Friday, July 25, 2014

J. S. Bach Passacaglia and Fugue in c minor BWV 582


Hans-Andre Stamm
Trost organ of the Stadtkirche in Waltershausen

This makes me wish I'd kept up the organ lessons when I was a teenager.  I'd probably have a job playing music today if I had.  This interpretation is pretty fine.

score

Update:  It's not terribly closely related but I've recently been listening more to Vincent Persichetti's music, a composer I'd pretty well neglected.  Here's his choral prelude on

Drop Drop Slow Tears

I'd resented Persichetti because I hated his 20th Century Harmony textbook so much when it was assigned for the advanced harmony class I took my Sophomore year.  His music is a lot better than his textbook.  I will admit, though,  it does have two of the best opening sentences ever found in a music textbook.

Any tone can succeed any other tone, any tone can sound simultaneously with any other tone or tones, and any group of tones can be followed by any other group of tones, just as any degree of tension or nuance can occur in any medium under any kind of stress or duration.  Successful projection will depend on the contextual and formal considerations that prevail and on the skill and the soul of the composer.

As I recall it goes immediately down hill from there. Though, looking at the book again for the first time in many decades, maybe there's more to it than I got out of it back when I was a brat.

 

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