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| The Grandma arrives to L'Auditori, Barcelona |
Today, The Grandma has gone to L' Auditori to listen to a concert in tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach. She hasn't gone alone because Tina Picotes, a great fan of classic music and Joseph de Ca'th Lon a great follower of Bach have gone with her.
Tina Picotes loves Bach, especially The Goldberg Variations while Joseph de Ca'th Lon is very interested in the Brandenburg Concertos since he discovered that one of these concertos was recorded in the Voyager 1.
Before going to the Auditorium, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Grammar 39).
More information: Phrasal Verbs 1
Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685-28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Art of Fugue, the Brandenburg Concertos, and the Goldberg Variations as well as for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.
The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. After becoming an orphan at age 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph Bach, after which he continued his musical development in Lüneburg.
More information: Biography
From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar—where he expanded his repertoire for the organ—and Köthen—where he was mostly engaged with chamber music.
From 1723 he was employed as Thomaskantor, cantor at St. Thomas, in Leipzig. He composed music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university's student ensemble Collegium Musicum.
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| Johann Sebastian Bach |
From 1726 he published some of his keyboard and organ music. In Leipzig, as had happened in some of his earlier positions, he had a difficult relation with his employer, a situation that was little remedied when he was granted the title of court composer by King Augustus III of Poland in 1736.
In the last decades of his life he reworked and extended many of his earlier compositions. He died of complications after eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.
Bach enriched established German styles through his mastery of counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation, and his adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. Bach's compositions include hundreds of cantatas, both sacred and secular.
He composed Latin church music, Passions, oratorios, and motets. He often adopted Lutheran hymns, not only in his larger vocal works, but for instance also in his four-part chorales and his sacred songs. He wrote extensively for organ and for other keyboard instruments. He composed concertos, for instance for violin and for harpsichord, and suites, as chamber music as well as for orchestra. Many of his works employ the genres of canon and fugue.
More information: BBC
Throughout the 18th century Bach was mostly renowned as an organist, while his keyboard music, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, was appreciated for its didactic qualities. The 19th century saw the publication of some major Bach biographies, and by the end of that century all of his known music had been printed. Dissemination of scholarship on the composer continued through periodicals and websites exclusively devoted to him, and other publications such as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis and new critical editions of his compositions.
His music was further popularised through a multitude of arrangements, including for instance the Air on the G String, and of recordings, for instance three different box sets with complete performances of the composer's works marking the 250th anniversary of his death.
Bach's musical style fits in the conventions of his day, which is the final stage of the baroque style. The specifics of his style lie with characteristics such as his skill in contrapuntal invention and motivic control and his talent for writing tightly woven music of powerful sonority. From an early age, he imbued himself with the compositions of his contemporaries and of prior generations, all of what was available from European composers, such as the French, the Italian, and those from all parts of Germany, and there is little of it that didn't appear in his own music.
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| Johann Sebastian Bach |
Religious music was at the centre of Bach's output for much of his life. The hundreds of sacred works he created are usually seen as manifesting not just his craft but a truly devout relationship with God. He had taught Luther's Small Catechism as the Thomaskantor in Leipzig, and some of his pieces represent it. The Lutheran chorale was the basis of much of his work. In elaborating these hymns into his chorale preludes, he wrote more cogent and tightly integrated works than most, even when they were massive and lengthy.
The large-scale structure of every major Bach sacred vocal work is evidence of subtle, elaborate planning to create a religiously and musically powerful expression. For example, the St Matthew Passion, like other works of its kind, illustrated the Passion with Bible text reflected in recitatives, arias, choruses, and chorales, but in crafting this work, Bach created an overall experience that has been found over the centuries since to be both musically thrilling and spiritually profound.
Bach published or carefully compiled in manuscript many collections of pieces that explored the range of artistic and technical possibilities inherent in almost every genre of his time except opera. For example, The Well-Tempered Clavier comprises two books, each of which presents a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key, displaying a dizzying variety of structural, contrapuntal and fugal techniques.
More information: NPR
Throughout the 18th century, the appreciation of Bach's music was mostly limited to distinguished connoisseurs. The 19th century started with the first biography of the composer being published and ended with the completion of the publication of all of Bach's known works by the Bach Gesellschaft. A Bach Revival had started from Mendelssohn's performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829. Soon after that performance, Bach started to become regarded as one of the greatest composers of all times, if not the greatest, a reputation he has retained ever since. A new extensive Bach biography was published in the second half of the 19th century.
In the 20th century, Bach's music was widely performed and recorded, while the Neue Bachgesellschaft, among others, published research on the composer. Modern adaptations of Bach's music contributed greatly to his popularisation in the second half of the 20th century. Among these were the Swingle Singers' versions of Bach pieces and Wendy Carlos' 1968 Switched-On Bach, which used the Moog electronic synthesiser.
By the end of the 20th century, more classical performers were gradually moving away from the performance style and instrumentation that were established in the romantic era: they started to perform Bach's music on period instruments of the baroque era, studied and practised playing techniques and tempi as established in his time, and reduced the size of instrumental ensembles and choirs to what he would have employed.
The BACH motif, used by the composer in his own compositions, was used in dozens of tributes to the composer from the 19th century to the 21st.
More information: Interlude
It's easy to play any musical instrument:
all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time
and the instrument will play itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach
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