Não traduzo porque não sou especialista, mas podem usar o tradutor disponível aqui no blog.
"The amazing thing about Johann Sebastian Bach more than any other
composer I can think of is that he tolerates such a diversity of
different interpretations. You can play him on an organ. You can play
him on a Moog synthesizer. You can play him sung by a mass choir, a
huge symphony orchestra or a minimalist ensemble of just one voice or
one instrument per part. And he still comes through. You can
transcribe his cello music for mandolin, for any single instrument and
it still packs its punch and comes over with extraordinary pathos and
attractiveness, too.
Because contrary to the popular image I think that many
people have of Bach as being a bit kind of mathematical and remote and
severe, the music itself tells you something quite different. The music
is complex. The music is mathematical. But it has amazing dance
impregnated rhythm and secularity. Even when he’s writing to the glory
of God there is a sense of kind of secular joy, secular ebullience and
effusion in his writing which makes it so attractive. And it leaps over
all the boundaries of nationality, of date, of period. And really it
reinforces the idea that this is music that is for our time.
I feel this particularly strongly as regards the church
cantatas that he wrote and we’ve got about 200 of them. There may have
been many more but have got lost in the sands of time that either were
burned or used to light fires or just perished. They’re extraordinary
pieces because in a way you could think nothing more irrelevant to our
times because they were written for a very specific moment in a church
service within the liturgy of a parochial liturgy in a provincial town
in Germany. And yet there is something about the way that Bach
formulates his music that leaps over all those obstacles and those
division and speaks to us very directly now.
And I think it’s representative of his urgent need to
communicate and to impart his own feelings. Not just to be a compliant
servant of the clergy of the church but to have his own views as to how
the Christian doctrine appeals to him and also how he thinks it applies
to his fellow man. Because there’s no doubt about it, he puts his own
spin on the texts. And that, I suppose, begs the whole question of the
relationship between music and text.
Music is not always the compliant hand servant, the
maid servant of text. It can operate according to its own rules and it
can function quite differently. And in counterpoint to the text it’s
supposed to be elucidating. And never is this more true in the case of
Bach where the sermon would be delivered by the preacher and it would be
laying down the law of the particular theme of the week which is based
on the gospels or the epistle. But the moment that Bach gets his hands
on it he can then alter the speed of delivery. He can alter the
repetitions, the emphases, the way it comes over rather like a
reiteration, like somebody who is giving a speech.
But a speech encoded, encrusted with the extra richness
that music brings as a result of the interplay of all the factors of
music – the harmony, the counterpoint, the polyphony, the orchestration,
the individual timbre of instruments, the tessitura. All these things
which make it incredibly rich and a highly developed form of human
utterance. "
In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
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