As with the two previous iterations of the biennial Bach Festival and Symposium, the weekend of 12–14 April 2019 was full of not only academic papers at the university, but also performances of Bach's music all over Amherst. The main aim of the event was to elucidate the multiple ways in which Bach has been re-imagined since the Mendelssohn ‘revival’.

Gilles Vonsattel (University of Massachusetts Amherst) opened proceedings with a recital on the piano of keyboard works by Bach and works inspired by Bach. His virtuosic performance was met with deserved cheers and a standing ovation, establishing the encouraging atmosphere that continued for the rest of the symposium. It was followed by the panel ‘Intercultural and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Bach's Matthew Passion’. Ernest May (University of Massachusetts Amherst) served as the moderator, asking the panel how we can approach the contemporary global phenomenon that is the St Matthew Passion.

Yo Tomita (The Queen's University of Belfast) was first, arguing that analysis of Bach's musical language remains neglected in scholarship. Motives, cruciform melodic lines in the Passions, use of key, musical form, counterpoint, harmony, rhythms and textures were Tomita's main concerns, and he aimed to relate them to the wider musical language in Bach's oeuvre, helping us move beyond what he described as unfounded and emotionally driven academic interpretation. Tomita explored the musical relationships between various passages found in the Well-Tempered Clavier and similar ones found in the Passions, and the meanings they could suggest there based on the text at such moments. He argued that the analytical exploration of Bach's musical language can point more objectively towards Bach's intentions than the emotive responses to which he had earlier referred. This theme of the tension between objective and subjective perspectives allowed a smooth transition to my own contribution (Thomas Cressy, Cornell University) – a historical and anthropological approach to the Matthew Passion in Japan. I presented a chronological overview: Kumi Kunitake's 1872 reaction to a chorale from the Matthew Passion; adaptations of Bach's chorales as national Japanese music; and the Matthew Passion’s premiere and role in Japanese music-making from the Second World War to the present. I then discussed how local Japanese assemblages of ideas, performers, scholarship, material culture and sociocultural conditions have allowed a performative complex (a multitude of social practices and aesthetic ideas afforded by the same cultural form) of Bach's music that negotiates with globally circulating cultural forms, beyond its being viewed as intrinsically ‘Western’ or ‘German’ music. I used recent approaches from material anthropology to argue that viewing different points in history in various social milieus allows such a multiplicity of interpretations of Bach to come to the fore, which depend on local cultural perceptions and theories of knowledge. These theories of knowledge also negotiate with the symbols and human-ritual activity (such as the concert) afforded by the cultural form (the St Matthew Passion).

Andrea Moore (Smith College) brought her expertise in contemporary concert culture to the panel, and Tan Dun's Matthew Passion was a point of focus. Moore argued that in his work Dun presents globalization as a benign process uniting the world under the ‘universal’ music of Bach, concluding that Bach's Passion performances are connected to the wider financial conditions of classical music as a whole, yet stand apart for audiences owing to the work's focus on spiritual collectivism in the context of the contemporary world of individualistic capitalism. Michael Marrissen (Swarthmore College) suggested textual analysis can still offer new approaches to the Passions, especially as interpretations of the music are still based on problematic translations. For instance, within the Lutheran theology, metaphors of bridegrooms marrying the church or communion or a lamb still seem odd, as do metaphors of hearts copiously bleeding and burying Jesus in our hearts, and so on. Thus to gain access to an understanding of such old-German/Lutheran metaphors, a contextual understanding of theological metaphors is still required. Ruth HaCohen (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) suggested focusing on the way time and form unfold in the Passions; the key areas she explored were multiple temporalities in the work (aria time, our time, Christian time) and the musical ‘silences’ that refuse verbalization. She suggested sounds themselves can silence trauma and anxiety in modern society – therefore the creation of a typology of culturally contingent silences and time, in relation to the Passions, may allow insight into how Bach's music can give hope to members of non-Christian societies.

In her reaction to the panel talks, Lydia Goehr (Columbia University) detected an assumption that Bach was solely responsible for the Passion, with such approaches rendering Picander's text secondary to the music. She argued that the atmosphere of the concert as musical event, where the performers are placed on stage, how certain words are given force in the music, and the work's textual/poetic aspects could all give us more objectivity in discussing the Passion, by defining the nature of the work beyond the musical.

The opening paper session, ‘Compositional and Theoretical Approaches’, started with Owen Belcher (University of Massachusetts Amherst), who took the audience through Schoenberg's, Lewin's, Riemann's and Schenker's analytical approaches to Bach. He concluded that theorists still favour Bach's keyboard works and chorales (without analysing the text of such chorales). Emiliano Ricciardi (University of Massachusetts Amherst) was next, arguing that Berio's recomposition of The Art of Fugue displays his three ideals of the ‘open work concept’: lightness, uncertainty and unfinishedness, and postmodern multiplicity, all expressed in soft and sparse gestures across various instruments. Maureen Carr (Pennsylvania State University) then elucidated Bach's influence on Stravinsky by tracing motivic and fugal developments in the composer's preliminary sketches for the Symphony of Psalms.

In the following session, ‘Bach on Piano’, Erinn Knyt (University of Massachusetts Amherst) addressed the lack of scholarly work on Busoni's revision of the Goldberg Variations. Knyt placed Busoni's piano edition and concert performances of the work in the context of making the ‘dreaded variations’ palatable to European audiences. Her analysis emphasized Busoni's preference for contrapuntal complexity and virtuosity in his transcriptions, which have been recorded by a number of pianists recently. Karolina Kolinek-Siechowiz (Uniwersytet Warszawski and University of California Davis) spoke on Marcin Masecki, a recent performer of Bach's music on the Wurlitzer piano. She suggested his recordings have a ‘made-at-home’ aesthetic that, combined with his technical ability, attention to musical structure and the very choice of instrument, frees Bach from professional Polish classical-music practices. Masecki's playful postmodern approach, with improvised cadenzas, raises questions of musical appropriateness, the interpretative agency of the performer, cultural transfer and our own attitudes towards the ‘imaginary museum of musical works’. Ernest May, with reference to Bach 333, YouTube and Spotify, further pursued the matter of an imaginary museum of Bach's works. The Bach 333 box set (a new complete recorded edition released in a collaboration between the Bach-Archiv Leipzig and thirty-two record labels) had ‘curators’ who decided which recordings were definitive representations of Bach. However, seminal recordings (by Gould, for example) are available for online users, allowing the personal curation of a digital museum of performers and favourite recordings of Bach's works.

Lydia Goehr's keynote talk, which began after lunch, summarized and theorized Adorno's article ‘Bach Defended against His Devotees’ (in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983)) and every other mention of the composer in Adorno's oeuvre. She suggested that Bach's ‘devotees’ were/are not doing him justice by trying to recreate the historical conditions of Bach's time; after all, modernity and the German nationalist aesthetics that followed Bach's time had placed history on a path to catastrophe that ended up in Auschwitz. Bach was therefore incorporated into such a history and misunderstood, until Schoenberg explored the formal possibilities implied by Bach's musical structures which had laid latent and ignored in this history. For Adorno, she argues, Bach's music had a dialectical character: the rationalization in structure and logic, in opposition to the anti-rational counterpoint, dissonances, non-resolved harmonies and contradictions that never allowed a falsely harmonized whole. She called for a reimagining of the possibilities of Bach rather than getting Bach ‘right’; for things to be better than they are in a tyrannical present, one needs to be released from authority, and the possibilities and spontaneity of the forms in Bach's music itself still have value for this task in their denial of stasis and embracing of dissonance and change.

The questioning of a ‘false reception history’ of Bach was aptly followed by the third paper session, ‘Bach Reception’. Yo Tomita presented an inspiring statistical analysis of score publications of Bach's music between 1800 and 1949. He revealed trends: the unusual popularity of the Well-Tempered Clavier (including Gounod's arrangements) throughout; a rise in the prominence of vocal and other instrumental works from the 1870s onward; extracts from works preparing consumers for the reception of the whole. Ellen Exner (New England Conservatory) then questioned Friedrich Smend's account of Mendelssohn's ‘miraculous’ Passion revival. She provided a well-received and much-needed historical analysis of precedents in the performance and publication of Bach's vocal music, particularly in Berlin, from 1750. A key factor was the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, which had been performing Passions almost annually for decades and had already experienced singing Bach's music under Carl Friedrich Zelter. Exner showed how changes in German music aesthetics allowed Bach's music to be canonized as the pinnacle of German artistic achievement and supremacy, obscuring the past with a baseless ‘agreed reality’ that has no historical or factual basis. Many Jews, women and other historical agents were silenced by Smend's rhetoric, which still dominates concert and conservatory culture. This session finished with John Lutterman (University of Alaska Anchorage) demonstrating eighteenth-century cello improvisation practices according to various treatises. Practices of ornamenting, arpeggiating, accompanying and improvising whole movements were demonstrated. His overall argument was that while we cannot escape nineteenth-century traditions (public concerts, editions and conservatory training), treatises and scores can still provide ideas on reproducing improvisatory practices.

The closing paper session dealt with ‘Religion, Culture, and Bach’, opening with Ruth HaCohen's paper. For her, the section ‘Dein Jesus is tot’ (Your Jesus is dead) from the aria ‘Zerfliesse mein Herze’, from the St John Passion, bwv245, can be seen as a rare case of an artist looking into the eyes of God's corpse – a dreadful absence expressed by the Nietzschean remark that God remains dead and we have killed him. HaCohen showed analytically how this passage stands out for its silences, dissonant chromatics and repeated iterations of the text, causing the spiritual community to weep. Tekla Babyak (independent scholar, Davis, California) then presented a paper on Liszt's religiously informed transcriptions and arrangements of Bach's music. She provided examples from Liszt's variations where the composer placed Bach's Lutheran melodies in the left hand, and opposed these to motives from the B minor Mass in the right hand, thus blending Catholic and Protestant aspects, but omitting passages containing text at odds with his own Catholic faith. The final paper of the symposium was an analysis by Peter Kupfer (Southern Methodist University) of the use of Bach's music in television commercials over the past ten years. The very rare nineteen cases of Bach's music in advertisements – out of a total of 250 uses of classical music, which is less than one per cent of all music used for such purposes – attempt to associate prestige and elitism with a product or provide reassurance regarding financial services. Musical properties such as repeated arpeggios or the arrival at a final reassuring chord (the Prelude from the G major cello suite and the Prelude in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1) were also argued to contribute to the message of the otherwise arbitrarily chosen music. (The pieces had usually been chosen by chance or on a temporary basis until other music could be found, until they grew on the directors.)

Overall this was an excellent symposium, which included a full performance of the St Matthew Passion by a diverse collection of student and professional choirs and musicians, and which reached as far as local cafes, where the Coffee Cantata was performed. The recurring tensions in Bach scholarship between the desire for historical accuracy and aesthetic ‘truth’ were prevalent, and both these issues were discussed at the event as being needed more than ever in a contemporary world where neither seems to be valued socially and politically. The inclusion of papers dealing with the vast numbers of interpretations of the composer at various points in time and in various sociocultural settings points to the presence of a multiplicity of museums and canonizations of Bach, a welcome development, for Bach scholarship has only recently begun to address this multiplicity critically.