Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Bach & God
ISBN: 9780190606985
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Musicology and Music History;

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

He is an Associate Professor of Music at Swathmore College and the vice president of the American Bach Society. Marissen has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music.

Marissen has written The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach's Brandenberg Concertos and has edited Bach Perspectives 3: Creative Responses to the Music of J. S. Bach from Mozart to Hindemith.

(Bowker Author Biography)