particularly in the manner in which he had synthesized a number of historical factors in order to come up with a way of playing the harpsichord and organ. In one sense, Leonhardt’s approach to articulation and his technique of listening strategically across the harmonic and melodic texture were a modern invention. There are no historical sources that tell you how to play exactly as he suggested. Yet his essential invention of baroque keyboard articulation and the manipulation of time as a means of expression were to me the best guess at how historical hints and insight into the music could be combined to devise a system that could work for us today. This set me thinking about whether one should follow Leonhardt more or less literally as if developing an historically informed tradition in our own present (and rather like the common pianist’s claim to be a great-great-great-grand-pupil of Chopin), or whether one should break away in a fit of modernist independence, anxiety-of-influence and all. I think my—still ongoing—conclusion was that there was no point in positively contradicting Leonhardt’s style unless one could come up with something demonstrably better, more historically informed, or musically revealing. But the main lesson for me was that historical performance was essentially a constellation of historical ideas, to be ordered and inflected by us in the present and for present purposes, whether openly or not. In a sense, the best way of developing from Leonhardt was to follow something of his technique of combining ideas, but without copying [End Page 9] him directly and without necessarily cleaving to the same interpretative factors. His lead came through his attitude (always as a musician and never a slavish scholar) and in this, he was a genuine pioneer. When my career took me to California, I found a whole new collection of first-generation Leonhardt pupils, all of whom reflected his influence in individual ways: some even slavish, but some quite defiant. Inevitably, he was a frequent visitor and I was particularly stimulated by the prospect of preparing choirs for his performances (especially in the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition in the early 1990s) and playing continuo in the orchestra. Some unkind musicians claimed that he made people sing like a harpsichord. It is certainly the case that he applied some ideas of articulation from the harpsichord, such as delaying strong notes or making the vowels decay quite quickly; however, the overall framing of meter, rhythm, word stress, and rhetorical emphasis seemed to me exactly the right combination of factors, even if my tastes would have erred toward more tone and projection than he generally desired. I was quite surprised by the degree of criticism that many commentators and musicians voiced regarding Leonhardt’s style in the Berkeley performances. I felt they were listening to the wrong part of the sound, hearing the gaps and the slightly mannered pairing of “good” and “bad” notes rather than the emerging line together with the contrapuntal and rhetorical subtlety. Exactly the same factors applied to his harpsichord playing, exacerbated by his undertaker’s demeanor—so many people heard him as a dry, “academic” performer without an ounce of humor. To me, almost all those judgments were wrong. He was dry only in the sense that his incisive and sometimes barbed humor so often went unnoticed. And he was hardly an academic in most contemporary senses (a connoisseur and antiquarian, certainly...

Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass ed. by Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver, and Jan Smaczny (review)

Reviewed by: Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass ed. by Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver, and Jan Smaczny Mark A. Peters Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass. Edited by Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver, and Jan Smaczny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xxix, 314 p. ISBN 9781107007901 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781107453555 (e-book), $79.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, appendices, bibliographic references, indexes. In reflecting on the state of research on Johann Sebastian Bach’s B-Minor Mass in 1985, the tercentenary year of Bach’s birth, Hans-Joachim Schulze dubbed the work the “perpetual touchstone for Bach research” (in Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Peter Williams [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 311–20). That Schulze’s characterization of the B-Minor Mass is no less true now than it was in 1985 is demonstrated by an impressive new collection of essays published as Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass and edited by Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver, and Jan Smaczny. The fourteen essays, by Bach scholars across Europe and the United States, engage the B-Minor Mass from the perspectives of historical and cultural contexts, analysis, source study, and reception, providing new insights into one of the best-known and best-loved of Bach’s works. As explained in the preface, the volume grew out of the symposium “Understanding Bach’s B-minor Mass” held at Queens University Belfast in November 2007. The essays in Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass were selected from those presented at the symposium and were revised for publication in 2013. The essays engage past research on the B-Minor Mass while contributing significantly to the body of scholarship on the work. In addition, the volume is carefully edited both for content and readability, and is a valuable contribution for scholars and also for performers or audience members looking for insights into the Mass. Any volume that engages with Bach’s B-Minor Mass must do so within the vast body of research on the work. In addition to a wealth of articles and essays, recent monographs dedicated to the B-Minor Mass include John Butt, Bach: Mass in B Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George B. Stauffer, Bach, The Mass in B Minor: The Great Catholic Mass (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: Messe in h-Moll (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2009). Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass not only engages such scholarship throughout its chapters, but also particularly frames our understanding of the Mass within its history of performance, scholarship, and reception in its two opening essays. Christoph Wolff’s “Past, present and future perspectives on Bach’s B-minor Mass” (chapter 1) provides a lucid and accessible introduction to the Mass, its history, and the research questions surrounding it, while Robin A. Leaver’s “Bach’s Mass: ‘Catholic’ or ‘Lutheran’?” (chapter 2) provides an excellent introduction to the Mass from the perspective of historical theology. Chapters 3 and 4 likewise complement each other, providing readers with a context for understanding Bach’s 1733 Missa (the Kyrie and Gloria of what would become the B-Minor Mass) within the wider framework of Mass settings in eighteenth-century Germany and particularly at the Dresden court. Janice B. Stockigt’s “Bach’s Missa BWV 232I in the context of Catholic Mass settings in Dresden, 1729–1733” (chapter 3) focuses on musical style, framing Bach’s compositional choices in relation to other Missa settings extant at the Dresden court. Szymon Paczkowski’s “The role and significance of the polonaise in the ‘Quoniam’ of the B-minor Mass” (chapter 4) complements Stockigt’s essay well by [End Page 173] exploring the cultural, political, and musical context for the Missa in Dresden. In fact, the chapter’s title is misleading and does not do it justice, for while Paczkowski does address the polonaise in the “Quoniam,” his goals for the chapter are much broader. As he states in his introduction, “this essay intends to show that the politics and culture of eighteenth-century Dresden provide a useful context for opening up to fresh enquiry some of Bach’s creative intentions in the B-minor Mass” (p. 54), and Paczkowski...

RUTH TATLOW (Musik- och teaterbiblioteket, Musikverket, Stockholm) writes:

The three words ‘networking, influencing, facilitating’ encapsulate the aims and achievements of Bach Network UK (BNUK) in its first ten years. At the instigation of Reinhard Strohm and together with John Butt and Ruth Tatlow, BNUK was founded in Oxford in 2004. Our motivating vision was to create an interdisciplinary forum that would attract profound discussion of Bach's music and bridge the scholar–performer divide. We imagined an integrated structure, powered by specialized research discussions, feeding into larger-scale meetings and being disseminated through publication. These ideas are still loosely recognizable a decade later.

Michael Lieb The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the BibleThe Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible. Edited by Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowlands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xi+725 pp.

<i>Michael Lieb</i> The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible<i>The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible</i>. Edited by Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowlands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xi+725 pp.

Bach's St John Passions

There are few pieces that can illustrate the vital differences between our own musical culture and that of Bach’s time more strikingly than the St John Passion. Whereas Bach’s audiences at Leipzig’s main churches primarily would have sought to contemplate the Passion of Christ, for example, today’s listeners are more likely to engage with the music on account of a passion for Bach. Even the well-known fact that Bach’s music originally formed part of a liturgical sound-world can seem surprising today, as John Butt and the Dunedin Consort have so powerfully illustrated in their widely acclaimed new recording of the John Passion (Linn Records, ckd419, rec 2012, 139′). The set reunites the Passion with a reconstructed Good Friday liturgy, and contrasting the controlled formality of organ preludes and congregational singing with Bach’s concerted movements achieves a remarkable effect: it not only intensifies a sense of drama and tension...

Messe in H-Moll, BWV 232 (review)

BACH MASS IN B MINOR Johann Sebastian Bach. Messe in H-Moll, BWV 232. Herausgegeben von = Edited by Uwe Wolf. (Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Werke: Revidierte [NBArev], Herausgegeben vom Bach-Archiv Leipzig, Bd. 1.) Kassel: Barenreiter, 2010. [Notes on the rev. ed., in Ger., Eng., p. vii-viii; preface, in Ger., Eng., p. ix-xxiii; facsims., p. xxv-xxxvii; scoring, p. 2; score, p. 3-279; abbrevs., p. 282-85; sources, in Ger., p. 286-300; notes, in Ger., p. 301-53; concordance, p. 354; name index, p. 355-56. ISBN- 13/EAN 9790006556304, pub. no. BA 5935. euro280.] On 13 June 2007 a celebration at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, marked the completion of the groundbreaking edition of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach begun in 1954 as a cooperative project of the Johann- Sebastian-Bach Institut in Gottingen, the Bach-Archiv Leipzig, and Barenreiter- Verlag ( Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Werke [Kassel: Barenreiter; Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag fur Musik, 1954-], widely known as the Neue Bach- Ausgabe). In 2012 one last supplementary volume remains to appear of that colossal edition of 104 volumes of music and 101 critical commentaries: a study by Peter Wollny on source transmission to the year 1850. However, the editing of Bach's music continues. In 2010, publication of a new series of revised editions, the Neue Bach Ausgabe: Revidierte (NBArev), to complement the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, commenced with Uwe Wolf's edition of the Mass in B Minor, BWV 232. A second volume appeared in 2012, containing cantatas from Bach's years as concertmaster at the Weimar court between 1714 and 1717. The Neue Bach Ausgabe: Revidierte will comprise twelve volumes of music, including early cantatas, the 1725 and 1749 versions of the St. John Passion, organ chorales, and chamber music, as well as a volume of pictorial documents, and an edition of the texts of the vocal works by Bach. In the Notes on the Revised Edition the editors justify this new editorial undertaking in light of the achievements of its predecessor which resulted in the reassessment of sources, the discovery of new sources, and the need to apply new knowledge and experience to works that had already appeared. The new editions retain the format and appearance of the volumes of music in the NBA with the exception of a new dark brown cloth binding. The new editions, however, incorporate the critical commentaries within the music volume, eschewing the octavo-sized companion volumes of the earlier edition. The new volumes contain longer introductions describing the compositions' histories and sources, and close with more concise source descriptions and revision reports. The editors of the new edition also state that [a]s a rule, the critical commentaries of the NBArev presuppose that the reader will also use the relevant critical commentary in the NBA. This ensures that the NBA's scholarly conception is maintained along with its underlying editorial guidelines . (p. viii). That this new effort would commence with the Mass in B Minor adheres to a convention begun with the first complete edition of Bach's works published by the Bach Gesellschaftbetween 1850 and 1900, which intended to publish the Mass as its first volume. Likewise, Friedrich Smend's edition of the Mass in B Minor had been intended as the first volume of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe. In neither instance did this come to pass, though the slight delay of those volumes' publication merely reflected much larger problems associated with the editions themselves (see John Butt, Bach: Mass in B Minor, Cambridge Music Handbooks [Cam - bridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 25-41; and George B. Stauffer, Bach, the Mass in B Minor: The Great Catholic Mass, Monuments of Western Music [New York: Schirmer Books, 1997], 267-70). The situation with Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in B Minor, BWV 232, confirms the fact that many of the most venerated compositions of Western art music do not survive in a perfect or complete state. …

Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions. By John Butt.

<i>Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions</i>. By John Butt.

Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions – By John Butt

Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions – By John Butt

Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach

Narratives of music and modernity have been prominent in musicological writings of the past decade, and the place of Johann Sebastian Bach within these narratives has formed the subject of stimulating debates. Recent studies by Karol Berger and John Butt have aimed to integrate Bach's Passion compositions into broadly conceived philosophical frameworks, in Berger's case focusing specifically on changing perceptions of time from a premodern sense of circular stasis to a modern linear idea of progress. This article proposes an alternative model of historical inquiry into these issues by presenting a detailed look at attitudes to time in early eighteenth-century Protestant Leipzig. My approach reveals a complex constellation of conflicting ideas and metaphors that encompass notions of time as both circular and linear and evince a particular concern for the question of how to fill the time of one's earthly existence productively. In this light, pieces like Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Georg Philipp Telemann's Brockes Passion can be understood to have offered a range of different temporal experiences, which depended on individual listening attitudes, performance decisions, and surrounding social conventions. I argue that only through paying close attention to these fluid and often incongruous discourses can we gain a sufficiently nuanced picture of how music may have reflected and shaped early eighteenth-century conceptions of time, history, and eternity.

Bach's Dialogue With Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions by John Butt (review)

84 Bach Review JohnButt,Bach 's DialogueWithModernity : Perspectives onthePassions (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press,2010),330 pp. JohannSebastianBach's Passions accordingto SaintMatthew (1727) and SaintJohn(1724) are "modern"in the sense used by unspecialized historians likemebecausethey werefirst composedand performed in theWestin whatGermanscall theNeuheit or "new time" - beginning withthe Renaissancein about 1350. They are "modern"inthetwosensesusedbyhistorians ofPhilosophy because they werecomposedandperformed after theriseoftheviamoderna , or"modernway"intheology (1300s),orafter Descartes'Discourse on Method (1637). "Modernity," ifitmeansanything, is something else thattheyrepresent in thesensethattheywerefirst composed and performed after theriseofcommercial capitalism intheWest(1300s) and theinitial declineofChristian religious orthodoxy in theseventeenth century. Exceptthatthey do notrepresent itbecausethey were first composedandperformed beforetheriseofindustrial capitalism inthe1800s,which,together withitsfullpanoplyofcultural consequences , is known to most late twentieth-century historiansas "modernization." Theyarenotmusicologically "Modernist," because they predateSchoenberg, Ives,andStravinsky (nottomention Joyce, Einstein, and Picasso). Nor arethey"Modernist"in theeyesof the Christian churchessincetheywere first composed and performed beforetheriseof"HigherCriticism" ofbiblicalscripture (1850s)unlesswe countHobbes andSpinoza(whomBach seemsnottohave read)amongthe"HigherCritics."At leastthePassionshavenever been accused of "post-modernism," hyphenated or not, perhaps becausePostmodernism hasnever beendatedbackbeforethe1950s.1 Allthistalkabout"modern,""modernism," and"modernity" is bewildering - indeedit'sawildwilderness that youputyourself injust by usingtheseterms."Modern" itselfis a word thatchangesits meaning automatically as thepresent recedesintothepast,muchlike a pieceofmusicon first hearing. Itwasinvented inthesixth century, 1The word "post-modern" seems tohave first been used in1916 bythe American essayist Randolph Bourne indescribing Japan (ťťTrans-National America" [1916] in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 191 1-1918 [NY: Urizen Books, 1977], 250). Reviews 85 byLatinspeakers, modernus inthenominative case,a portmanteau or mashupoftwowords, modus hodiernus ,that meant"thestyle oftoday," ata time when"today"was sixth-century AD. Likeevery other word, ithasa history ofmeanings shading intoandoutofuse,andintoand awayfrom eachother;thehistory ofthis word,withitseverforwardrolling "today," is impossibleto pin down forreasonsas logicalas theyare ordinary. And JohnButt'sadventurous post-postmodern book,Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives onthe Passions ,triesout nearly allthosemeanings. That couldbe either dilettantish or disastrous, butitisn't.Butt wresdeshonestly withallthose"modern"sandevenconfusesthem; buthe neverquitesuccumbsto thesirensof nonsense,and never forgets thatBach's MatthewandJohnPassions,together withthe manyjoysa readerand listener oughtto findin them,are thereal center ofhisstory. It'swhatone oughtto expectfrom Butt,a major figure inBach criticism who notonlyeditedTheCambridge Companion toBachbutalso wrotePlaying with Histoiy : TheHistorical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997& 2002). "Onlythat whichhasno history isdefinable," wroteNietzschein the Genealogy ofMorals . There are books and books purporting to define"Renaissance"and "humanism," butit takesa Nietzschean understanding ofhistory tounderstand whatthoseEuropeanthinkers ofthelatefourteenth and fifteenth centuries actually thought. They didnotmake"progress" intothe"future," butinsteadturned backto a distant pasttorecover itandrecognize itas "past"and,ineffect, to discover historical time. Beforethefourteenth century, Romeandthe RomanEmpirewerepresent inliterate people'sminds - present as if they hadbeenthere allalong - andtheLatinthatthey wroteandread hadallalongbeenthought tohavebeen- tobe - theeternal language ofRome.Then inthe1300sthinkers called"humanists" discovered thattheir ownLatinwas quitedifferent from theLatinofJesus'and Cicero'stime - thatthereseemedto havebeena greatchangesince then,a changethattheyconcurred in callingdecline.Thatmedieval "decay"implied, finally, thatthings mustbe improving in their own post-medieval time astheGreekandLatin"Classics"wererecaptured andreinvigorated. This step,inturn, was formalized byanother, the 86 Bach dividingof a formerly continuoushistoryinto threeparts,like Caesar's Gaul: "Classical Antiquity," the "Middle Ages," and the presentinwhichtheylived,an erawhichtheyquickly baptizedthe "Rebirth" inItalian,"Rinascimento," inFrench, "Renaissance." Renaissancehumanists thereby invented a verycuriousidea of "progress," oneadaptedtoexplain howtheir culture wasclimbing out oflateLatin"medieval darkness" byreaching backwards torecapture theliterary, artistic, and politicalgloriesof democratic Athensand republicanRome. Afterthe Renaissance,the Reformationalso reachedback to a past - a slighdy younger, morevulgar,and less Classicalpast - thefirst century ofChristianity, whoselanguagewas street GreekandAramaic.And whatworddidtheRenaissanceand Reformation thinkers reachfor whenthey neededanadjective forthe greatthings they werefinding in thepastand makingnew fortheir own time?"Modernus,"of course.That samelateLatin,Dark Age coinage. So how does JohnButt,a leadingexperton Bach, assess the effect on Bach's Passionsofwhathe callsthe"growing imperatives ofmodernity" (p.94)?I think itis toButt'scredit thatheiswilling to try anything "modern"on forsize.He eventakesa crackatapplying toBachJürgen Habermas'sconceptofmodern valuesas a secularization of Christianethics,but finds himselfreined in by Hans Blumenberg's critique ofHabermas.Buttwrites ina footnote: Blumenberg, ontheother hand, feels that attempts todescribe the modern age as a secularization of Christian categories do an injustice tothelegitimacy ofmodernity. He suggests, instead, the notionof "reoccupation," bywhichmodern categories might indeedfillconceptual spacesthatwerepreviously occupiedby religion, butthe positions thus occupied arethemselves prior tothe religious occupants. See [Blumenberg,] The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp.27-51,esp.p.49. 2 More,perhapsmostimportandy, Buttdwellson a majoridea, whichhe is...

Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions. By John Butt.

Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions. By John Butt.

Bach in Edinburgh

Bach Network UK came into being in 2004, as the vision of Reinhard Strohm (Oxford), Ruth Tatlow (Stockholm) and John Butt (Glasgow). Positioned geographically and conceptually between the Bach Archive Leipzig and the American Bach Society, it has become an intellectual and collegial meeting place for Bach research and performance from around the globe. The biennial Dialogue Meetings—so-called explicitly in order to emphasize the practice of free exchange of ideas—has become a welcome opportunity to meet with colleagues and friends and share the most recent research about the composer. As an important by-product, the Dialogue Meetings provide the core material for BNUK's peer-reviewed online journal, Understanding Bach (www.bachnetwork.co.uk). Over the weekend of 12–14 August 2011, BNUK held its fifth Dialogue Meeting in Edinburgh. Seven sessions were organized over the three days, with papers given by musicologists, theorists, writers, students and performers. Interspersed between sessions were performances, exhibits, special speeches and panels, and plenty of breaks to get to know new colleagues and talk about Bach. The Meeting was held in the grounds of the spacious Loretto School outside Edinburgh, and the timing was intentionally planned to coincide with the Edinburgh Festival. The dialogue sessions were delivered in the beautiful 17th-century Pinkie House, with its famous 96-foot-long Painted Gallery, whose dramatic ceiling is sumptuously adorned with emblems and inscriptions.

Bach's chorus revisited: historically informed performance practice as 'bounded creativity'

We attempt to reconstruct the past even if we cannot reach it. Authentic or historical performance in Baroque music can be defined as the adoption of performance practices that are believed to have been familiar to the composer and/or were prevalent at the time the works were originally performed.2 Taken literally, this approach to performing Baroque music seems to imply convergence, leading ultimately to the elimination of all creative activity by performers:3 ‘historical performance, with its utter subservience to the dictates of past manners of execution … would, if carried to its logical conclusion, swallow up entirely a performer's individuality’.4 However, authentic performance does lend itself to different interpretations. As outlined by several scholars, from Richard Taruskin to John Butt, authentic performance can refer to the use of instruments from the composer's era, including the adoption of relevant playing techniques, but it also involves adherence to the intentions of the composer, often derived from carefully scrutinizing the original sources of a particular work.5 In addition, it may also include attempts to re-create the context of the original performance. These multiple—albeit complementary—readings of the notion of authentic performance can be seen as a first source of variation in outcomes to be witnessed when looking at ‘authentic performances’.6

‘For whom the bell tolls’: Listening and its Implications

ABSTRACTThis response highlights the cultural specificity of the ‘work-concept’ and questions the tripartite scheme of listening proposed by John Butt. It offers an alternative set of listening categories, and makes reference to the issues of early-modern class structures and the role of music in religious devotions. The argument is supported by critiques of historical vignettes that include the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's transcription of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere and Jean Joseph Marie Amiot's demonstration of French music to a Chinese audience in the mid-eighteenth century.

Handel oratorios

John Butt, with the Dunedin Consort and Players, offers the delectable and evergreen Acis and Galatea in the original Cannons performing version of 1718 on Handel: Acis and Galatea (Linn CKD 319, rec 2008, 95′). Handel served James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon, for only a short time in 1717–18, from which period date the so-called ‘Chandos’ anthems (more properly the ‘Cannons’ anthems since Brydges did not become the Duke of Chandos until 1719) and Acis and Galatea. The earliest version of Esther also dates from about then. Handel evidently enjoyed the services of a fine group of professional musicians who were nevertheless unusually disposed: five singers—a soprano, a bass, three tenors but no alto—and an ensemble of three (occasionally four) violins, no violas, two cellos and a bass, plus two oboes and a bassoon. Acknowledging the research of Graydon Beeks, Anthony Hicks and others, Butt shows that the 1718 version of the work was scored for precisely these resources. The five-part ‘chorus’ comprises the five soloists: Galatea (soprano), Acis, Damon and Coridon (tenors) and Polyphemus (bass). Later versions of the piece assign Coridon's air ‘Would you gain the tender creature’ to Damon, upsetting the original intention that Damon is advisor to Acis and Coridon to Polyphemus. The two oboists would have doubled on recorders, and the piece would have been directed from the harpsichord, probably by Pepusch, Brydges's Master of Musick, or conceivably by Handel himself. Butt re-creates this set-up exactly (save for two recorder players in addition to the oboists) and the result is fresh, vigorous and captivating. They use the 1991 Hallische-Händel Ausgabe score, but include a bassoon which the HHA editor assigns only to Handel's later performances; the extent of the bassoon's role is unclear, however, and so the performers have had to make informed decisions here. Butt's liner notes, as one would expect, are a model of lucid, informative scholarship.

Three Messiahs

Since Messiah underwent a succession of revisions necessitated by the exigencies of individual performances, especially the need to make the best use of the available vocal talent, no one definitive version of the score exists. However, inasmuch as those versions (of which up to ten can be identified) represent what was heard on specific occasions over which the composer presided, they can all be regarded as ‘authentic’, and well worth reviving in their own right—even if unsuspecting listeners used to today's most commonly heard versions may sometimes be surprised at what they hear. Each of these three recordings (all on two CDs) is inspired by one such contemporary performance. That by the Dunedin Consort and Players, directed by John Butt (Linn ckd 285, rec 2006, 140′) is modelled on the work's very first appearances in Dublin in 1742; René Jacobs directs the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge and Freiburg Barockorchester in the version which Handel prepared for the 1750 London revival (Harmonia Mundi hmc 901928.29, rec 2006, 138′), and the recording from the Choir of New College, Oxford and the Academy of Ancient Music, directed by Edward Higginbottom, is based on the following year's performance at the Foundling Hospital (Naxos 8.570131–2, rec 2006, 142′).