Listening to Bach The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio [Hardcover]

Of all the things we can know about J. S. Bach'sMass in B MinorandChristmas Oratorio, the most profound come from things we can hear.Listening to Bachexplores 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 theMass in B Minoras 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 theMass in B Minorand theChristmas 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 theMass in B MinorandChristmas 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 theMassandOratorio, 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.

List of Tables
List of Audio Examples

Preface: Listening to Bach

Part I: The Mass in B Minor BWV 232