At the tenth Dialogue Meeting of the Bach Network in 2022, shortly after the release of Rethinking Bach, I attended a roundtable presentation about its contents. Informal discussion and hushed whispers around the corridors of Madingley Hall, Cambridge, revealed predictable responses: the volume brought unwelcome ideas into Bach studies, a discipline that should primarily focus on interpreting J. S. Bach's music, and the primary sources that supposedly reveal hints of the composer's worldview, musical intentions and religious stance. Some, however, deemed the book a much-needed example of the benefits of interdisciplinary approaches. Before discussing my own response, I should like to contextualize the book within Bach scholarship.
Bettina Varwig's Introduction lays out the mission statement: to repopulate and redefine a ‘well-fortified island’ of Bach's canon of works, which sits isolated ‘in an ocean of musicological and wider humanities/social sciences discourse that laps up against its shores without any serious risk of getting its inhabitants’ feet too wet’ (1). To continue the metaphor, in our age of rising sea levels and global warming, Bach Island seems to be rapidly losing ground because of broader issues of scholarly climate that (perhaps) fall outside its inhabitants’ direct control; but Varwig's vision for the future of Bach scholarship is more hopeful and outward-bound. She advocates building bridges to other ‘archipelagos’ of scholarship and establishing ‘starting points for an exciting set of conversations’ as part of that wider academic ocean (6).
A book displaying such foresight has been sorely needed for anglophone and European Bach scholarship. Considering that the twentieth century's Japanese Bach Zenshū (Complete Bach Edition (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1996–1999)) included chapters on Bach by leading Japanese scholars of art history, theology, history, linguistics, psychology, philosophy and literature in its fifteen academic volumes, one is justified in pondering why such interdisciplinary collaborations prove anomalies for Western Bach scholarship. Indeed, Western musicology in general carries a legacy of, in Kevin Korsyn's words, ‘fear of disciplinary contamination’; this fear manifests itself in a defensive anxiety that avoids questioning entrenched scholarly habits, disciplinary boundaries, research approaches and categories of study when they are set against ‘outside’ ideas (Kevin Korsyn, Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 42). Considering such a legacy remains entrenched in some corners of Bach Island, the fourteen-chapter volume's exploratory and self-reflexive ‘rethinking’ mission is a bold one.
While Varwig looks ashore, she by no means ignores the local myths, ghosts and legacies that haunt the island. The rapidly melting icecaps of Bach scholarship, from a colder age, reveal their troublesome histories for scholars who are rethinking them; those bravely traversing their icy terrain in the volume offer reflection on the monuments encased within. Ellen Exner's chapter uncovers the National Socialist, German supremacist, antisemitic and sexist underpinnings of the still-pervasive myth and canonization of Mendelssohn's so-called ‘Bach revival’. She urges us to recognize the voices of women and Jewish musicians who were arguably more responsible for propagating Bach's music in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Berlin. Similar myth-busting appears elsewhere in the volume. David Yearsley critiques the stern and serious image of Bach, and melts such frigid statues according to eighteenth-century theories of humour; Bach's Mass in B minor inspires Joshua Rifkin's authoritative contribution, which deems it ‘a monument that never quite existed’ as a single work that later listeners, scholars and musicians have held dear (290); Daniel Melamed excavates the circular reasoning found in esoteric genres of Bach scholarship. Melamed calls into question proponents’ seductive claim to understand ‘hidden meanings’, secret codes and scriptural symbolism, in order to attract ‘public attention, despite minimal truth’, by ‘inventing puzzles and finding ways to make the composer accountable for them’ (231).
Such myth-busting is welcome, but readers sceptical of the extent of the volume's ‘rethinking’ mission may ponder whether the book simply provides the latest trend of ‘thinking’ Bach. Indeed, over two decades ago, sociologist Tia DeNora charged Bach scholarship with simply continuing a dull hermeneutic pattern of telling readers how to perceive Bach, based on a writer's interpretative power to ‘reveal’ what has been missed by lesser authorities – many Bach scholars merely add to a long line of infinitely variable interpretations about what the music definitively is in a decontextualized interpretative vacuum. DeNora instead proposed that writers can break the chain through further reflection on their own position as a socio-politically and historically mediated subject, and provide analyses of what Bach's music does in specific social contexts (Tia DeNora, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42–45). I argue that the current volume offers much that moves towards a ‘rethinking’ perspective too.
John Butt's chapter suggests that the diversity of interpretations of Bach's music may be partly afforded by the construction of the music itself. Focusing his discussion on the ‘Christmas Oratorio’, he moves the notion of fixed and singular meanings of Bach's music towards a discussion of ‘viewpoint’; Bach's compositional style is predisposed (perhaps deliberately, in Butt's view) to influence a listener's thoughts and feelings in unexpected ways. Because Bach affectively charged differing texts and imagery in his cantatas with the same music he used in the ‘Christmas Oratorio’, Butt suggests that Bach was already aware that his musical architecture was flexible enough to fit a multitude of purposes beyond an ‘original’ meaning (258). Varwig's own chapter similarly discusses Bach's music from the perspective of embodiment, bodily metaphors from Bach's time, physical demands on the fingers and hands and the agency of the keyboard and musical lines in influencing the movement of human bodies.
Other chapters reimagine Bach according to what his music does or has done in differing social contexts, and draw on broader intellectual concerns beyond what is traditionally found on Bach Island. Yvonne Liao traces Bach's music across three different (post)colonial eras in Hong Kong, proposing that his music has diachronically gathered associations with British colonial history, social legitimacy and distinction, colonial spaces and architectures, Anglicanism, and sonic imaginations pertaining to Europe. Film and popular culture provide Michael Markham's chapter with material for his lucid discussion of Bach's continuing ability to attract modernist notions of the mathematical and theological sublime, and inhuman genius. Markham reveals a duality of cosmopolitan and nationalist German approaches that share a durable assumption that Bach is ‘healthy, solid, stable’, which accounts for Bach's being pervasively attached to ‘whatever one thinks is the right way forward for music or society’ (349). Stephen Rose rethinks Bach's social entanglements according to ideas he imports from theories of material culture. Discussing the consumer culture of Bach's Leipzig, and the sociality of musical instruments and scores and the agency they demand, he reframes notions of Bach's manuscripts in terms of their social function as eighteenth-century material culture.
Only a few chapters address what Bach Island offers in exports (to interact with ‘well-intentioned neighbours’, in Varwig's words (4). Derek Remeš shows how Bach's own pedagogical method stands in opposition to modern music-theory education. He suggests that the modern emphasis on Bach's chorales in four-part harmony training, and single ‘correct’ solutions for them, differs from Bach's own teaching of improvisatory Choralbücher (for which one chorale melody could have several musical solutions). As Bach himself focused on active composition training and multiple harmonic solutions to Choralbuch melodies, full of contrapuntal potential, Remeš suggests that Choralbuch training may reinvigorate curricula that are seeking to drop dry chorale-writing exercises. Jeremy Begbie's chapter reaches further afield to, and through, the discipline of theology. Looking to rectify the lack of theological expertise applied to supposedly theological analysis of Bach's music by musicologists, Begbie provides insights from systematic theology and Bible exegesis. He suggests that Christ's own Jewishness, and Christianity's reworking of Jewish prophesies, render antisemitic evaluations of Bach's music erroneous (he argues that Bach's music itself emphasizes the ‘deepest Jewish convictions’ (174) of the texts, as well as notions of eternity misunderstood by Bach scholars). Crucially, he suggests that theologians have much to learn from Bach's rich musical settings of biblical texts, and from Bach's ability to elucidate the plurality of meaning beyond a singular and definitive theological interpretation.
Isabella von Elferen's excellent chapter ‘Rethinking Affect’ deserves special mention, not only for bringing the complexities of affect theory to Bach Island, but also for showing how baroque theories of affect challenge our modern assumptions (especially pertaining to the received myth of a formulaic baroque musical rhetoric). She invites us to embrace the ambivalence, unpredictability and unconscious manifestations of affect beyond formulaic and prescriptive dogmas or interpretative codes; they merely seek, in von Elferen's view, to make one's diverse and unpredictable ‘affective and embodied responses incorrect according to theology, Bach's intention, or doctrine of affects’ (144–145). Her subsequent discussion of the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences, its benefits for Bach scholarship and indeed the benefit of considering ‘messy baroque’ flows and Deleuzian folding and unfolding, is a model example of ‘rethinking’ Bach. I could not help feeling the necessity of such scholarship in English considering her discussion of Deleuze, covering ground already provided in Japanese by philosopher Nakamura Yūjirō (中村雄二郎) nearly three decades ago (Nakamura Yūjirō, ‘さえずる機会: ドゥルーズ＆ガタリ’ [A Continually Chirping Machine: Deleuze & Guattari], in Bach Zenshū, volume 14, ed. Bach Zenshū Committee (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1995), 148–163).
This volume, therefore, is essential reading for anyone wishing to engage in a broader critical study of J. S. Bach's music. It offers much to Bach scholars looking to re-evaluate previous debates and provides starting-points for conversations between those stranded on musicological islands and those inhabiting larger archipelagos of the humanities and social sciences. Several chapters notably show ample potential for Bach Island's interdisciplinary exchange, even if the rising and stormy ocean invites the most challenging – and rewarding – exploratory ventures in our age of melting monuments and parochial histories.
