Word: bache
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What attracts the young to Bach is what attracts them to almost any other music: the beat. Artists of the past sometimes judged Bach to be nothing more than jigging monotony-"a sublime sewing machine," Colette called him-but the young know better. "There is a bridge between Bach's ideas of rhythm and those of the mid-20th century," says Pianist Glenn Gould, "and it has been created by popular music and jazz." The Swingle Singers, an eight-member Paris-based group led by American Ward Swingle, popularized Bach scores by performing them to the accompaniment...
Perhaps more significant than such major concerts by well-known artists are the thousands of more modest Bach performances, ranging down to the smallest towns and the merest amateur level. Here Bach is pervasive. Following the pattern set by the present-day chorus at Bach's own St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, church and community choirs throughout the Western world are marking Christmas by singing something of Bach's, even if only a two-minute chorale. And what church organist will let Christmas-or any other week-go by without playing at least one Bach prelude or perhaps...
Church or concert, Christmas or midsummer, there is one striking thing about the new audience for Bach. It is young. At the weekly Bach cantata performances at Manhattan's Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, the congregation sports more beards than button-downs, appears to be almost entirely under 35. "Students will brave rainstorms to wait in line for standing room at a Bach recital," marvels German Organist Helmut Walcha. Record stores report a marked increase in the number of teen-agers thronging around the classical counters, buying up Bach without so much as a glance at the new Beatles album...
...prevalence of youthful Bachniks, says Music Critic Bernard Jacobson of the Chicago Daily News, explains why "the rise in Bach's popularity has not brought about an increase in the amount of Bach at symphony concerts, where all the subscribers are 90 years old. Bach is a revolutionary figure, allied with the liberals, while Beethoven, the archrevolutionary, has become the bulwark of the conservative establishment...
Even rock musicians have struck a bond with Bach-and why not? The very improbability of it appeals to their fanciful eclecticism; besides, they like the way his music is melodic but not meandering, emotional but not sentimental. Blues-Rock Singer Paul Butterfield, 27, names Bach his favorite music along with the blues and Ravi Shankar. "I don't always know what Bach is doing," says Butterfield, "but we seem to be friends." One of last year's hit records, A Whiter Shade of Pale, by England's Procol Harum, was arranged around an organ theme inspired...