This chapter explores early modern conceptions of voice and vocal timbre, focusing on French and German philosophical and musical writings of the long seventeenth century. It argues that a Cartesian paradigm of representation, which has tended to underpin most present-day interpretations of the music of this period, falls short of recognizing the capacity of the early modern (musical) voice to bridge the realms of the material and immaterial, of body and soul. Such a historically situated consideration of timbre – configured here as a quality arising at the intersection of the physiological and spiritual processes that constituted the human voice – thereby offers a way towards recuperating certain off-Cartesian modes of thinking, feeling and listening.
Using the famous death-themed Cantata 82 as a case study, this article offers a model for situating J. S. Bach's cantata output in the wider cultural sphere of early eighteenth-century Leipzig life. Looking beyond the immediate and well-studied liturgical and theological contexts, the article reconstructs a broader range of associations that Bach's music may have evoked for his contemporary listeners, drawing out allusions to operatic topics, popular fears of deadly diseases, fictions of heavenly music and macabre dances of death. By locating the question of musical meaning in the interpretative space between the piece and its historical listeners, the article offers an alternative to conventional hermeneutic approaches that view Bach's cantatas as conveying a singular and clearly audible message of Lutheran doctrine.
This article considers the twentieth-and twenty-first-century practice of presenting Johann Sebastian Bach's Passion compositions on stage, in light of recent debates about performativity, presence and liveness. By tracing the history of such stagings from Ferruccio Busoni's plans in the 1920s to contemporary versions by Peter Sellars, Alain Platel, and others, I explore the increasing tendency to turn these canonical works into politically or aesthetically relevant events. Through a close reading of the critical reception of each production, I show how stagings have the capacity to challenge productively our easy familiarity with these pieces outside their initial liturgical setting. Unlike a standard concert presentation, staged performances tend to confront audiences more immediately with the violent imagery and spiritual demands of the Passions, thereby continually renewing the dialogue between Bach's works and later audiences. The article thus offers a contribution to an anthropological enquiry into the present-day cult of Bach and the particular forms of aesthetic pleasure that classical music affords its twenty-first-century devotees.
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