Johann Sebastian Bach (1 gen 1685 anni – 1 gen 1750 anni)

Descrizione:

a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Brandenburg Concertos and the Goldberg Variations, and for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival he is generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.

Bach
A. Bach’s Career
1. Bach never left Germany.
2. He held a series of organist positions early on, worked at a ducal court, and then
became music director in Leipzig.
3. Bach’s career was provincial, and he composed what was needed at the time.
4. Most of his great vocal music dates from Leipzig.
5. His later years saw the composition of esoteric and old-fashioned masterpieces of
counterpoint that have never been surpassed.

The Chorale Prelude
1. Bach belonged to a family of church musicians that stretched back to the sixteenth
century.
2. Bach sought out the greatest composers in the Lutheran tradition for study, walking
some 300 miles to hear Buxtehude.
3. Bach inherited the genre of chorale prelude, a single-stanza setting of the chorale that
introduced congregational singing or served for meditation.

The Fugue
1. Pachelbel began to separate the free and strict sections of a toccata, and by Bach’s time
these were separated into distinct pieces, such as prelude and fugue or toccata and fugue.
2. A fugue can be a self-alone piece, part of a piece, texture, or procedure.
3. Bach’s Fugue in G Minor is an example of the composer’s approach to the fugue in his
early years and is relatively straightforward.

Bach’s Imported Roots: Froberger and Others
1. Even though Bach never left Germany, he was able to assimilate various national
styles and idioms.
2. German musicians had long brought in other styles, including the French dance suite.
a. Chief among the proponents of the dance suites was Johann Jacob Froberger.
1) Froberger helped establish the standard dance sequence in a suite:
allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue. These dances are all defined under Froberger's tab on the timeline.
2) Bach adopted this model as a basic pattern for all of his suites.
3. These four dances were all in binary form, but varied in meter and tempo.

Bach’s Cantatas
1. Bach’s contemporaries considered his sacred vocal music to be his chief contribution.
2. Unlike Handel’s, Bach’s vocal music was intended for church.
3. He adopted some of the dramatic devices associated with opera.
4. Texts published by Neumeister altered the traditional biblical verses associated with
chorales into little poems that contained an emotional response to the texts, functionally as arias
do.
5. Of the Bach cantatas: They include both secular and sacred; most follow operatic
conventions of recit/aria (da capo) mixed in with chorale settings.

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