Andreas Werckmeister (1645 – 1706), a late seventeenth-century German Lutheran organist, composer, and music theorist, is the last great advocate and defender of the Great Tradition in music, with its assumptions that music is a divine gift to humanity, spiritually charged yet rationally accessible, the key being a complex of mathematical proportions which govern and are at the root of the entire universe and all which that embraces. Thus understood, music is the audible manifestation of the order of the universe, allowing glimpses, sound-bites of the very Creator of a well-tempered universe, and of our relationship to each other, our environment, and the divine powers which placed us here. This is the subject matter of the conversation which Werckmeister wishes to have with us, his readers, particularly in his last treatise, the Musicalische Paradoxal-Discourse. But he does not make it easy for today’s readers. He assumes certain proficiencies from his readers, including detailed biblical knowledge, a fluency in Latin, and a familiarity with treatises and publications concerning music, theology, and a number of related disciplines. He writes in a rather archaic German, riddled with obscure references which require a thorough explanation. With its extensive commentary and translation of the treatise, this book seeks to bridge Werckmeister’s world with that of the twenty-first century. Werckmeister wrote for novice and professional musicians alike, an author who wanted to consider with his readers the basic and existential questions and issues regarding the wondrous art of music, questions as relevant then as they are now.

In 1947 Friedrich Smend published a study claiming that J. S. Bach used a natural-order alphabet (A = 1 to Z = 24) in his works. He demonstrated that Bach incorporated significant words into his music, and provided himself with a symbolic compositional theme. Here, Dr Tatlow investigates the plausibility of Smend's claims with new evidence, challenging Smend's conclusions.

Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music identifies the cultural and devotional conventions underlying expressions of mystical love in poetry and music of the German baroque. It sheds new light on the seemingly erotic overtones in settings of the Song of Songs and dialogues between Christ and the faithful soul in late 17th- and early 18th-century cantatas by Heinrich Sch tz, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Sebastian Bach. While these compositions have been interpreted solely as a secularizing tendency within devotional music of the baroque period, Isabella van Elferen demonstrates that they need to be viewed instead as intensifications of the sacred. Based on a wide selection of previously unedited or translated 17th- and 18th-century sources, van Elferen describes the history and development of baroque poetic and musical love discourses, from Sch tz's early works through Buxtehude's cantatas and Bach's cantatas and Passions. This long and multilayered discursive history of these compositions considers the love poetry of Petrarch, European reception of petrarchan imagery and traditions, its effect on the madrigal in Germany, and the role of Catholic medieval mystics in baroque Lutheranism. Van Elferen shows that Bach's compositional technique, based on the emotional characteristics of text and music rather than on the depiction of single words, allows the musical expression of mystical love to correspond closely to contemporary literary and theological conceptions of this affect.

What is music, and why does it move us? From Pythagoras to the present, writers have struggled to isolate the essence of "pure" or "absolute" music in ways that also account for its profound effect. In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds traces the history of these efforts across more than two millennia, paying special attention to the relationship between music's essence and its qualities of form, expression, beauty, autonomy, as well as its perceived capacity to disclose philosophical truths. The core of this book focuses on the period between 1850 and 1945. Although the idea of pure music is as old as antiquity, the term "absolute music" is itself relatively recent. It was Richard Wagner who coined the term, in 1846, and he used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For Wagner, music that was "absolute" was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. His contemporary, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, embraced this quality of isolation as a guarantor of purity. Only pure, absolute music, he argued, could realize the highest potential of the art. Bonds reveals how and why perceptions of absolute music changed so radically between the 1850s and 1920s. When it first appeared, "absolute music" was a new term applied to old music, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had become-paradoxically--an old term associated with the new music of modernists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Bonds argues that the key developments in this shift lay not in discourse about music but rather the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century-line and color, as opposed to object-helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism. By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to the twentieth-century, Bonds not only provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept but also provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how essence has been used to explain music's effect. A long awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field, Absolute Music will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history, theory, and aesthetics of music.

This book a offers a multitude of provocative new perspectives on one of the most iconic composers in the Western classical tradition. Its collective rethinking of some of our most cherished narratives and deeply held beliefs about Johann Sebastian Bach will allow readers to see the man in a new light and to hear his music with new ears.

Bach's cantatas are among the highest achievements of Western musical art, yet studies of the individual cantatas that are both illuminating and detailed are few. In this book, noted Bach expert Eric Chafe combines theological, historical, analytical, and interpretive approaches to the cantatas to offer readers and listeners alike the richest possible experience of these works. A respected theorist of seventeenth-century music, Chafe is sensitive to the composer's intentions and to the enduring and universal qualities of the music itself. Concentrating on a small number of representative cantatas, mostly from the Leipzig cycles of 1723-24 and 1724-25, and in particular on Cantata 77, Chafe shows how Bach strove to mirror both the dogma and the mystery of religious experience in musical allegory. Analyzing Bach Cantatas offers valuable information on the theological relevance of the structure of the liturgical year for the design and content of these works, as well as a survey of the theories of modality that inform Bach's compositional style. Chafe demonstrates that, while Bach certainly employed "pictorialism" and word-painting in his compositions, his method of writing music was a more complex amalgam of theological concepts and music theory. Regarding the cantatas as musical allegories that reflect the fundamental tenets of Lutheran theology as established during Bach's lifetime, Chafe synthesizes a number of key musical and theological ideas to illuminate the essential character of these great works. This unique and insightful book offers an essential methodology for understanding one of the central bodies of work in the Western musical canon. It will prove indispensable for all students and scholars of Bach's work, musicology, and theological studies.

Written late in his life, J. S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue has long been admired—in some quarters revered—as one of his masterworks. Its last movement, Contrapunctus 14, went unfinished, and the enigma of its incompleteness still preoccupies scholars and musical conductors alike. In 1881, Gustav Nottebohm discovered that the three subjects of the movement could be supplemented by a fourth. In 1993, Zoltán Göncz revealed that Bach had planned the passage that would join the four subjects in an entirely unique way. This section has not survived, but, as Göncz notes, it must have been ready in the earliest phase of composition since Bach had created the expositions of the first three subjects from its “disjointed” parts. Göncz then boldly took on the task of reconstructing the original “template” by putting together the once separate pieces. In Bach’s Testament: On the Philosophical and Theological Background of The Art of Fugue, Göncz probes the philosophic-theological background of The Art of Fugue, revealing the special structures that supported the 1993 reconstruction. Bach’s Testament investigates the reconstruction’s metaphysical dimensions, focusing on the quadruple fugue. As a summary of Zoltán Göncz’s extensive research over many years, which resulted in the completion of the fugue, this work explores the complex combinatorial, philosophical and theological considerations that inform its structure. Bach’s Testament is ideally suited not only to Bach scholars and musicologists but also intellectual historians with particular interests in 18th-century religious and philosophical ideas.