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

Edited by Mark A. Peters, Reginald L. Sanders

Part of the Contextual Bach Studies series

Paperback / softback

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Description

Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J.

S. Bach collects seventeen essays by leading Bach scholars.

The authors each address in some way such questions of meaning in J.

S. Bachâ€™s vocal compositionsâ€”including his Passions, Masses, Magnificat, and cantatasâ€”with particular attention to how such meaning arises out of the intentionality of Bachâ€™s own compositional choices or (in Part IV in particular) how meaning is discovered, and created, through the reception of Bachâ€™s vocal works. And the authors do not consider such compositional choices in a vacuum, but rather discuss Bachâ€™s artistic intentions within the framework of broader cultural trendsâ€”social, historical, theological, musical, etc.

Such questions of compositional choice and meaning frame the four primary approaches to Bachâ€™s vocal music taken by the authors in this volume, as seen across the bookâ€™s four parts: Part I: How might the study of historical theology inform our understanding of Bachâ€™s compositional choices in his music for the church (cantatas, Passions, masses)?

Part II: How can we apply traditional analytical tools to understand better how Bachâ€™s compositions were created and how they might have been heard by his contemporaries?

Part III: What we can understand anew through the study of Bachâ€™s self-borrowing (i.e., parody), which always changed the earlier meaning of a composition through changes in textual content, compositional characteristics, the workâ€™s context within a larger composition, and often the performance context (from court to church, for example)?

Part IV: What can the study of reception teach us about a workâ€™s meaning(s) in Bachâ€™s time, during the time of his immediate successors, and at various points since then (including our present)?The chapters in this volume thus reflect the breadth of current Bach research in its attention not only to source study and analysis, but also to meanings and contexts for understanding Bachâ€™s compositions.