The Music of Rebellion

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Abraham, Amsterdam, archeologist, Arthur Rubinstein, Avraham, Baruch Spinoza, Beit Midrash, Bible, Concerto in D minor, consumerism, David Cardozo Academy, Glenn Gould, Halacha, Inquisition, Jews, Karl Richter, kosher, Marrano, matzah, Mitzvah, Moses, Moshe Rabeinu, Mount Sinai, Nathan Lopes Cardozo, National Socialists, Nazis, philosophy, Protestant, Shabbat, Shlomo Rodrigues Pereira, synagogue, Talmud, Torah, Winston Churchill, yarmulke

Winston Churchill once sent a very long letter to a friend. At the end he wrote: I am sorry but I had no time to write a short one.

It takes eighteen minutes to bake a matzah and it comes out flat. JDOV gave me twelve minutes to speak about my life and my love for Judaism and told me that it must sound like Bach’s Concerto in D minor (BWV 1052).

So here we go.

But let’s first listen to Bach.

I was born in 1946 in Amsterdam, by breech delivery. It was very painful. My mother endured it with iron strength. We nearly did not make it. It was the same iron strength that she showed when she saved the lives of all of my father’s family, all Jews, from the hands of the Nazis.

My parents were a mixed marriage: my father Jewish, my mother not.

These two facts – breech delivery and being born from a mixed marriage – set the stage for my life. I see everything upside down and always as an in-outsider. I see great beauty where others see only the ordinary. I see problems where others believe that everything is fine. For me, the average is astonishing.

Our name is Lopes Cardozo. That is a real Jewish name – not Goldstein or Rabinowitz. Those are “goyishe” names.

On my father’s side we come from Spain and Portugal, after the Inquisition, in 1492. We are anusim, Marranos. Our forefathers were raised as Christians, and only in Holland could they start to live a Jewish life again.

My father was a very proud Jew. He could not stop speaking about it. But it had no religious meaning.

My mother lost her parents when she was very young and moved in with my father’s family, so she grew up in a strong, secular, socialistic, but culturally very strong Jewish family and society. Friday night was holy, with lots of delicious food, although they were as poor as church mice. They did not eat kosher, but no treif meat would ever enter the house. Jewish expressions, customs, and jokes were the daily language.

My father was an ardent admirer of Spinoza, the great Jewish philosopher in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century who walked out on Judaism and was banned by the rabbis. It is the most well known Jewish ban ever. It made him world famous; I am still trying to get a similar rabbinic ban, but to no avail. It would considerably raise the sale of my books.

Spinoza got me thinking. He attacked the Jewish tradition vigorously. There is no God, he said, at least no biblical God. The Torah is not divine, not godly. In fact, it is primitive and nearly meaningless. Judaism is a lot of nonsense, he declared. And so I wanted to know what he was attacking. Why did he have no good word for the Jewish tradition? And what is this Jewish tradition actually all about?

So I started to read without end, speaking with rabbis – Orthodox and Reform; philosophers – religious and non-religious; as well as atheists and believers.

To make a long story short: I became so fascinated with the Jewish tradition that I went to the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Chacham Shlomo Rodrigues Pereira, and told him to convert me, since I was the child of a mixed marriage – and so he did.

I was sixteen. Many years later my mother also converted, after I convinced her of the beauty of Judaism. My parents got married three months before I was married to a very nice lady sitting here in the audience – all by the same rabbi in the Sephardic Synagogue in Amsterdam.

I learned twelve years in Chareidi yeshivot, and I have a Ph.D in Philosophy. I love yeshivot, but I never felt that they gave me the full picture. Judaism is much greater than what yeshivot teach.

Let me tell you what happened to me when I was learning in yeshiva. A non-Jewish friend came to visit me and asked to see the Beit Midrash. So I put a yarmulke on his head and told him to come in. He expected a large hall with all the students whispering, like in a university library.  But what did he encounter? Three hundred young fellows walking around nervously, shouting at each other as if the world was coming to an end.

In total shock, he asked me. “What is this, a demonstration against the Queen of England?” ”No,” I said, “they are discussing what God actually said three thousand years ago at Mount Sinai.” “You still don’t know?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Indeed, we still don’t know, and that’s why we are still alive after four thousand years, and because of that we outlived all our enemies. A tradition that keeps arguing with itself will stay alive and grow.”

Now listen to Johann Sebastian Bach.

It is God speaking to us in music – with so many options for how to play it, without end. Like the rabbis speak about God’s words with so many interpretations. Remember Glenn Gould, Richter, Arthur Rubinstein and so many others. Such were Abaya, Rava and many other sages in the Talmud – each one playing totally different music, but simultaneously, with strict adherence to the music notes, to rigid rules of musical genius. An iron fist, and an uncompromising dedication to detail, resulting in a phenomenal outburst of emotion.

That, my dear friends, is what happened at Sinai. God gave heavenly musical notes at Sinai for us to play on our souls. Strict notes, but to be played with infinite passion. To listen to Bach is like being struck by an uppercut under the chin and staying unconscious for the rest of the day. And so it is with the Torah. It is like an archeologist forced to go to rock bottom in search of all the hidden possibilities; to exert himself in order to unearth them and find infinite treasures.

God owes a lot to Bach. He put God in the center of our world. Where would God be without Bach?

But Bach’s music is more than that. It is a rebellion. A rebellion against all earlier forms of music. Against making music sterile, stagnated, boring and flat. It opened new dimensions that people did not want to see or hear.

The same is true about Judaism. It is a religious protest against complacency, spiritual boredom and mediocrity.

Religion means to live in utter amazement, in astonishment. To live like Bach. To walk around in total wonder. And to know what to do with that wonder. To translate it into deep feelings and the solid side of the human deed: The Mitzvah, the Halacha.

Halacha teaches us how to live life in utter amazement. Just as Bach did.

After Moshe Rabeinu [Moses], Bach was the greatest halachist who ever lived in modern times – the iron fist, the heavenly explosion, the rebellion and the strict adherence to rules and detail.

And what did we do with Judaism? We denied Bach’s music to play the central role in Halacha any longer. And so we made it flat and boring.

We tell our children to obey, to conform, to fit in. Not to disturb the establishment. Not to challenge religious and secular beliefs. And by doing so, we have nearly killed Judaism.

Eating kosher is a rebellious act. An act of disobedience against consumerism that encourages people to eat anything as longs as it tastes good. When we go to synagogue, it is a protest against man’s arrogance in thinking that he can do it all himself. Observing Shabbat is an attack on society in a world that believes our happiness depends on how much we produce.

Avraham [Abraham] was the first ultimate rebel who destroyed idols. And so were the prophets.

And so is the Torah – a rebellious text declaring war on a world that has still not learned how to live a spiritual life of incredible greatness while standing firm with its feet on the ground.

And so are we Jews. To be a Jew is to forever swim against the mediocrity of this world. We are a nation of protestors. We are the real protestants. But we forgot who we are.

And therefore I decided to become religious. I love rebellion and spiritual war. I can’t live in boredom.

I will continue to play Bach, the rebellious man of Halacha who introduced me to God and the Torah.

So, just listen to Bach and hear the music of the Jewish tradition.

Nathan Lopes Cardozo – David Cardozo Academy

Breaking Bad with the Goldberg Variations

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airplane, airport lounge, Albuquerque, bassline, Beethoven, Breaking Bad, Christmas, emotions, epithet, George Clooney, Goldberg Variations, Goldbergs Anonymous, hand-crossing, harpsichord, Honoré de Balzac, Jeremy Denk, manual, pho, piano, Seattle, Tchaikovsky, The Guardian, Toby Saks, Trio in A minor, Walter White

Jeremy Denk

I stopped watching Breaking Bad early in season three for a strange reason: I felt it was bad for my soul. Frankly, I had never been that concerned about my soul before, but when charred plane fragments began to rain down on Albuquerque (fans know what I’m talking about), I felt a dull ache, an unusual suffering, and I decided enough was enough. If you like, Breaking Bad is the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) of misery. How many terrible consequences can Walter White reap from his first bad decision? At least as far as I watched, the show’s approach was exhaustive: a survey of emotional, physical, and spiritual harm. The Goldbergs are also exhaustive, and contingent on Bach’s first fateful decision, on the bassline he has chosen, the parameters he has set forth.

In fact, the Goldberg Variations have caused me more misery than any other piece of music in history, with the exception of the Tchaikovsky Trio in A minor (for totally different reasons). How many hours have I spent backstage fretting, knowing that there will be several insufferable know-it-alls in the audience, with their seven hundred recordings and deeply considered opinions? How many hours have I spent practicing those passages where the two hands climb over each other, then turn around (as if revisiting the site of an accident) and head for each other again?

The Goldbergs, originally for a two-keyboard instrument, become uniquely treacherous when played on just one. There are many impossible crossings, many unplayable moments. You have to decide which hand goes over the other, and practice how to make the switch smoothly; but there is always the possibility you will be on stage, communing with the spheres, and your fingers and wrists will literally tangle – like two dancers who stumble over each other – scattering wrong notes into paradise. You must always also be reminded that the instrument you are playing them on is the “wrong” one, especially by critics.

On top of their difficulty, the Goldbergs are terrifyingly clean. The work clings mostly to the purity of G Major, and its materials are so self-evident: the variation with the scales chasing each other in thirds (horrible memories of practicing scales as a child); the variation with the arpeggios (ditto); the variation with the scurrying passages in one hand and the leaps in the other. It almost like a lesson plan, with modular units, and everyone knows them – they are as well-traveled as a seasoned flier in an airport lounge.

I never wanted anything to do with the Goldbergs, but one day – I don’t know how – my friend Toby Saks convinced me to learn them for her festival in Seattle. She thought it would change my life. With one hasty yes I was committed – you cannot do a program substitution with the Goldbergs; it would be like trying to replace George Clooney. As usual, I procrastinated, and a panicky, cold December and January ensued, a Christmas holiday spent with a piano, wondering why it couldn’t have just been fifteen variations, say, or eighteen, instead of thirty? I broke them into bundles of five, to cope with the project’s enormity.

The day before my first performance, I remember sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant, hunched over a giant bowl of pho (outside fell classic Seattle drizzle), while my musician friends murmured consoling epithets at me – “I’m sure it will be fine” – treating me like a patient who was about to undergo an operation.

The first performance was a bit like a dream, much of it bad, but a few variations had something, I felt. My first taste of Goldberg addiction. Was I encouraged or war-scarred? A second period of obsession began, going over those stubborn variations in order to understand the independence (or lack thereof) of my hands, trying to find the most transparent and loving way to express them. And now, nine years later, with a recording under my belt, I probably belong in Goldbergs Anonymous.

The Goldbergs, insular and obsessed, have all the failings of classical music in general. The piece is a text reflecting on itself, satisfied in its own world, suggesting that everything you would ever want to know is contained within. The variations (by definition music about music) are subject to countless insider discussions in the outer world, to comparisons of recordings like heavyweight bouts, to that annoying word “definitive.” Despite this, Bach’s smile wins through. The piece is a lesson in many things, but primarily in wonder: the way that the tragic variations fuse seamlessly into the breathlessly comic, the way that simple scales become energy, joy, enthusiasm, the celebration of the most fundamental elements of music. This is the kind of beatific happiness that Beethoven eventually tried to attain, after the heroic happiness of the middle period. The last movements of Beethoven’s op. 109 and op. 111 invoke the Goldbergs, and represent a joy beyond achievement.

The copout of Breaking Bad, shared by many great novels and works of art (I’m thinking of you, Balzac!), is to leave us mired in a sea of human degradation. It is often easier to write sadness. And happiness easily becomes a shortcut, or a falsehood; “happy ending” is often a derogatory term. Of course, the ending of the Goldbergs is cut with melancholy (unlike Walter’s pure blue stuff). When the theme returns at the end, you realize this is the last time you will hear that turn into bittersweet E minor (melancholy about melancholy), and also the last time you will experience the chain of fifths with which Bach escapes from it. I’ll admit it always chokes me up, not because the piece is over, not because things are ending, but because of a sense of the completeness of everything that has come before, the rightness, and – if it doesn’t sound too cheesy to say – the radiance of experience. It gives you that rare thing in human existence: a sense that, at the end of something, it has all been worthwhile.

Jeremy Denk – The Guardian

Suzuki Completes Cantata Cycle

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In 1993, when Robert von Bahr received a letter at his Stockholm office proposing that his company, BIS Records, undertake a complete cycle of all two hundred Bach cantatas with someone named Masaaki Suzuki conducting a Japanese choir and ensemble, he reacted, he recalls, with “uncontrollable laughter.” But the proposal also came with an offer of a plane ticket, so von Bahr flew to Tokyo to hear Suzuki conduct his Bach Collegium Japan. “And then,” he remembers, “the sun came up.”

Now, twenty years later, BIS is releasing the fifty-fifth and final volume of Bach Collegium Japan’s traversal of the Bach cantatas. While there have been other cantata cycles, none has taken this long, been prepared with such care or been greeted with higher praise.

“Although the excellence of rival surveys is not in doubt, this Japanese survey is the strongest and most consistent,” the venerable Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music declared, stamping it “an obvious first choice.”

“It’s beautifully crafted,” said Matthew White, the Canadian countertenor and artistic director of Early Music Vancouver. He sang in Vol. 23 of the series. Suzuki’s cycle “balances rigor and passion, which Bach’s music embodies in a very simple way,” he said. “And when I was rehearsing with them, I felt them embrace that.”

How did thirty-odd mostly Japanese singers and musicians a world away from Germany deliver what many believe is the greatest-ever interpretation of this cornerstone of the Western canon? They practiced. For two decades.

Suzuki became obsessed by the cantatas as a music student in Tokyo. He learned that as a church composer in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach was expected to deliver a new cantata for every Sunday service. Each cantata is about twenty minutes long and consists of two choral movements and several arias and recitatives for solo voice, with the texts adapted from hymns or Bible passages and  the singers accompanied by a small ensemble.

For Bach, it was journeyman work, but it was also the very core of his life as a composer. The cantatas are chock full of beauty – an exultant chorus, a soprano’s voice floating above an accompanying oboe, weaving melodic lines, a stolid Lutheran hymn transfused with passion.

“The texts were so different and the polyphonic structure of Bach’s music is so fascinating to me, I couldn’t stop listening to the different recordings,” Suzuki said in a telephone interview. “And . . . afterward I couldn’t resist performing these works myself.”

From 1979 to 1983, he studied period performance in the Netherlands – playing early classical music with the instruments, ensemble sizes and performance practices that would have been used at the time the music was composed. He then returned to Japan to teach, establishing the Bach Collegium Japan in 1990. In 1995, Suzuki and von Bahr began to record cantatas.

It was a rocky beginning. “We had many discussions and arguments about the way of recording, and also about performance style with period instruments and so on and so on, because he was the producer as well as the president [of BIS],” Suzuki remembers. “And our members thought: ‘It’s not possible to work with him.’” But Suzuki’s performances left von Bahr ecstatic, and the entrepreneur eventually convinced Suzuki that he was in it for the long haul. Very long, as it turned out.

Unlike other traversals, which were often recorded in haste while everyone was available, or with one conductor beginning the cycle and another completing it, Suzuki and von Bahr resolved to rehearse intensively – “at the very beginning it took us two hours just to perform ten bars,” Suzuki remembers – and then perform the cantatas in concert before recording them.

Over the years, individual musicians changed, but the Suzuki sound remained remarkably consistent – technically perfect, vocally pure, yet imbued with a spirituality imbedded in Suzuki’s deep Christian faith.

Initial releases were treated with polite caution – at best. One Italian critic opined that the Japanese throat was physiologically incapable of reproducing German speech. When a Spanish reviewer criticized the German pronunciation of the chorus, von Bahr phoned him and began complaining in German, only to discover the critic didn’t know a word of the language. “He was fired,” von Bahr recalls with some satisfaction.

Suzuki believes that being Japanese has its advantages when performing Bach. “If our choir has a Japanese character, and not a European one, then it makes the voices and the intonation very pure. And in Japanese culture as well, it is not so important to project your personality, but to be homogeneous with others, and that can work very well in a choir,” he said.

It didn’t take the critics very long to come around – and stay around. “Standards haven’t slipped an inch,” Fanfare, an American classical music magazine, raved in 2009, judging the cycle “a set for the ages.”

One French critic wrote about the music’s “clarity of purpose, sweep . . . the sumptuous timbre of instruments, innate sense of ideal orchestration . . . and wonderfully luminous chorus, which hit all the marks.”

“Their music-making is contained and precise,” White observes, “but punctuated by moments of emotional outburst that transcend all that beautiful accuracy.”

The Germans not only warmed to this Asian interpretation of their sacred Bach cantatas, they awarded Suzuki and his ensemble the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2001, the German Record Critics’ Award in 2010 and, in 2012, the Bach Medal, presented by the City of Leipzig.

No one is more surprised than Suzuki that they pulled it off. “I never thought until recently that we could complete it,” he said. “Whenever I was asked how long it would take, I would say: ‘Another fifteen years.’ And then: ‘Another fifteen years.’” After all, times were hardly good for the classical music recording industry. A cycle by the Dutch conductor Ton Koopman, Suzuki’s teacher, was interrupted when his recording company went bust. (Another company took up the torch, allowing the cycle to be completed.) Deutsche Grammophon abandoned a planned cycle by the British conductor John Eliot Gardiner. (He completed it with his own money.)

But not only did little BIS survive, the Suzuki cantatas “have been our bread and butter,” says von Bahr. A typical release sells ten thousand copies; some have sold much more. (That’s a strong number, considering other BIS releases usually sell around three thousand copies.)

It hasn’t ended with the cantatas. Along the way, the Bach Collegium Japan has recorded acclaimed performances of the Mass in B minor (BWV 232), the St. Matthew Passion (244b) and the motets, as well as works by Handel, Vivaldi and other composers. And, to keep himself busy, Suzuki is also recording a complete set of Bach’s music for harpsichord.

For von Bahr, the success of the Suzuki cycle speaks not to one culture interpreting another, but to music that transcends cultures entirely, proving that “it is a language that anyone can understand, if they’re willing to listen.”

John Ibbitson – The Globe and Mail

Even Bach Can Be Dangerous

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Abigail Klein Leichman, Accident Analysis and Prevention, athlete, automobile, background music, bass guitar, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, biology, Cadillac, car, CD, Chevrolet, compact disc, Eminem, emotions, General Motors, Hahnemann Medical University, hand-clapping, in-car entertainment, Israel Defense Forces, Israel National Road Safety Authority, Israel21c, Jerusalem, John Sloboda, Keele University, Levinsky College, medical school, mental health, Micha Kizner, music cognition, music therapy, Nachal Troupe, percussion, Philadelphia, phobia, psychology, Rubin Academy of Music and Dance, Saturday Night Live, soldier, stage fright, Tel Aviv, Tina Fey, traffic safety, Transportation Research, Warren Brodsky, Zack Slor

Listening to music in the car affects the way you drive, but whether it’s Bach or Eminem doesn’t matter. The trick is to choose tunes that do not trigger distracting thoughts, memories, emotions or bopping along to the beat. This takeaway message from an Israeli study was all over the Internet, US news programs and international newspapers months before it appeared in the October 2013 edition of Accident Analysis and Prevention.

The media attention has put lead researcher Warren Brodsky, director of music science research at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev, in the limelight more than any of his previous findings in music cognition and has illuminated his research path for possibly the rest of his working days. “It seems that every aspect of my career has led me down this path,” Brodsky says. The study also was notable in scientific circles because it was commissioned by the Israel National Road Safety Authority, making Israel the only country in the world to fund an investigation of how background music puts drivers at risk for distraction.

Brodsky had long been interested in this phenomenon, given that people in modern cultures listen to music more in their cars than anywhere else. “I wondered how listening to music affects driving behavior and how the car environment influences what kind of music we listen to,” he says.

In 2002, Brodsky published the first study to show that fast-paced music directly causes accelerated driving speed. “It was perhaps a small study, but it made a huge splash around the world,” he says. Indeed, his finding even merited a mention on Saturday Night Live. Comedian Tina Fey reported: “A new study shows that drivers who listen to fast tempo music while driving have more accidents, while drivers listening to slow music have sexier accidents.”

Born in Philadelphia, Brodsky moved with this family to Jerusalem at age fifteen. After high school at the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance, he played bass guitar with the well-known army band, the Nachal Troupe, and then returned to Rubin in 1982 to earn a bachelor’s degree in percussion and music education.

His performances for soldiers had left him intrigued as to how music affects well-being. Music therapy was not yet taught in Israel. He later became one of its pioneers by earning a master of creative arts in music therapy at Hahnemann Medical University in Philadelphia, the only graduate program of music therapy within a mental health department of a medical school.

Returning to Israel, he worked in special-ed schools, state hospitals and mental health clinics. He began training music and movement therapists at Levinsky College in Tel Aviv in 1986 and was among the first to get licensed by Israel as a creative and expressive arts therapist.

In 1992, Brodsky and his family went to England for three years so he could study toward a doctorate in music psychology at Keele University under the mentorship of the renowned John Sloboda. “I was interested in new fields like the biology of music-making, music medicine and performing-arts psychology,” he says.

His work in the UK influenced British medical associations to rethink “stage fright” as an occupational hazard, rather than a mental health weakness or social phobia, that might best treated by clinicians with a background in music. “It was important for the field that a new breed of musician, with clinical training and psychotherapeutic experience, take responsibility of how to treat performing musicians in the symphony orchestra, just as athletes might get counseling from a sports psychologist,” he says.

The research bug had bitten Brodsky, and the effects were permanent. “I couldn’t go back to the therapeutic arena after that. My heart wasn’t in the clinic, and my passion to treat patients had been replaced by a deep passion and infatuation for empirical work.” He won a post-doc fellowship at BGU in the behavioral sciences department and later became tenured as senior lecturer of music. Brodsky is the sole teacher of music courses in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

In 2008, Brodsky did a proof-of-concept study commissioned by General Motors about how music might strengthen brand identity of Chevrolet and Cadillac automobiles. He has also published investigations on hand-clapping songs of elementary school children and positive aging among orchestra players. Then, in 2010, the Israel National Road Safety Authority provided funding to Brodsky for a large-scale on-the-road study involving young drivers. “It seemed like this was my calling. No one else in the world was invested in researching the effects of music on driver behavior – not from the field of music psychology or traffic safety,” he says.

Previously, Brodsky and Israeli music composer Micha Kizner, a former buddy from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Entertainment Unit, devised a program of original music carefully structured to increase driver safety and published pilot studies in the journal Transportation Research. With this CD in hand, Brodsky and co-researcher Zack Slor recruited eighty-five young drivers to drive several forty-minute trips with either their preferred cruising tracks brought from home or with the experimental CD. The results show a clear twenty percent decrease in driver errors, miscalculations and aggressive driving accompanied by the alternative background music.

“Bottom line, the car is the only place in the world you can die just because you’re listening to the wrong kind of music,” says Brodsky, who is writing a book on the topic.

“Maybe we have to educate the public at large. There is a need to raise awareness and to teach drivers new practices of everyday music consumption and how to make better choices for roadway listening. It’s a question of being more careful about preferences and exposure. In the end, it is an issue of health and well-being, not in-car entertainment.”

Abigail Klein Leichman – Israel21c

As Cultures Intersect

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Shi Shuai

Shi Shuai is the face of classical music’s most promising new frontier: a young and gifted violinist, born in Shanghai and trained by some of the West’s most prominent musicians who is eager to return to China to perform and teach in a burgeoning symphony scene. And Fuling, the pretty outpost of 1.2-million at the nexus of the Yangtze and Wu Rivers, has the trappings of a new home for Mozart and Bach. Like dozens of smaller Chinese cities, it boasts a gleaming grand theater that just opened this year and has, in its initial season, brought Canada’s National Arts Centre (NAC) orchestra to perform.

The future of classical music, many have grown fond of saying, is in China – and Ms. Shi’s arrival in Fuling with the NAC seems emblematic of the new sound echoing here. Classical music was banned during Mao’s time. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that it was allowed back in, and it has exploded in recent years, winning converts and attracting students. But the real test lies in smaller centers, such as Fuling, and Ms. Shi is keen to put her talent and passion on display.

“I don’t have a good voice to sing,” she says. “Violin is like my voice, to sing out what I’m feeling.”

But if Fuling is the future, it’s one where the quiet concluding bars to the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 5 in E minor must compete with the loud chirping of a bird ringtone. As numerous others, as Google and Home Depot, have discovered, exporting Western commerce and culture to China is often not as easy as it seems. The potential of a middle class burgeoning among 1.3-billion new customers continues to thrill, but the work of attracting interest is filled with pitfalls.

The orchestra was recently in China as part of a broader Canadian campaign that included visits from Governor-General David Johnston and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. While the NAC works to build a potentially lucrative long-term music relationship with China, Ottawa is hoping cultural diplomacy can help smooth relations still frayed from years of neglect and, more recently, the tension over Chinese buying up Canada’s oil sands.

Partway into Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 3 in G Major, music director Pinchas Zukerman turns to face the noisy burbling of the crowd and vigorously points his finger to his lips; later, Ms. Shi stands up to ask for quiet in Chinese. Nearly all of the theater’s 1,038 seats have been filled, thanks in part to local authorities that bought up numerous tickets and handed them out for free, but not all the patrons are captivated.

In a place where many are hearing this music for the first time, orchestral music occupies no sacred space, no tradition of reverent listening. Classical music has arrived in a cultural market furiously trying out new things. The NAC orchestra sits on the Fuling Grand Theatre schedule somewhere between Mamma Mia! and a Michael Jackson tribute show. The symphony opens not to its own music but to the thundering bass track of a video ad for the theater’s coming shows, with bare chests and thrusting pelvises flashing on the bright screens.

This, then, is orchestra in one tiny part of China outside the major centers, in a place where it must compete for the ears of 19-year-old Ni Sha – Lisa, she calls herself – an English student whose tastes run to blues, country and her current favorite, Taylor Swift.

“I don’t think everybody here can understand this concert, including me,” she says, as a swelling crowd and she gather outside the theater high on the banks of the Yangtze. “But I really want to know.”

When Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, author of River Town, came to Fuling in 1996, it had been a half-century since an American had lived in an isolated place still reached primarily by boat. Today, it’s a quick drive down a four-lane highway. The end to isolation has brought visible change, in shiny new apartment towers and roadside advertisements for a residential complex called, in English, “Hot Springs City.” Less visible is the curiosity it has sparked about a broader world people are now more able to explore.

“Before this theater opened its doors we had almost no contact with Western music,” says Yang Xiao Lin, 43, a realtor who has come to hear the orchestra. High-speed Internet and Youku, a Chinese equivalent to YouTube, have given people a chance to sample orchestral music ahead of its arrival, and Ms. Yang likes what she has heard. Not only is the NAC concert a chance to taste what she calls “high-rank joy” – status music, in other words – but she finds something spiritual in it. “The cello is so deep,” she says.

That appeal – status and sound – has won classical music growing numbers of converts in China, where it had already gained a small foothold pre-Mao, with the Shanghai Symphony opening its doors in 1879. Nine conservatories are now pumping out graduates. Many of their teachers are foreigners or foreign-trained Chinese. Beijing now has at least ten professional symphony orchestras.

The numbers of young Chinese people studying piano and violin far exceed the population of Canada. Some of the top luthiers on Earth draw out rich tones from Chinese woods; earlier this month, Shenyang, China-born pianist Lang Lang was named International Artist of the Year. Even The Julliard School is planning a new location not far from Beijing amid hopes that Chinese ears will prove more hungry for symphonic sound than those in North America, which have left orchestras facing bankruptcy and salary cuts.

But it’s far from clear whether symphonies will truly find a home in China. Even in Beijing, “the National Centre for the Performing Arts after five years is doing roughly half as many international well-known orchestras as they were at the beginning,” says Wray Armstrong, a well-connected, Beijing-based impresario.

Classical music is, in some ways, an expression of a culture foreign to China. “I don’t know if China can save Bruckner or Wagner,” says Jindong Cai, the director of orchestra studies at Stanford University and author of Rhapsody in Red – How Western Classical Music Became Chinese.

There may, however, be a future for symphony with an Asian lilt. The Chinese pipa has found its way into symphony performances in major North American and Australian concert halls, while Chinese composers are experimenting with new orchestral sounds. There’s even an argument that it is no more difficult to lure Chinese audiences to Mozart than to Michael Jackson as both are unfamiliar.

That doesn’t make it easy. The raucous concert in Fuling is “proof that we’re a long way from bringing Western culture to the hinterlands” of China, Mr. Zukerman said. “And the hinterlands are what makes a country. It’s not Shanghai, and it’s not Hong Kong.”

Still, even in Fuling some see an innate appeal in symphony. Ms. Yang, the realtor, emerged from the concert bearing a broad smile. It was, she said, “really, shockingly good. Sometimes it sounds like a young girl is telling a love story gently, and sometimes it feels like you’re in a deep forest.” Her husband, however, thought it could use a slight tweak. “It would be better,” he said, “if they could add a few more Chinese characteristics.”

Nathan Vanderklippe – The Globe and Mail

Hagia Eirene in Istanbul

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acoustics, apse, architecture, atrium, Barocco sempre giovane, Constantine I, dome, Hagia Eirene, Haydn, Hindemith, Hurriet Daily News, Istanbul, Istanbul Bach Days, Jiří Bárta, Locatelli, mosque, museum, Nazlı Erdoğan, Ottoman Empire, Pachelbel, St. Irene Church, Stamitz, Telemann, Topkapi Palace, Turkish Ministry of Culture, western art music

Hagia Eirene

Hagia Eirene (St. Irene Church) stands on what is believed to be the oldest site of Christian worship in Istanbul. Roman Emperor Constantine I ordered the church in the fourth century, making it the first church built in Constantinople, and it is also the only church that was not turned into a mosque after the Ottomans conquered Istanbul in 1453. Eventually the Topkapi Palace walls enclosed the church, and the building was pressed into service as an armory and booty warehouse.

In the early twentieth century, the former church was transformed into a military museum, and now, under the control of the Turkish Ministry of Culture, the church’s original atrium, an apse containing five rows of built-in seats, and a great cross outlined in black against a gold background in the half-dome above the apse combine to create an extraordinary atmosphere for performances of western art music.

During the recent Istanbul Bach Days, the ensemble Barocco sempre giovane appeared at Hagia Eirene with soloists Nazlı Erdoğan and Jiří Bárta in performances of works by Locatelli, Pachelbel, Stamitz, Telemann, Bach, Hindemith and Haydn.

– Hurriet Daily News

Violinist Charles Yang Crosses Over

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American Ballet Theatre, Bach Partita, ballet, CDZA, Charles Yang, choreography, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, dance, Eminem, From the Top at Carnegie Hall, Glenn Dicterow, Jascha Heifetz, Justin Timberlake, Lady Gaga, Marcelo Gomes, New York Philharmonic, Ormsby Wilkins, Partita in D minor, Peoria Symphony Orchestra, Pia Catton, popular music, star-maker, Susan Jones, The Juilliard School, The Wall Street Journal, Twyla Tharp, violin, YouTube Music Awards

Marcelo Gomes and Charles Yang in Paganini

After American Ballet Theatre presented the revival of Twyla Tharp‘s Bach Partita this past weekend, its violin soloist, Charles Yang, had to run off to another gig: the YouTube Music Awards, where he was a performer, as was Lady Gaga and Eminem. It is an unusual mix for a classical-music career, but it is working for this 25-year-old Juilliard graduate. The ballet company needed a virtuoso to accompany Bach Partita [with music selected from Partita in D minor (BWV 1004)], a densely packed but little-seen work that had its premiere with Ballet Theatre in 1983.

Among the reasons the work hasn’t been performed since 1985 was the difficulty in finding the right violinist. During rehearsals, Ms. Tharp used a recording by Jascha Heifetz, a violinist known for his technical prowess. “He could play at this furious tempo,” said Ormsby Wilkins, Ballet Theatre’s music director. “That’s what drew Twyla to it.”

For the stage, however, that presents a problem – most professional soloists want to play Bach their way, not Heifetz’s. Simply slowing down the music doesn’t work because movements and phrases in dance are built to match the music, said Susan Jones, who reconstructed the ballet from grainy old videos. “It needs a good deal of drama and theatricality,” she said. “For a half-hour ballet, it has a lot of content.”

So the company faced a quandary: It needed someone who could handle the technical demands of Bach Partita and was willing to subsume his style in favor of another’s. Mr. Wilkins remembered a young violinist, Mr. Yang, who had worked on Paganini, a new piece with principal dancer Marcelo Gomes.

In Paganini, Mr. Gomes danced while Mr. Yang played onstage and moved, too, as part of the choreography. “I like to do these oddball kind of things that break down the barriers between genres,” said Mr. Yang.

Mr. Wilkins contacted the musician, still in Juilliard’s graduate program at the time, to see if he might be a fit with Ms. Tharp and her choreography. Mr. Yang listened carefully to the parameters. “She needs me to play like Heifetz. She knows what she wants,” he said. “I heard that, and I was like, ‘OK, I might as well give it a shot.’ ”

That meant a private audition for Ms. Tharp. To prepare, he practiced Bach Partita with Glenn Dicterow, the New York Philharmonic’s concertmaster and a former Heifetz student. “My Bach is very different from Heifetz’s Bach, so I had to modify my playing,” said Mr. Yang. Heifetz’s rendition of the piece is “quick and raw sounding,” Mr. Yang added. “He doesn’t overuse delicate styles. He goes for it.”

Taking pains to emulate the virtuoso, Mr. Yang won over Ms. Tharp and got the job. “We really bonded,” he said of the choreographer, who didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Yang has performed with the Peoria Symphony Orchestra and on PBS’s From the Top at Carnegie Hall. At the YouTube awards, he played with the group CDZA, which bills itself as creating “musical video experiments.”

His versatility nearly took him out of classical music altogether. While he was an undergraduate at Juilliard, his youthful good looks, vocal ability and guitar skill attracted a team of corporate star-makers from Asia who, he said, “wanted me to be pretty much an Asian Justin Timberlake.” Mr. Yang, who is from Texas, balked at the five-year contract as well as what struck him as glitzy but less fulfilling work. “The Asian pop scene is unique in and of itself. I wanted to pursue my classical dreams. And now I work with people like Twyla.”

Pia Catton – The Wall Street Journal

Bach Unwigged

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Abraham Calovius, Actus tragicus, armor, Arnstadt, bassoon, bereavement, Calov Bible, cantata, Cantata Pilgrimage, chorus, clergy, counterpoint, Dorset, Elias Gottlob Haussmann, empathy, English Baroque Soloists, Galileo, gang warfare, Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit, hagiolatry, harpsichord, Himmelsburg, Ich habe genung, improvisation, John Eliot Gardiner, Kapellmeister, Leipzig, liturgy, mass, Mass in B minor, medieval, Mendelssohn, Monteverdi Choir, motet, Music in the Castle of Heaven, music notation, music publishing, National Public Radio, obbligato, Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique, organ, passion, performance practice, philosophy, portrait, Red Palace, refugee, rehearsal, Saxony, score, Second World War, solace, St. Thomas School, sympathy, Thirty Years War, Tom Huizenga, town council, Weimar, Weltanschauung

Johann Sebastian Bach has been a central figure in the life of British conductor John Eliot Gardiner since he was a youngster. On his way to bed, he couldn’t help glancing up at the famous eighteenth-century portrait of Bach that hung in the first floor landing of the old mill house in Dorset, England where Gardiner was born. It was one of only two fully authenticated portraits of Bach by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, painted around 1750, and came to the Gardiner home in a knapsack, delivered on bicycle by a Silesian refugee who needed to keep it safe during the Second World War. Bach’s music also hung in the air of the Gardiner home. Each week the musically inclined family gathered for serious singalongs, which included Bach’s motets.

It’s a scene Gardiner sets at the beginning of his new book, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, published by Knopf [published earlier in the UK by Penguin as Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach]. From his childhood interactions with Bach, Gardiner would grow up to become one of the composer’s greatest champions, creating his own orchestras (English Baroque Soloists and Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique) and choir (Monteverdi Choir) to play the music in historically informed performances.

Gardiner’s obsession with Bach culminated in 2000, when he and his musical forces (and a team of recording engineers) embarked on a massive pilgrimage. Traveling around Europe and the US, they performed all of Bach’s sacred cantatas (about two hundred of them) on their appropriate Sundays in different churches.

Gardiner’s new book was more than twelve years in the making, and one of its goals is to get to know Bach the man a little better, since scant information has been passed down about his personal life. Bach was filled with contradictions, Gardiner discovered. He had anger management issues, and yet he had the capacity for tenderness.

“He had normal flaws and failings, which make him very approachable,” Gardiner says. “But he had this unfathomably brilliant mind and a capacity to hear music and then to deliver music that is beyond the capacity of pretty well any musician before or since.”

Despite Bach’s contradictions, Gardiner says, in Tom Huizenga’s conversation with him below, the composer would have been a great guy to hang out with.

Tom Huizenga (TH) In your book, you’re saying Bach’s music is well-known, but we end up knowing very little in comparison about Bach the man. How do you try to crack that nut in your new book?

John Eliot Gardiner (JEG) Well, with great difficulty and that was a big challenge. But I think basically there are three elements that you have to draw on. Number one is the contextual information that you can gain from the sources, from the local, parochial sources about conditions in Germany at the time of Bach’s birth, conditions pertaining to the schools that he went to, conditions pertaining to the whole difficult social life of Germany recovering from the Thirty Years War and on the brink of enlightenment but still hanging on to a pre-Galileo view of the world – very medieval in a way – and not allowing yet the full flood of enlightenment thought to change their weltanschauung.

The second area which I found very useful to explore was his own annotations and comments that he introduced in his copy of Abraham Calov’s Bible commentary – Calov being a seventeenth-century theologian – a book in Bach’s private library which Bach annotates very carefully and very meticulously and things that draw his eye like, for example, how to deal with the concept of anger and that Calov makes it clear that you can be, you must turn the other cheek if somebody is being angry about you or if you feel angry in response to a personal slight. But if the attack is on your profession, your skill, your office, not only can you respond with anger but you should respond with anger. And that to me explains a good deal of Bach’s very competitive and antagonistic response to the authorities who were employing him at different stages in his lifetime, and made life difficult for him, or in his own words, “caused a life of envy and hindrance.” So that was a big resource.

And the third area of research that I really plunged into with a great deal of enthusiasm was of course the evidence that can be gleaned from a deep immersion into his compositions of music with a text attached to them. In other words, the passions, the motets, the Masses and above all the cantatas that he wrote in such a concentrated period in Leipzig in particular. And I was fully aware in writing the book that I was treading on treacherous ground in so far as one man’s reading can be very different from another person’s and it’s a very subjective source of evidence, if you can call it that. But I felt convinced that my deep immersion into that music did allow me the occasional glimpse of the chinks in his armor plating as it were, when his personality sort of grinned through the fabric of the music. And that gave me huge encouragement to persist and to try and get to the end of the book, because it’s not, as you I’m sure realize, a conventional life at all.

TH About your immersion into the music. You mention in the book that part of your aim is to show how Bach’s approach in his vocal music reveals his mind at work, his temperamental preferences as well as his philosophical outlook. So how does the music reveal the mind?

JEG Well, music is a much more elusive and ephemeral form of communication than words alone and yet it has its own precision. I mean, it’s Mendelssohn who famously said that he found that music was much more precise than words. The problem comes in actually defining that precision and saying what exactly the music is saying. But I think the one thing you can extrapolate from studying Bach’s setting of religious texts is that there is a counterpoint going on between the meaning of the texts per se and the affect and impact of the music surrounding the text setting, and it divides into two broad categories, really. One is collusion and a direct sense of sympathy and empathy between the import and the meaning of the words and the type of music that Bach uses to surround it and explain it – the text. And then there’s at the other extreme, collision – those moments where the music and the text seem to end up pointing in opposite directions.

TH Can you give some examples of those two types?

JEG Well, there are quite a number of cantatas where the text is quite genial and talking about, “God is right, all you have to do is to comply and just get on with it,” and Bach is writing music of wonderful frippery and irrelevance as if to pull the leg of the listener. It’s not that he’s saying, “God isn’t right,” but he’s saying, “You don’t have to take it in such a literal way – you can enjoy it.” The cantatas are full of instances where just by prolonging a single syllable or a single word or repeating things, he gives a different emphasis than the one the preacher would have done when announcing the scripture from the pulpit. And music has this extra – particularly Bach’s music – expressive potency which is so extraordinary and it’s something that leaps out of its initial context and appeals to us now in the twenty-first century in a way that perhaps he never acknowledged. I mean, he was writing this music for a very specific moment, for a very specific time of year, in a very specific liturgy in a parochial context. And yet such is the breadth of his vision that it can reach us now.

TH In a similar vein, you mention in the book that you were “keeping a weather eye out for the instances in performance when his personality seems to rise through the fabric of his notation.” And I’m wondering if there are specific examples you have in mind, where Bach the man, whom we seem to know so little about, rises up through the music.

JEG There are quite a few instances in the cantatas but they’re not that well known. I can give you one instance in a piece that is very, very well known and that’s the Mass in B minor (BWV 232), where I think that really applies. In the credo there is this monumental chorus Confiteor unum baptisma – I believe in the universal baptism and the resurrection of the dead. And Bach starts off in really good, solid Lutheran card-carrying fashion by inserting a cantus firmus, a sort of almost plainsong statement, in the basses followed in stretto with the altos and then with the tenors. And you think, “Oh, this is a really major ex cathedra statement” – and so it is until the point when the music seems to crumble and it just simply dwindles and the tempo slows down.

These great girder-like proclamations cease and the music enters into a sort of twilight zone full of dark modulations. And a searching quality enters in the music to the point where you don’t know which direction it’s going to move in. There are extreme insecurities of harmonic movement and it feels at that moment that Bach himself is saying to himself and allowing us to share his momentary doubts as to whether there is going to be a life beyond our earthly existence.

And only at the last moment is there a scalar descent in the bass line and suddenly there is this eruptive chorus with trumpets and drums, “And I look for the resurrection of the dead” – Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum. And suddenly, there’s a sprint to the line and it finishes in a flourish and that’s it. The impressiveness of that jubilant chorus, which is so affirmative, would I think be a lot less if it hadn’t been for the transitional patch of murky self-doubt that comes before it, and I think that’s something that humanizes Bach the man to us. It makes us feel that he, too, had his doubts and had his wobbles.

TH You have a very intriguing chapter in the book called “The Incorrigible Cantor,” where you talk about a side of Bach that I think many people, even fans of his music, really don’t know that much about.

JEG Well, that’s all to do with anger management and attitude towards authority and I think the seeds of that are to be found in the unsavory atmosphere that pertained in the schools that he attended and in the gang warfare that took place in the towns between the rival choirs who were busking to raise money for their schools and their education.

Even though you can’t pinpoint Bach’s direct involvement with any of these incidents, that is the typical background of the schools that he was attending. And it all comes to an eruptive moment in Bach’s own life when he’s age eighteen and in his first job in Arnstadt, and he has a silly disagreement with a bassoon player who can’t manage to play an obbligato little riff that Bach writes for him, which is difficult. But, patently, the guy made a bit of a mess of it and Bach swears at him and calls him something quite insulting. And the bassoonist, in order to gain his own back, awaits for him with his gang in the town square. When Bach is on his way back from the castle going home, they set up on him and with knives and cudgels and Bach is obliged to defend himself by drawing his sword and there’s a nasty incident and eventually they’re separated and Bach goes on his way. And the next day he goes to the Consistory and lodges a severe complaint and the Consistory don’t back him up, they give the moral victory to the bassoonist.

And that, I think, is a sort of paradigm, or it’s a foretaste anyway, of the problems that Bach encountered at so many different stages in his career. Like when he was in Weimar, he is really disappointed to be passed over in the hierarchy and he doesn’t get appointed Kapellmeister when the guy that’s appointed ahead of him is manifestly less talented, less competent. And Bach looks for a job elsewhere and he gains a job elsewhere and the Duke of Weimar imprisons him for cheekiness and subversive behavior and on it goes.

When he gets to Leipzig, he signs a very elaborate contract with the town council and he falls foul of their regulations in so many different ways and he finds himself in battles either with the clergy or with the town council or with the headmaster of the school, and it wears him down and he then describes, in one of the few private letters we have, how his life is full of “vexation and hindrance” and how the people here in Leipzig are little interested in music and have a curious disposition.

So there’s a sense that he’s always the outsider, that he’s up against something, that he’s incorrigible to some extent. And he carries on right until the bitter end fighting battles which really he didn’t need to, maybe. And that is one side of his personality. And maybe it was a creative side because it – in his embattled state – fired him up to write the music that he did. On the other hand, there’s a totally different side to him – the convivial family man who welcomed all visiting musicians and who took infinite pains to look after the musical education and the career steps of his children. So there is a fault line running right through his personality, I feel.

TH I think we tend to think of Bach as the bewigged “grand arbiter and lawgiver of music” who would be far from being jailed or drawing a sword on someone. And I think we tend to romanticize Bach’s big job in Leipzig where he landed in 1723 and where he wrote so many great pieces – the St. John Passion (BWV 245) and St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244), the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), the Mass in B minor. We imagine him just quietly churning out his church music but . . .

JEG It wasn’t like that at all.

TH Right. You reveal in your book it’s so much different than that. Tell us just briefly what a day in the life of Bach might have been like when he was in Leipzig.

JEG Well, he was responsible not just simply for writing the music but also as a schoolmaster, for disciplining and for being a kind of house father to a lot of the boarding school choristers who were in his charge and who had their dormitories right up next to his private living quarters in the Thomas school in Leipzig. So how Bach had any time for a private life, God knows. But he would have taken prayers. He would have taken early lessons. He would go into daily rehearsals and daily classes, and then he would get to his desk and start composing the cantata for the week that was going to last up to thirty-five minutes depending on the occasion. And it didn’t end there.

He then had to see to its copying out. And there was this little kind of mini factory, or sweatshop, of copying that was under his supervision with students, sometimes family members, doing the copying out of the parts of the score, readying for the one and only rehearsal. There may have been a few private, tuitioned rehearsals when he could have dealt with particularly difficult solos or obbligatos, but basically it was rehearsed in breakneck speed on a Saturday before the performance on a Sunday.

In addition to that, he was also assessing organs in different parts of the country, around Saxony, and he was writing recommendations, he was supervising a harpsichord hire system. Some of his works went through publication and he was publishing other people’s works. He was tireless, absolutely tireless. And he kept up that rhythm for at least the first three years – before he either burned out a bit or else became disillusioned by the lack of support and responsiveness on the part of the town authorities from the clergy.

TH And not to mention that he was a father and a husband and a bandleader and a recitalist.

JEG All that. It’s true.

TH Your book is not a typical chronological bio of Bach where he was born here, then he did this, he did that, and then he died.

JEG It’s not intended to be a conventional life work.

TH Instead you tackle aspects of Bach in each of the chapters and I’m wondering why you chose that approach.

JEG Well there are plenty of life-and-works of Bach and I didn’t feel qualified to write that and certainly not to speak with authority on the keyboard music and the organ music in particular, where that’s been dealt with very well by other authors. Where I did feel there was a strong case for emphasis was on the church music and particularly on the cantatas – the music that I know best. And so what I tried to do is to take the reader by the hand and take him or her through a series of different perspectives of looking on Bach.

I start off explaining in the preface why I think the book could be written that has a different approach. Then in the first chapter I describe my own approach, my own curious and upbringing and experience of Bach, which at the time it didn’t strike me as being odd or exceptional, but it was only when I got to school that I realized that it was a bit odd and how I came to interpret Bach and to have a lifelong fascination with him and found that the models that were held up before me of how to perform him were to some extent unsatisfactory and how, if I was ever going come to terms with his music, I would have to do it in my own way, which meant forming my own choir and a period instrument orchestra and how that led to the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage in 2000 and so on.

TH Tell me a little bit about the wording in the title of the book. It’s called Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven and that title seems to me to put Bach up on a pedestal a little bit. And that’s the kind of veneration, or “hagiolatry” as you put it, that you seem to try to work against in the book.

JEG Yeah, I guess you can accuse me of that because I do revere Bach. The castle of heaven is a translation of the Himmelsburg in German. It was a chapel in the Red Castle of the Dukes of Weimar from which Bach performed, and the music floated downwards, out of sight of the Duke and the congregation. And what I was trying to suggest by calling the book Music in the Castle of Heaven, is that Bach was producing the most heavenly music that perhaps has ever been heard on Earth and yet his sights were set on the castle of heaven of performing music as a good Lutheran to a much higher degree of perfection in the afterlife. And I’m trying to suggest that we’re the beneficiaries of a kind of celestial vision.

TH Well, I think we are. After studying and performing Bach’s music for so much of your life – and now you’ve written this book – you must feel somehow like you know him. So what is the answer? What was Bach like?

JEG Convivial, cantankerous, remote, present, full of humor but deeply serious.

TH All dichotomies.

JEG All dichotomies. But a great guy to go out and have a beer with.

TH Do you feel like you’re closer to knowing who he is after writing this book?

JEG Yeah but I might be just deluding myself, but yes I do.

TH Do you think he was basically just a normal, not too interesting, guy who happened to be a genius at writing music?

JEG He had normal attributes. He had normal faults and failings which make him very approachable, but he had this unfathomably brilliant mind and a capacity to hear music and then to deliver music – in terms of improvisation and then in notated music – that is beyond the capacity of pretty well any musician before or since, yes.

TH You know it’s quite obvious that for this book – at over six hundred pages including a glossary, a chronology, twenty pages of notes – that you’ve done countless hours of research. And I’m wondering what was the single most surprising thing you discovered about Bach that you hadn’t known before?

JEG I think that would have to be his compassion towards those who’ve lost a dear one. Where you’d expect it to be gloomy and lachrymose, Bach writes music of ineffable tenderness and consolation and music that doesn’t require you to be a Christian, or let alone a Lutheran, to be able to have access to that wonderful compassionate solace that his music can bring you. You can hear it in some of the motets and you can hear it in some of the cantatas, famous ones like Ich habe genung (BWV 82), but also in the cantatas for the sixteenth Sunday after Trinity which are particularly concerned with infant mortality. You sense that he’s really befriended death in a way that no other composer I know of has done to that degree, and with that degree of persuasiveness. That’s something I cherish, and that brings me personal comfort. And also I can extend it by suggesting people listen to or approach or perform that music if they’re in a state of bereavement or loss.

JEG If you had to pick one piece of Bach’s music that you have recorded to recommend to someone who’s not really all that familiar with Bach, what would you pick?

JEG Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit, the Actus tragicus (BWV 106).

TH And why that one?

JEG Because it’s a precocious, early example of what I’ve just been talking about: somebody who is dealing with eschatology, dealing with the ends of things, dealing with the eternal mysteries of life and of death and of finding a path through all that pain and grief to find a serene ending.

Tom Huizenga – National Public Radio