In the final episode of Season Six, we return to the subject of Bach translation in a conversation with scholars Michael Marissen and Daniel R. Melamed about their free, open-access Bach cantata translation project, https://bachcantatatexts.org/. If you have questions, comments, or even cantata translations requests, you can reach them at the website, where you can also sign up for email announcements of new translations.

This month we hear from historian Dr. Tanya Kevorkian, Associate Professor of History at Millersville University, about her forthcoming book, Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany, which documents and explores the rich variety of everyday sounds and music that characterized life in German Baroque cities. This episode is sponsored by the American Bach Society, which supports the study and performance of the music of J.S. Bach in the U.S. and Canada, with membership open to anyone interested.

This episode of "Notes on Bach" is sponsored by the American Bach Society.

This month we hear from Dr. Mark Peters and Dr. Reginald Sanders about the complex subject of meaning in Bach’s vocal music, which can emerge from compositional choices, listener reception, and an intersection of these and other factors. Dr. Peters and Dr. Sanders edited an essay collection on this subject, Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J.S. Bach, published by Lexington Books.

In this episode of “Notes on Bach,” we hear from musicologist and violinist Dr. Noelle Heber about J.S. Bach’s attitudes towards, experiences with, and cantatas related to the ideas of spiritual and material wealth. Dr. Heber's book, J.S. Bach's Material and Spiritual Treasures, can be ordered here. For more about her book, check out Dr. Heber's blog post.

Resources Mentioned in the Show

For recent research about Anna Magdalena Bach, visit Eberhard Spree's English-language blog and check out our earlier Notes on Bach episode with Dr. Andrew Talle.

To hear about how scholars have used Bach's Calov Bible in their research, check out our Notes on Bach episode with Dr. Robin Leaver. To learn more about the Calov Bible and see facsimile pages, visit here.

To kick off Season 6 of “Notes on Bach,” we hear from musicologist and BBC radio host Dr. Hannah French about how conductor Sir Henry Wood, long associated with the BBC Proms, shaped Bach reception in twentieth-century England. Her book, Sir Henry Wood, Champion of J.S. Bach, was recently published by Boydell and Brewer. For more, check out “Henry and Seb,” Dr. French’s podcast miniseries on the book. 

Image above: Wood’s final conducting score of J.S. Bach, Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor: For Orchestra, orch. Henry J. Wood [Klenovsky] (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 39. Property of Dr. Hannah French.   

Bach Society Houston is grateful to the American Bach Society for sponsoring this episode.

In our final episode of the season, we hear from Dr. Stephen Rose, Professor of Music at Royal Holloway University of London, about his recent book, Musical Authorship from Schütz to Bach (soon available in paperback). Dr. Rose joins us to discuss how people in early modern Lutheran Germany thought about musical creativity, authorship, and ownership in economic, cultural, theological, and philosophical terms.

On June 6, 2021, Bach Society Houston will present a concert called “Music in the Americas at the Time of Bach," which can be streamed online. The concert’s theme—“eighteenth-century music” outside the European geographical context and repertoire typically implied by the term—might raise questions for BSH audiences. Our episode today will explore some of those questions with Dr. Glenda Goodman, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book Cultivated By Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press). Dr. Goodman joins us to discuss how her book—and concerts like the one I just mentioned—can help us consider, and then expand, some of our assumptions, definitions, and labels around European-derived music during Bach's lifetime and in the generation or two following him.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Image from an 18th-century American music notebook at Dr. Goodman’s website

“Notes on Bach” episodes with Dr. Andrew Talle about his book Beyond Bach and the Anna Magdalena notebooks

Vast Early America episode of the history podcast “Ben Franklin’s World,” featuring Dr. Karin Wulf and other scholars

Dr. Candace Bailey, Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South (University of Illinois Press)