Word: musication
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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...
...according to the definitive Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) catalogue. Nearly three-quarters of these were intended to be performed at Christian worship-including a Magnificat and 41 Christmas cantatas (plus six more that make up the famed Christmas oratorio). Even in the secularist atmosphere of the 20th century, his music rings with what Toronto Choral Conductor Elmer Iseler calls a positive, "D-major feeling about life." From the evidence of the 1968 holiday season, more and more listeners are trying to get into the same...
...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...
...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...