Bach-analia

Three hundred years ago, when Harvard Square was a peaceful field and Increase Mather was the President of Harvard, Bach was born in Germany.

Today, there are daily traffic jams in Harvard Square, Derek C. Bok is Harvard's President, and Harvard is celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach's 300th birthday.

Beginning Saturday, Harvard will sponsor the only week-long festival devoted to Bach in the Boston area.

The festival, the brainchild of Christoph Wolff, Chairman of the Music Department, will feature styles ranging from Baroque to electronic music. "I felt that it was an ideal opportunity to coordinate all of the normally uncoordinated musical activities on campus," Wolff explained.

Harvard is not alone in its tribute to Bach. On March 21, Bach's actual birthday, St. Matthew's Passion, one of his major works, was broadcast worldwide from Leipzig, the city where Bach spent most of his life. A number of other universities have also celebrated Bach's birth, but mostly with one-day celebrations.

"Our festival is more ambitious. We're expecting to do quite well--not because of anything we've done, but because Bach draws crowds," said Daniel Melamed, coordinator of the event.

But why is Harvard--and everyone else--bringing back Bach? This year also marks Handel's 300th birthday, as well as Scarlatti's, but neither of these has drawn nearly as much attention.

At Harvard, this is partially explained by the types of works each excelled in. "You can't really have a major Handel festival without paying attention to his operas, and the difficulties for undergraduates in putting together an opera are nearly insurmountable," Wolff explained. "If you look at Bach's works, you have an ideal repertoire that can be tapped by chamber music, choral and orchestral groups."

On a scale beyond the University, Jameson N. Marvin, director of choral activities at Harvard, said Bach's birthday is receiving more attention than Handel's because "the level of Bach's genius as a composer is so constant, and there are such pinnacle works in all categories, where as Handel only has them in a few."

But Bach was not acclaimed as a genius composer in his own time. "If you look at Bach's obituary notice in 1750, they praised him as the greatest organist and clavier player of all times, but they had very little understanding of him as a composer," Wolff explained. Marvin added that in Bach's time, other composers, like Handel and Telemann were more acclaimed.

Yet, Wolff said, there are hints that Bach was aware of his own talents. "I think he did recognize his own greatness," Wolff said. "He composed the Mass in B Minor with an eye toward posterity."

And today, Bach is still considered great. "[He is] easily the most well-known and frequently performed composer," Wolff said.

He attributed Bach's recent surge in popularity to technology's growth. "It has been primarily the recording industry which has made people aware of the enormous wealth of, say, cantatas. Previously, only selected ones were available," Wolff expained.

"Right now, in general, people who love music but aren't professionals are particularly interested in the Baroque period, and that's first and foremost Bach," Marvin added.

But even if Bach realized that his music would last, he surely could not have imagined the changes posterity would make. Director of the Electronic Music Studio Ivan A. Tcherepnin said, "Bach showed a lot of foresight by not specifying instruments, tempo, or dynamics in some of his works. It's as if he was saying, in three hundred years, you can experiment with these things."

And sure enough, this Sunday afternoon, these very experiments will take place. Jeffrey L. Goldberg '86, who will direct Sunday afternoon's Musical Offering explains his role: "What I'm doing may not satisfy purists who aren't used to hearing Bach on synthesizer, harp, trombone, or sax, but Bach can stand and transcend particular musical instruments." He added, "As the Musical Offering was Bach's response to the newest instrument of his day--the piano--we're applying it to the newest instruments of ours."

Goldberg said that unlike the music of some of the romantic composers, Bach's music is so strong that one can almost play it on any instrument, and it will stand out.

Part of this strength may come from Bach's ability to forces the direction music would take. "Bach could look into the future of music by thinking about his sons, who also were significant contributers to the music of their time. He could look into the future as he could look into the past," Wolff said.

And, said Goldberg, "Bach had the incredible ability to switch from the most learned to the most modern styles. It makes every generation learn something new from him. He can weather the fads of time."

One violinist who will be performing in three of next week's events explained Bach's sustained popularity. "He has an inner intensity that you can't get when you're falling away in more romantic pieces. It's purely--there's not a superfluous element in it," she said. "It's not so much that he makes the simple complex as the complex simple."

Bach's music is exceedingly complex, sometimes combining four or five melodies at once, and Andrei A. Molotin '88, a self-proclaimed Bach fanatic, said that this complexity may explain why Bach was not so popular in his own time. Molotin labelled Bach's music emotionless and pure, and said it should not be played in the more flowing romantic style, which would cause some of the structure to be lost.

"It was Bach's struggle to make music scientific and structured that is the basis for anything that came after him," Molotin said.

But viola player Chris Lee '88 said that it was a different facet of Bach's music that appealed to him: "Most people think of Bach as a structured, almost mathematical music, but I think its got a very powerful lyrical, emotional quality, almost like religion."

Goldberg saw this division as needless. "Bach's able to do these technical acrobatics with counterpoint, but that's not the point. It's music and it sounds beautiful. Sometimes people make an artificial dichotomy between this scientific aspect and the musical one. That isn't there," he said.

"The quantity of wonderful music that Bach produced is what amazes me," said pianist James E. Schwartz '88. "He produced cantatas the way we produced cantatas the way we produce Expos papers."

Bach Events at Harvard

Saturday April 13: Harvard University Choir

St. Matthew Passion

Memorial Church, 7:00 p.m., Free

Sunday April 14: Harvard-Radcliffe Ensemble Society and Harvard Electronic Music Studio

Paine Hall, 8:00 p.m.

Sunday April 14: Harvard Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, Bach Society Orchestra

Sanders Theatre, 8:00 p.m.

Monday April 15: Reinhard Goebel, Baroque violin

Robert Hill, harpsichord

Paine Hall, 8:00 p.m.

Tuesday April 16: Lecture: Robert C. Marshall

Brandeis University, "Bach's Use of Music History"

Paine Hall, 4:00 p.m.

Tuesday April 16: Christa Rakich, organ

Memorial Church, 8:00 p.m. free

Wednesday April 17: Lawrence Lesser, violincello

Paine Hall, 8:00 p.m.

Thursday April 18: Nancy Granert, organ

Memorial Church, 8:00 p.m., free

Friday April 19: Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra

Sanders Theatre, 8:00 p.m.

Saturday April 20: Robert Hill, harpsichord

Paine Hall, 8:00 p.m.

Sunday April 21: Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, Baroque Orchestra

Sanders Theatre, 3:00 p.m.

Continuing: Bach Document's at Harvard

Richard F. French Gallery, Loeb Music Library

Tickets available: at events on at Holyoke Center Ticket Office, Harvard Square.