Sound thinking
The dance of law and freedom
by Ken Myers
“An aspect of law that is often misunderstood is its relationship to freedom. If it is hard for our old selves to fathom a joyful response to the law, it is at least as hard for them to understand the connection between law and freedom because on the surface they appear to be opposites. Where there is one, the other, it seems, needs to be absent. But Bach understood that there is a relationship between law and freedom, and his entire musical output seems to me to demonstrate the relationship.
“Two opposite and seemingly incompatible aspects of the reception of Bach’s music suggest that there is a relationship between law and freedom. On the one hand Bach has become the composer most readily associated with ‘classical’ music. More specifically he is associated with all that is learned, difficult, intellectual, and contrived in music. He is first of the list of composers of ‘masses and fugues and ops’ that Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado threatens to inflict on music-hall singers in his attempt to ‘make the punishment fit the crime.’ This aspect of Bach’s reputation is not new. The famous criticism by his contemporary, Johann Adolph Scheibe, voiced the opinion of many. In calling Bach’s music ‘turgid and confused,’ ‘artificial,’ in ‘conflict with Nature,’ and the result of ‘onerous labor,’ Scheibe was saying the same thing as those today who view his music as learned, intellectual, and contrived. No doubt there is some truth in that view of Bach. In no other composer’s works do fugues and canons and other complex sorts of counterpoint loom so large. And it is no accident that Bach’s music, more than any other, has been the basis for the academic training of music students in harmony and counterpoint.
“But that is only one side of Bach. Malcolm Boyd points out that
“To-day a performance of the B minor Mass or of the Brandenburg Concertos can be relied to fill a cathedral or concert hall, and festivals devoted largely or exclusively to Bach are commonplace in the musical calendar. Every generation of music lovers seems to find in the works of this incomparable artist that Gemütsvergötzung, that ‘refreshment of spirit,’ which his title-pages promised, and which his music so richly provides.
“That ‘refreshment of spirit’ which Bach’s music provides explains why popular recordings of his music bear titles like ‘The Music of Jubilee’ or ‘The Joy of Bach’ — certainly not titles suggestive of stuffy academicism. It also partly explains why no other ‘classical’ composer has been ‘jazzed up’ more successfully than Bach and why the Swingle Singers’ best hits were arrangements of his music. These are symptoms of what all Bach lovers know: there is no more exuberantly festive music, no more intensely expressive music, no more sublimely beautiful music, and no music so full of life as that of J. S. Bach.
“To the modern mind, with its high premium on freedom and rights and with its facile equation of unfettered spontaneity with joy, these two sides of Bach present an anomaly. If both views of Bach are correct, then it would seem that Bach must have been some kind of artistic split personality; sometimes he was a stuffy academician writing canons and fugues while at other times he took off his powdered wig, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and ‘let it all hang out.’ But that is not true. There are not some stuffy academic pieces that no one listens to and some ‘unbuttoned’ pieces that people enjoy. The Brandenburg Concertos, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Goldberg Variations, and the Mass in B Minor, for example, are among Bach’s more popular works. Yet these are works filled with the utmost in compositional complexity and sophistication. One is bound to be astonished, as Boyd puts it, ‘that music which makes so few concessions to the listener should enjoy an immense popular following.’”
— from Calvin R. Stapert, My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance and Discipleship in the Music of Bach (Eerdmans, 2000)
