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Listening to Bach

The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio

By (author) Daniel R. Melamed
Format: Paperback / softback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, New York, United States
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Published: 26th Dec 2019
Dimensions: w 127mm h 205mm d 12mm
Weight: 205g
ISBN-10: 0190097256
ISBN-13: 9780190097257
Barcode No: 9780190097257
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Synopsis
Of all the things we can know about J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor and Christmas Oratorio, the most profound come from things we can hear. Listening to Bach explores musical style as it was understood in the early eighteenth century. It encourages ways of listening that take eighteenth-century musical sensibilities into account and that recognize our place as inheritors of a long tradition of performance and interpretation. Daniel R. Melamed shows how to recognize old and new styles in sacred music of Bach's time, and how movements in these styles are constructed. This opens the possibility of listening to the Mass in B Minor as Bach's demonstration of the possibilities of contrasting, combining, and reconciling old and new styles. It also shows how to listen for elements that would have been heard as most significant in the early eighteenth century, including markers of sleep arias, love duets, secular choral arias, and other movement types. This offers a musical starting point for listening for the ways Bach put these types to use in the Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio. The book also offers ways to listen to and think about works created by parody, the re-use of music for new words and a new purpose, like almost all of the Mass in B Minor and Christmas Oratorio. And it shows that modern performances of these works are stamped with audible consequences of our place in the twenty-first century. The ideological choices we make in performing the Mass and Oratorio, part of the legacy of their performance and interpretation, affect the way the work is understood and heard today. All these topics are illustrated with copious audio examples on a companion Web site, offering new ways of listening to some of Bach's greatest music.

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Melamed invites us into new ways of listening to and thinking about the Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio and also engages significant debates in relation to these works. [Listening to Bach] also serves as an excellent introduction for students not only to these two important works, but also to Bach scholarship and performance practice. * Bach: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institutep * [T]his makes for a highly unified and informative book, one enhanced by sixty-five recorded examples (presented on the Oxford University Press website and performed mostly by John Butt and the Dunedin Consort) and an appendix of nine helpful tables... In the end, Melamed's book is about Bach the craftsman, the astonishingly inventive but pragmatic composer who compiled monumental choral works by blending styles-old and new, secular and sacred-and by appropriating, revising, and even abridging preexisting pieces. His approach reflects the tendency of today's scholars to present Bach as an enlightened, humanistic figure by stressing his musical and intellectual accomplishments and playing down his religiosity and observant Lutheran worldview. * New York Review of Books * A highly unified and informative book, one enhanced by sixty-five recorded examples... A rich examination of parody and its consequences in the Christmas Oratorio. * New York Review of Books * Melamed is sensible and tolerant in detailing the wide diversity of present-day Bach performance practice. The message is that there is no one way of listening to Bach, but awareness of musical style can help one learn both new and old ways of listening. This important book is must reading. * D.Arnold, CHOICE *