Week 1: 2 October 2023 – Trinity 18 and Songs of the Summer
Plus: What are “The Complete Organ Works of J.S. Bach”?, Kepler's Galileo, Fangirls, and more!
Bond Chapel, and therefore this whole series, is situated in the traditional homeland and native territory of the Three Fires Confederacy—the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe Nations—as well as other groups including the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Miami, Peoria, and Sac and Fox. It’s important to remember their forced removal and dispossession, but also not to speak of these groups in the past tense, as Chicago continues to be vibrant with tens of thousands of Native voices.
In that spirit, please enjoy this wonderful song and video about heritage, culture, and place, by Potawatomi musicians Elexa Dawson and Nicole Emmons:
Week 1: 2 October 2023 – Trinity 18 and Songs of the Summer
Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 550
Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam, BWV 684
Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam, BWV 685
Pedal-Exercitium, BWV 598
Kommst du nun, Jesu, vom Himmel herunter, BWV 650
Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 1100
Christus, der ist mein Leben, BWV 1112
Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut, BWV 1114
Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr, BWV 1115
Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, BWV 1116
Fantasia super Valet will ich dir geben, BWV 735
Valet will ich dir geben, BWV 736
I’ve gone back and forth on how to approach the first and last concerts of this series: is it better to treat them like all the others, or to begin and end things with a bang? Ultimately, I decided to go with the former, not making any effort to pack in name-brand “greatest hits.” (Which isn’t to say there aren’t hits on this program!)
That’s especially important because there’s a lot of catching-up to do around the beginning and end of the series: all the music that has some liturgical relationship to the summer months needs to be squeezed in! You’ll notice that these first few recitals will go a bit “out of order” before we can more or less begin to match the rhythms of the calendar.
No, not that Prelude and Fugue in G Major. BWV 541 gets all the press (and, as I remember it, is seemingly ubiquitous on competition programs among advanced high school organists), while I’m not sure I’ve ever seen BWV 550 programmed. And I get it: BWV 541 has a good story attached to it, and it’s in a refreshing Vivaldian concerto style. (For more about that piece, come back on—checks notes—13 May.) This Prelude and Fugue, by comparison, is a more old-fashioned piece in the North German tradition.
Not that you’d necessarily be able to tell from listening to it. There’s nothing stodgy about this piece, with its stop-and-start drama-filled opening, pedal solo covering the entire range of the pedalboard, sudden changes of tempo and meter, and briskly virtuosic fugue (Alla breve e staccato). The fugue itself is closer to the string-band concert style of the Brandenburg Concertos’ third movements than to the Art of the Fugue. And even when it’s not completely exposed in lengthy solos, the pedal part is all over the place, reaching up to an awkward high E that only a few organs had in Bach’s day. No wonder this piece is neglected: it’s quietly one of the gnarlier Preludes and Fugues Bach wrote.
The next set begins with a pair of pieces from the Clavier-Übung III, Bach’s major published organ work. Unsurprisingly from the title, “Christ our Lord came to the Jordan” is a Baptism hymn, falling within the “catechism” section of the Clavier-Übung III and belonging to John the Baptist’s day (in June) on the calendar. The first of the two pieces also imitates string textures, giving something like a two-violin duet in the right hand while the left plays the bass (the tune in the pedals). But it also seems to imitate something else: in general, people seem to hear the steadily flowing left hand as a depiction of the Jordan River itself. This may not come as a big shock to us now, but such direct musical imagery is extremely rare in Bach’s organ music. You may get occasional passages that organists hear as sparkling stars, abstract voice crossings that may represent the crucifixion, or references to particular musical styles (dances, fanfares), but almost never this kind of painting in notes.
The companion piece (BWV 685) was, along with the other keyboard-only chorales in the Clavier-Übung III, written to fill up empty space in the printed edition (and possibly to make the total number of pieces a doubly Trinitarian 3✕3✕3), but even when writing for such a “practical” purpose, Bach gives us a dense little piece of counterpoint, as tightly wound as anything in the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Clavier-Übung means “keyboard practice,” so I suppose it’s only fair to follow that with pedal practice; I’ll have more to say about this short piece in the next section. I’m following it with the last of the six Schübler Chorales (more on those as a set below as well), an arrangement of a movement from the cantata BWV 137 (Trinity 12).1 The tune may be familiar to some as “Lobe den Herren,” although the ornamentation can make this difficult to pick out. And difficult to play! As written, the hymn tune goes in the pedals, loaded with long trills and in an awkward high register. Meanwhile, the right hand gets to stretch and jump around to play a violin part that has almost nothing to do with keyboard technique. Combined, they make for one of the most devilishly tricky pieces in Bach’s organ works; please enjoy the pratfalls in this practice recording from Wednesday:
More summer catchup for the Neumeister chorales that follow, as well as a Michaelmas chorale (BWV 1115) that finally brings us to our time in the calendar. Again, lots more to say about the collection below, but a little bit here about how they’re constructed. Each of these pieces puts the hymn tune on top in long notes while the other voices spin out their own music from parts of the tune. Sometimes the whole more or less blends together into a fugue-like texture (BWV 1112, 1116); other times, there’s a rush of moving notes under the tune (BWV 1100, 1115); and at still others, it makes sense to bring out a solo voice against a backdrop in the left hand (BWV 1114). Even within this basic template, there’s a great deal of variety to be had.
Finally, another pair of chorale preludes with wildly different approaches to the same tune. (Used in cantata BWV 95 for Trinity 16.) The first is a somewhat old-fashioned, stately chorale fantasia (which I’m playing with a somewhat old-fashioned registration), in which each phrase of the hymn is introduced in turn on the manuals, before being played in the pedals. But like “Kommst du nun,” the pedals have a melody in the middle of the texture, rather than underpinning the whole. Meanwhile, the second chorale prelude gives us a contrapuntal torrent of triplets for the hands, grounded by the hymn tune in the feet at half speed. The main surviving manuscript source ends with a plain verse of the hymn, written using figured bass: a stately conclusion to a grand piece.
What are “The Complete Organ Works of J.S. Bach”?
Have you ever wondered how the BWV numbers for Bach’s works are organized?
No?
You already know?
OK, good, let me tell you anyway. Everything is ordered by genre, roughly tied to the first published complete edition of Bach’s works. So BWV 1–224 are the works now known as cantatas (first sacred then secular), followed by other choral works (225–49); hymn settings (250–438); the perpetually neglected songs (439–524); organ music (525–771); other keyboard music (772–994); other instrumental music (995–1071); and finally other contrapuntal works like the Art of Fugue (1072–1080). So there’s the answer: play those 250-odd pieces from BWV 525 to BWV 771 and you’ve got the complete organ works of Bach.
What’s that? BWV 1100? On this program? OK, maybe things aren’t quite so simple. Pieces discovered after the catalogue was first completed had to go somewhere, and rather than confusing everybody by shifting all the later numbers around, the more recent editors of the BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis) opted to just tack them onto the end. (This is why more recent numbering systems like Anthony Hoboken’s Haydn catalogue often break the numbers out into sections by genre, to contain the mess.)
How have new pieces come to light? The most famous of these collections is the Neumeister Collection, which was rediscovered in 1984 at Yale’s Beinecke Library by Christoph Wolff, Hans-Joachim Schulze, and Harold Samuel. The discovery more or less made Wolff’s reputation as a scholar, and why not? Turning up over 30 new organ pieces by J.S. Bach is a big deal, and he didn’t even have to do any guesswork or attribution on stylistic grounds: Bach’s name is clearly written above each piece.
But how is it possible that this manuscript, full of music labeled “Johann Sebastian Bach” could go unnoticed in Yale’s archives for a century? Why did this music require rediscovery?
There are several reasons. For starters, the Neumeister Collection is from the 1790s, decades after Bach’s death—not the most secure source. And the music itself can be clunky, violating all sorts of rules of counterpoint, with awkward melodies and strange transitions aplenty. There are also beautiful, interesting, and exciting moments, but on the whole it doesn’t quite sound like Bach.
Multiple people who were around Yale when the Neumeister chorales were discovered and premiered have told me (always in hushed voices and with a certain knowing tone) that of course people knew about the manuscript before it was publicized. The implication, I think, is that nobody cared about the music enough to bring these works to light.
I can’t speak to how true this story is, and it’s always struck me as something of an attempt to knock Wolff down a peg (although his subsequent work should be more than ample evidence of his chops as a Bach scholar). And I’m not repeating it here because I necessarily think it’s true: rather, it’s interesting that this story exists at all. The story says something about what “the complete [organ] works of Bach” has meant, and how that’s changed.
Generally, composers (and artists, writers, etc.) tend to produce works only up until the date that they die. But there are famous exceptions, artists whose list of works only seemed to grow in the decades after their death. (Josquin Desprez is a classic example for music, and Rembrandt among painters.) Of course, what that really means is that a great many people wanted more music to be by these composers: to sell more copies, to attach a little more prestige to a piece they wrote themselves, or even as a kind of sign of quality. “This anonymous piece is so good, it surely MUST be by Josquin.”
When music (and art) criticism developed as a field of study in the eighteenth century, one of the main tasks of connoisseurs and scholars was to winnow away the fakes—to securely establish a canon of Masterworks by the great artist, with the remaining lesser works relegated to early periods or perhaps the artist’s workshop. The œuvre shrinks to elevate the status of the artist.2 A number of pieces within the BWV 525–771 range have been confirmed to be by other composers, and I will not be playing them.
But further academic developments create new incentives. The darker insinuation behind the “everybody knew about the Neumeister chorales” story might be that Samuel, Schulze, and Wolff were the first who were willing to debase Bach’s reputation by insisting that this music is by him—to inflict it, for instance, upon audiences who want to hear “the complete [organ] works of Bach.” And of course their reason for doing so could only be personal and professional gain. Publishing “new Bach” is a great coup for the scholar, no matter the cost to Bach himself.
Hopefully it’s clear that I don’t subscribe to this interpretation. (If, again, the story is even true to begin with.) First of all, the same “early works!” maneuver was available to and exploited by Wolff et al.: the Neumeister chorales are not presented as “mature masterworks” or even “representative accomplishments,” but rather as a record of Bach’s early development. They are [merely] “interesting,”3 perhaps providing a thrill of recognition to listeners and organists who know the music of Bach’s teachers and influences. (If you like Georg Böhm or Dieterich Buxtehude, BWV 1115 may bring a smile to your face.) Above all, they are a reminder that composers do not spring up fully formed. Bach had to cultivate his craft too.
Even this is probably underselling this music. I’ve enjoyed getting to know it better, especially the quirky passages that an older Bach would never have written. There’s something refreshing about these pieces, and they form a nice change of pace from the Bach who had a more fixed idea of what he liked and how to write it.
I’ve noticed this kind of reevaluation extending to other works too. One of the other canonical answers to this section’s title question would be “Whatever Bärenreiter publishes in their complete organ works box set.”4 For a long time, that would have excluded delightful pieces like the Fantasy and Fugue in A minor BWV 561, which was only added in the relatively recent supplemental Volume 11. And even still, the Eight Short Preludes and Fugues (BWV 553–60) are nowhere to be found; I’m playing them from an older edition. Despite the insistence of older generations of scholars that these pieces are not up to Bach’s standards, there are scholars (including Stauffer) who would champion them. And why not? They’re delightful little things, and there’s a reason they’re almost de rigueur as early teaching pieces.
Conversely, I’ve heard scholars like Stauffer and Wolff cast doubts on other works that are included in Bärenreiter’s original eight volumes. These include the F-minor Prelude and Fugue BWV 534 and, perhaps notoriously, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor BWV 565. I like both of these pieces. I’m playing them. The same goes for this week’s Pedal-exercitium, which I’ve seen attributed to C.P.E. Bach. (Really? I’m aware that he wrote down the only surviving copy, but it hardly sounds like anything in his organ music or elsewhere.)5
I hope that doesn’t sound nihilistic or anti-intellectual. In general, if there’s no convincing evidence that a piece isn’t by Bach, and if I like it enough, it’s on the list. That includes everything securely attributed, and indeed almost all of the organ works with BWV numbers that haven’t been definitively handed over to another composer. (Volumes 1–9 and some of 11 of Bärenreiter, for those keeping score at home.) The sketchier “doubtful” works—anything “BWV Anh.” for instance—don’t excite me, and I won’t be playing them.
On the other hand, organ arrangements of Bach’s other works very much do excite me, and where they exist in plausibly Bach-related 18th-century copies, I’m playing them. After all, even the Schübler Chorales (such as “Kommst du nun”) are often speculated to have been arranged by the publisher, or Wilhelm Friedemann, or some other non-J.S. Bach person who had a cruelly literal sense of humor when it comes to turning bass parts into pedal parts. So that’s why I’ve added in a seventh Trio Sonata, an organ arrangement of the G-major Gamba Sonata BWV 1027/G-major Trio Sonata BWV 1039 that’s been pieced together from sources reasonably close to Bach. (Never mind that the second slow movement requires a modern arrangement to complete the piece.) And I’m playing the recently-rediscovered B-flat Major version of the Prelude and Fugue BWV 545, since this version includes a movement from the G-minor Gamba Sonata BWV 1029. I just love stealing repertoire from viol players.
There’s another bonus to playing the B-flat Major version of this Prelude and Fugue: it’s in B-flat major, unlike any of the other big Bach Preludes and Fugues. Variety is good, and it’s not just me saying that. It’s pretty widely agreed that Bach transposed the Prelude in E Major BWV 566 from an original Toccata in C Major; and the “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major BWV 552 that bookends the Clavier-Übung III probably started life in D or C (keys that sounded much more in tune on Bach’s organs, and in Bond Chapel). Within the harpsichord works, Bach transposed the French Overture BWV 831 from C minor to B minor in order to contrast better with the Italian Concerto BWV 971.6 I don’t think it’s an accident that the later versions of these pieces are in different keys: C gets boring after a while!
These are also the latest known versions of these pieces, another principle I’m following with very few exceptions. In some cases, like the “B-flat-Major Prelude and Fugue,” that risks including some music (the interludes) that isn’t actually by Bach; in fact, the version of the “Valet” fantasy, BWV 735 that I’m playing this week has an ending that very well might not be Bach. But on the whole, I’d rather take the version with more and different music.
But what about the most obvious source of “more organ music”? Why not just play the other keyboard works on organ? After all, in Bach’s day, these lines were much blurrier, with much music being equally suitable for organ, harpsichord, or clavichord. (And the “lute” music that’s probably for a keyboard instrument; and the likelihood that he played the solo violin music on the clavichord; and all those arrangements of pieces for various instruments; and…) This is to some extent the approach taken by Benjamin Alard in his in-progress series of recordings covering all of Bach’s keyboard music for Harmonia Mundi.7 Given the opportunity of lumping this repertoire together, with a dash of slightly contrarian instincts,8 Alard has a great deal of room to experiment. So “harpsichord” or “clavichord” pieces like the Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother BWV 992 get to become organ pieces, while Bach’s Vivaldi concerto arrangements with pedals (e.g. BWV 593) are played on pedal harpsichord or clavichord.
These choices can completely transform how you hear the music, and I recommend his recordings wholeheartedly. (His interpretations are often quite original beyond instrument choice, and the playing is stellar aside from any novelty value.) But in this case I guess I’m just more conservative than Alard. As delighted as I have been by listening to these new “organ pieces,” I’m not sure there’s been any piece that I’ve preferred to a more “standard” harpsichord or clavichord rendition. (Often quite the opposite.) This is surely as much to do with how I’m used to hearing these pieces as it is to do with “the music itself”—but at least it helps me set some (arbitrary) bounds on what is already a huge project. Maybe I’ll change my mind if I’m convinced to give a do-over in a couple decades.
What I’m listening to
Amid somewhat disappointing releases from IVE (so consistently good that they almost converted me from a lifelong Diet Coke habit) and Doja Cat (the singles are OK), this week’s highlights weren’t necessarily where I was expecting them:
yeule - softscars
Wow. I liked Glitch Princess, but its soundworld of mostly blissed-out glitchy electronics did nothing to prepare me for this album. Compare “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty,” the only guitar-forward track I remember from that album, to softscars opener “x w x.”
The Discord message that alerted me to this album’s release was “it’s good…but idk the genre.” yeule has somehow spliced hyperpop on top of shoegaze, delivering a really great rock album covered in a gloriously disorienting blanket of noise and vocal effects. It’s a sound that’s both much harsher than their previous releases and also more generous: there are more Tunes, even alternate-universe Hits on this album than I think anybody could reasonably have expected. The lyrics are searing and direct and maybe not everybody’s taste, but they fit the sonic universe to a tee. (And are also easily tuned out due to yeule’s signature manipulation of the vocal track.) I’ll be listening to this album for a while. (And seeing yeule in Chicago on 10/10!)
Joshua Redman and Gabrielle Cavassa – where are we
I like Joshua Redman. I think a lot of people do—his playing is always stylish, superbly controlled, and judicious. Which is to say I don’t think he’s many people’s favorite: his music isn’t usually all that exciting. This album mostly follows the same script, with clever and sensitive reworkings of a wide range of songs representing the geography of America a whole. But the highlights for me are a version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” jolted into motion by guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel), and a version of Coltrane’s “Alabama” that appropriately builds to a climax with the intensity of a cold stare. More of this please!
I think this is my first time hearing Redman with a vocalist (Cavassa is wonderful throughout), and maybe the change of pace is just what he needed for inspiration.
Musiciens de Fatick; Simon Sene; et al. – SENEGAL: Musique Seereer
Refreshingly, a presentation of Serer music that doesn’t so much as mention njuup, but instead tries to give a more panoramic perspective, encompassing a variety of occasions for music-making. You shouldn’t listen to my opinions about music like this, but I like the vibrancy of the singing and playing, as well as how well Ocora’s sound engineers (as usual) captured the distinctive sounds of the instruments. More info here.
ITZY – RINGO
Not sure why ITZY’s Japanese singles have so consistently outclassed their Korean ones recently, but this one has to take the, uh, cake. For my money it’s their best song since “WANNABE,” lacking the devastating catchiness of that song’s chorus but compensating with fantastic instrument choices and a great rhythmic shift in the prechorus.
Jos Van Immerseel – Le clavecin à Paris au XVIIIe siècle
A generous helping of French harpsichord music, some familiar, some much less so. I normally prefer playing with a little more sweep and flair, but the three instruments are absolutely gorgeous, and shown off marvelously by Immerseel’s playing and the recording engineers.
Ohzora Kimishima 君島大空 – no public sounds
In a strangely similar vein to softscars, Ohzora Kimishima blends noisy electronica with noisy indie rock with sometimes bizarrely catchy tunes and rhythms. The big difference is that these blends are more often consecutive in this album: almost every track has a total left turn in the middle, an experience that I found both very cool and very disorienting. Even more confusing is the fact that practically all of the drastic vibe shifts worked for me. Like softscars, make sure to stick around until the very end.
Kep1er – “Galileo”
I’m not sure I would call this song a highlight of the week per se, although it’s a pretty good pop song that might have “Up” beat for my favorite Kep1er song so far.
No, the real reason I listened to this song so many times is of course the title! Finally, an Early Modern astronomy song for the group named after Johannes Kepler. At least, that’s what you’d think they’re named after. But how could you be so naïve? According to the company that formed them, “Kep” is a reference to “catching dreams” and the “1” signifies the unity of the 9 members coming together to form the best group.9 Or perhaps they’re named after the exoplanets orbiting one of the many stars named after the Kepler telescope.10 Or, gasp, maybe this fan-submitted name for the group that came out of Girls Planet 999 really is just a plain astronomy reference after all. (Note that Boys Planet fans really missed an opportunity by picking the name ZEROBASEONE over “Brah3” or “Copern1cus”.)11
Anyway, despite these promising origins, Kep1er has constantly disappointed me by refusing to deliver a “Kepler” song.12 So when this track dropped, I simply had to pore over it for every trace of astronomical metaphor. Only “traces” though, since of course they would never be so gauche as to explicitly sing about telescopes, moons of Jupiter, or inertial reference frames. Instead, the lyrics give us something more subtle: a conceit about “discovery” via distant observation, with references to looking up at the sky, calls to “watch me shine” (like a [pop] star or a [Girls] Planet, one assumes), and the, um, mathematical metaphor of “One plus one equals I miss you two (What?) Can’t you see my feelings? It’s my proof.” At least Mashiro is as confused as I am. (What?)
Oh, you thought I’d quit without talking about the music video? How could I let you go without diving into this wonderfully confused bit of film, which takes us from a mysterious photobooth that drops from the sky—
—which, naturally, has the following options—
—to a gallery including (?) “AI-generated painting of Frida Kahlo” (?)—
—to an intersection too hellish for even real-life traffic engineers to dream up—
—to (finally!) some gosh-darned real astronomy:
But wait! What’s this?
Planetary rings? The kind first observed by…some Italian astronomer whose name I forget? (Never mind the extreme orbital inclination of one of the rings; I’m not sure anybody’s ever modeled rings around a heart-shaped planet before in any case.) In any case, this image may also get us back to the meaning of the group’s name:
I guess it’ll always take a Galileo to understand what’s going on around a Girls Planet.
Concert Films
I saw IU’s concert film yesterday, and I’ll see it again Saturday. You should too! It’s fantastic!
In between (tonight), I’m looking forward to the in-theaters rerelease of the Talking Heads/Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense. Believe it or not, I’ve never managed to see the movie, so I’m glad I’ll get the chance to do so with big-screen sound.
Also recommend but have nothing to say:
Eeri – Inventory (review)
Idrissa Soumaoro - Diré (review)
No-No Boy - Empire Electric (artist website)
What I’m Reading
I finally got around to Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, published last year. There’s a lot to like about this book, which is compellingly written and well-grounded in prior writing on fangirling and fandom. It might contain the most evocative writing I’ve ever seen on the experience of being a fan (of a pop artist), and its descriptions of what it’s like to exist on Tumblr and Twitter are both vivid and (I think?) reasonably accessible to people who aren’t familiar with those platforms. To the extent that you think of Twitter when you think of “The Internet as We Know It,” the book lives up to its subtitle.
Some of us might find that a bit narrow. (I’m not going to fault Tiffany for the subtitle; for all I know, an editor insisted on it.) And that’s probably the inevitable critique about a book like this. For all her protestations early on that it’s not a book about One Direction fandom, 1D is not only the book’s lodestar, but also the sole topic of over half its chapters. To be clear, I think it’s good that Tiffany can write from the perspective of a hardcore fan, since that’s what enables her to give so much texture and meat to her writing. (Although, especially in the later chapters on Larries, I found myself wishing for just a little bit less meat—I don’t think some of the blow-by-blow accounting really helps advance the argument or the story.)
But when the focus remains so narrow, it’s a little hard to keep track of what’s unique to Directioners and what’s true of online fandoms as a whole. The references to Beliebers help, but literally anything drawing a contrast or comparison with Swifties could really have helped make the ideas pop more. (And also would have saved her some hassle in working to expand the notion of “fangirling” past heterosexual fandom for young men.) The same thing goes for her chronological bounds, where precedents like Beatlemaniacs, Deadheads, and Bruce Tramps fans are invoked, followed by a jump cut to Beliebers on MySpace. Where are 1D’s more recent ancestors in the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC? (If she doesn’t think their online fandoms were significant, why was that the case?) And where are the fandoms on all the other corners of the internet? (It’s a little jarring and more than little funny to see talk of a “Reddit forum.”) I can’t expect Tiffany to go back through old Naver forums for arguments between Club H.O.T. and fan g.o.d., but I was left wanting a bit more.
Of course I was. This is a huge topic, too huge for one book, and it’s to Tiffany’s credit that I want to hear what she has to say about any of this.
Beyond other online fandoms and spaces, I wish Tiffany had been willing to talk more about the rest of The Internet as We Know It. The material on Larries, for instance, had me constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop: for her to really dig into the broader implications for how conspiracy theories originate and proliferate online. I think QAnon is mentioned only once, in passing; not to explore these links feels like a missed opportunity. It’s to Tiffany’s credit (and her editors’) that she mostly sticks to her area of expertise, narrowly construed, but even a bit more work to situate online fandoms in a broader context would really have added some punch to the argument—at least for me.
A few others:
Tom Scocca – Third Base, Heading for Home (found on Defector)
Dallas Morning News – SMU, UNT working on major organ projects
Texas Monthly – Is Texas’s Barbecue Bubble Ready to Burst?
The Atlantic – The Parents Trying to Pass Down a Language They Hardly Speak
Thanks for reading and see you Monday if you can make it!
I’m aware that the title for this organ version is an Advent hymn. Sue me—Advent is already too crowded in this series, and, as I’ll touch on below, nobody’s even sure if Bach was all that involved in the publication anyway.
I will be delighted to hear from everybody how drastically oversimplified this account is.
Sorry to Wayne Leupold and George Stauffer; I’m just trying to represent the current state of affairs, not how I think things should be.
The Pedal-exercitium is also not quite complete, but giving it an ending only requires adding a measure or two to what’s written. In general, I will only be playing the “complete” organ works of J.S. Bach, skipping anything that requires extensive reconstruction to finish.
And yes, also possibly to have a different key from any of the six Partitas in his previous publication.
Robert Levin also does something similar in his Well-Tempered Clavier recording for Hänssler.
Alard—in a masterclass that taught me a great deal—is one of the very few musicians to ever tell me to play something faster.
https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2021/10/22/girls-planet-999-winners-top-9-kep1er-out-how-to-pronounce-act-name/ Yes, the tweet that this article cites says “astrology.”
Thanks to an anonymous Kep1ian for fact-checking this.
To be fair, their debut EP is called FIRST IMPACT. Thankfully, the track “MVSK” turns out to be a play on “MASK” with an upside-down A, not SpaceX’s “MUSK.”
I think Maxwell's silver hammer is closer than Galileo's golden pen...both as to the rings, their inclinations and the planet they wrap around...some very bad JCM poetry would likely emerge ...