A recent Twitter post by the composer Nico Muhly aligns with a recurring trope of “Bach-ness” that defines Bach’s public mythic profile. This chapter focuses on similar images of Bach, whether visual or aural. Bach has been most commonly imagined in the popular consciousness as representing not the human but the superhuman, the inhuman, the dehumanized, and the sublime. One can sense in recent writings on Bach an anxiety about how well these attributes can continue to resonate in our current moment of political or cultural relevance tests, and about which works by Bach are most likely to thrive in this new postmodern media world. I will wonder aloud, with some trepidation, whether Bach’s public mythic profile, long solidified along Modernist lines as the encyclopedic mathematical mystic, is undergoing a broad, gradual change; indeed, if it needs to in order for his music to survive in a twenty-first-century media environment and amid a postmodern audience sensibility.
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