Word: bache
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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...
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...
...crystalline logic underlies all of Bach's work-which is one reason why he is so often the favorite composer of mathematicians and scientists. But his music also throbs with a living pulse; his rhythms and harmonic modulations, however controlled, evolve with a seeming spontaneity. His endlessly inventive melodies, however neatly they fit into a scheme, rise and fall and intertwine with a lyrical life of their own. The most solid of his constructions are nevertheless charged with energy and intensity. And as Robert Shaw points out, his lines serve not only to fill in the structure but also...
...spiritual side of Bach has probably prompted as much exaggeration as the notion that he is a dry, abstract musician's musician. Because so much of his work was intended for use in worship, he has traditionally been known as "the fifth evangelist," pealing out a musical gospel from some celestial organ loft. "For me," wrote French organist Charles Marie Widor in 1907, "Bach is the greatest of preachers." Two years ago, three Venetian music lovers wrote to the Vatican weekly Osservatore della Domenica, suggesting that Bach, even though he was a Lutheran, ought to be canonized...
...true that Bach's chorales are still widely used at Protestant services-and in the ecumenical climate of modern Roman Catholicism, no organist would hesitate to use his setting of Luther's A Mighty Fortress as a prelude to Sunday Mass. Still, the mode of Christian worship is not that of Bach's time, and the impact of his compositions, whether secular or sacred, stems largely from a general feeling of transcendence in the music. "He will give Christianity to Christians, Judaism to Jews, even Communism to Communists," says Karl Richter, conductor of the Munich Bach Choir...