Johann Sebastian Bach: Genre-Bender Extraordinaire | Big Think
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- Опубліковано 15 вер 2024
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Bach will always be my favorite composer of all times. His music is full of real human emotions.
What about Coffee Cantata?
@@andreslasaga6036, his love for coffee immortalized.
I accidentally read this as "Johann Sebastian Bach: Gender-Bender Extraordinaire"
Yeah, I kept wondering when they'd get to that part. I was half into the video before I re-read the title.
I feel cheated. Now I'll never know the _true _*_Gender-Bender Extraordinaire~_*
Piegoose well you can't know because there is not only one ! The so called league of extraordinary gender-benders is secretly operating worldwide since the demise of the last templars.The reason why bach is special is that(even though it might not seem so surprising anymore when consedering the various gender movements these days) he could bend 4 genders which seemed like utter magic back in the days.So he was elected leader of the league and tried to bring balance to the world(since the middle ages there were more women than men among the population wich was also one of the reasons why mostly witches and not witchers died during the inquisition).But everything changed in the last years when feminazis who claim to be sexually classified as apache helicopters attacked.Now that the world needs him the most he vanished...
So did I!
In spanish gender and genre are actually the same word (género). Same root I think.
He did write a few perfectly stagable works that went under the listed genre of "dramma per musica"-- which is how operas often got referred to-- in things like Hercules At The Crossroads (BWV 213), The Contest Of Pan And Apollo (BWV 201), and the Coffee Cantata (BWV 211). The last two, especially, it seems like people say they weren't staged just because Bach wrote them, but they are clearly very dramatic and diologic.
But Bach's Matthew Passion is definitely the greatest baroque opera, and it's not even an opera.
Bach, altering the existence of mankind with music since 1700.
Until, in 1756, a miracle happened...and changed music for ever.
@@voxveritatis3815 I wouldn't write that Christoph Willibald Gluck being knighted by Pope Benedict XIV is a miracle. Maybe if you show out your arguments, I will be capable of this your assumption.
@@ilkeadrall710 What would make you reckon I was referring to the absolute irrelevance of Christopher Willibald Gluck being apppointed a knight in 1756 to point out the course of music itself changed for ever? I'm certain you know exactly to whom I am referring. Fortunately for mankind, 1756 saw the birth of the ultimate musical miracle, the genius of geniuses in music. C'mon say it...spit it out. You're gonna be all right 😉
@@voxveritatis3815 Your way of being like a roller coaster is of my liking. Some man was knighted by a Catholic Pope and you render him/it irrelevant as just being appointed. Your words figure out that I reckon but you play up to my wisdom of saying or my vanity of splitting out. Why didn't you let go of it ... long ago ... maybe for a greater purpose. By the way, I'm all right before going to be all right. I earnestly appreciate your attitude.
@@voxveritatis3815 I would hardly call the birth of Thomas Linley the younger miraculous.
Bach left us such wonderful music to express the eternal truths of the bible. He had no need to express his gift in opera. Church music was the highest form as it points to the eternal word of God.
The whole job of Gardiner and too many other hysterically informed performers is to relativize what you have underlined.
Wonderful it is to hear such a great interpreter of the Cantatas talking about Bach. Many of his interpretations are my favorites because they do give a dramatic touch to this very magical of musics.
"I don't look at the guy next to me and think, 'hey, I'm doing better than him'. I mean, compared to Bach, we all suck." - Pat Metheny.
The word after Monteverdi was Rameau, one of the great French Baroque composers.
Bach was always breaking the rules, and doing his own thing.
Looking forward to adding the phrase "mutant opera" to my students' glossary of studied terms.
Come to think of it, Schutz didn't compose opera either, a contemporary of Monteverdi. Yet his passions are full of dialectic drama and energy.
Lol, at first I read Gender-Bender...
Lol, me too.
Mist Niebla he just misread the title I dont think it was a politically or idealogically influenced comment lol
I would love to watch a big think interview with this man.
Thank you for another gem of a discussion by Sir Gardiner. I can listen to anything he has to say, esp about Bach.
He gets under the skin of musical and psychological matters and makes such valuable sense of them. And obviously these insights of his are palpable in his interpretations.His understanding about Bach’s misunderstood complexity, darkness and sensuality is so exiting and elements that have resonated with me since I was a you g musician. 🌈❤️🌹
Air by Bach is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard!
Kinetic Vibe Which one? He wrote many aires.
“As opposed to other composers, Bach targets the very young, the child, and people of a certain age, like me. And tries to leave out the middle. What I mean by this is that there are all kinds of mental, psychological dispositions from the opera that he totally shunned. Envy. Greed. Lust. Jealousy. I mean, this is the bread and butter of the opera. He never went there. He had no interest in that. His music tries to express things like, awe. Grace. Thanks. Fear. Trepidation. Hope. All kinds of sentiments a child can have, and an older person can have." -Bernard Chazelle
I like (love) Bach and can't stand operas, so that much is fine.
Even though the religion/Christ thing isn't for me - tears run down my cheeks when listening to Christ being martyred in Bach's St. Mathew's Passion and I almost become Catholic at the B minor Mass. (even if Bach didn't)
Bach is my way of "worship without religion." He's saved me from falling into sectarianism through his universality!
Haendel's operas have some absolutely beautiful arias.
I relate so much. Bach expresses religion through music so densely that he becomes independent of it. Through Bach I encounter God without having to mediate my faith by religion.
Bach was a supreme genius. Ironically, his music was largely unknown for some 200 years after his death. Marvelous music.
Socrates was unknown for an almost equal amount of time.
Patrick Mulvaney
Interesting parallel.
200 years? More like 80 years, the Bach Revival gained momentum around the 1830s.
Indeed, he was a supreme genius. But his music did not disappear. In fact, the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Haydn not only either had copies of his music or played it, they considered him a genius and stood in awe of his work. Mendelssohn's grandparents were also fans of his, and introduced him to the music, leading to his revival of the St Matthew's Passion in 1829. Gounod developed his Ave Maria from Bach's Prelude in C to great effect, and Busoni reworked many of Bach's pieces, including the Great Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D Minor.
The Brandenburg Concertos were published and performed around 1849-1850. Mendelssohn had done quite a lot to revive Bach as did Chopin and, even for that matter, Beethoven.
What a privilege to listen to Sir John E. Gardiner’s thoughts about J.S.Bach!; thanks....No question, in part it was a political and especially a psychological response for Bach to express many deep emotions and connect with his personal history through the Passions and Cantatas, all the religious beliefs, romanticism, sensuality, all there “no special dresses, no wigs”. Thanks again!
I think also, since 18th century composers themselves were practical musicians, there was not an opportunity for Bach to compose opera. If he had worked at a opera loving court, instead of a church, I'm sure he would have been inspired to compose operas.
Utterly interesting video! I detest operas too....and maybe that is because of my choise for audio and not video... I sang a lot of Bach. It was great!
Naked City are a good example of genre bending, with songs spanning 20 or 30 genres in less than a minute. Due to this they aren't the easiest to listen too. But are certainly noteworthy.
Bach, the ultimate hipster
and the 1st "rock -n- roll" rebel
This concludes the revisionary history lesson of the day.
You are obliged to actually back up your nonsense assertion.
More of Gardiner!
It took me the whole video to realize it didn't say genDer bender.
Gender and genre are cognate words. In french they are the same word. It just means type or kind.
It is a well-known fact that English stole innumerable words from French. Here, we have a funny case where English stole the same French word twice : during the middle ages it stole it from Old French, in the form 'gender', and much later, it stole the Modern French form of the word, namely 'genre'.
I think Bach, like many musicians, got tired of hearing the same thing, hearing what was popular, and hearing simple patterns. I think he want something different.
Bach was so devoted to his God he probably though anything not associated with it was frivolous.
Buon giorno, Donna Cianciosi! That is entirely possible. I think you meant to write "he probably THOUGHT...".
Damn, the whole time I was waiting to find out what was going on with the gender bending.
I listen to Air on a G String now and again. It's arguably his best work.
Or BWV 1080, which sadly ended up as incomplete. :(
Hasn't the provenance of Air On A G String been contested and reasigned to an italian composer?
1. It is easy to deduce you aren't much of a listener.
2. I have rarely heard any other composer's work that moves me as much as the work of Johann Sebastian Bach.
May I ask whom you are addressing?
Yes, it is lovely, but I don't think many "Bach people" would argue that it stands alone as his "best work". It's actually a small part of a much larger work (Orchestral Suite no3 in Dmaj), and Bach composed many other similar little ditties. Interestingly, this particular air only aquired the appellation "on the G string" after a late 19th century arrangement in which the melody was transposed down to be played entirely on the "G" string of a violin. (Bach himself would not recognize the title.) Funny that this name has stuck, even when the piece is performed on a non-stringed instrument, and despite the more recent association with the sexy underwear.
In the original suite, this air serves to contrast with the preceding overture, which is very boisterous and majestic with lots of horns and drums... Listen to it in the context of its surrounding pieces and it becomes more like an interlude, or a "rest for the ears"... It is certainly neither the focal point nor the climax of the suite.
It IS, arguably, one of J.S. Bach's most POPULAR and RECOGNIZABLE tunes, much in the same way "Eine Kleine Nachtmusic" (a relatively minor composition compared to the entire body of his work) could easily be called "Mozart's greatest hit". I think both Bach and Mozart would be surprised that these "little" tunes, out of everything they wrote, somehow became so popular and inextricably associated with their names.
of course, it could be that his musical style with all the fugues and stuff did not fit what was opera at the time.
Opera took a wrong turn leaving Bach as the real thing and passed it on to Mozart? Maybe opera seria took an odd turn (partly in reaction late Monteverdi -- the Coronation of Poppea ) and Mozart helped put it back on track with Cosi and Don Giovanni and the Abduction and so on. But I don't see Bach in this development.
Just curious-- why use the term "mutant-operatic" and not "oratorio?"
(I am not trolling, I promise. I'm in university, studying music education. I genuinely want to know...)
Did any of his sons, who were also composers, compose operas?
I'm not aware any of them did, so it might be a family preference to exclude composition of opera.
Unless you consider Coffee Cantata as an illegitimate opera in his catalogue?
Бах е един! Бах е един! Един е той!
So true... extraordinaire ♥
That's a very nice German pronunciation.
About bloody time too. Fed up of hearing about "Bark" amongst English pseuds who know not of what they speak. They wouldn't DREAM of anglicising or uttering such a barbarism against a Romance name of course.
Opera was to the secularist what oratorio is to the religious. Bach had not a secular bone in his body. A devoted Lutheran who had a passionate attachment to Christ Jesus. Everything he wrote was dedicated to him, by the initials “J.J.” (“Jesus help me”), or (I. N. J) “In the name of Jesus”, or “S.D.G” (“😅”Solely to the glory of God”).
I think he didn't care much for opera.
Super hard to understand his answer. So why didn’t Bach write opera? ‘Because he wrote mutant opera / his own type of opera’. But so what? He could have still written opera.
Not a bad essay but the video title is a bit of a stretch. It could be something like "Why didn't Bach write opera?". Maybe only two sentences of the video is about Bach genre-bending and it really doesn't seem to be a well-defended or important point.
ELO
I don't think this video was synced properly, or they might have another recording over the original video. It seems, off. Awkward. Doesn't seem to match, loses it's strength, in my opinion. Interesting points nontheless, but the quality of it didn't allow me to engage with it as I would like to.
bach was a hipster dude
Mutant Opera
I think that Bach didn't compose operas because for him music had a connection to the divine, it was a way to glorify god and not for the "cheap" entertainment that operas provide where the words that are composed are of stories and dramas that have nothing to do with religion or god.
didn't he do a tour with Guns "n" Roses?
Handel was the greatest master of opera in the 17 hundreds and wrote some of the greatest music conceived by man. I do not agree with Gardiner with regard to placing Handel in this bad light, on the contrary, many things he mentioned do not pertain to GFH.
So I'm not the only one who came here thinking Bach was a cross-dresser.
Nevertheless, I am still disappointed. Would've made for interesting discussion :D
Opera is tedious and Bach ain’t got time for that.
Interesting accent. Very German but also a little British at times.
its a british accent 100%
Uuriu Like Alan Rickman in die hard?
Bach suchs.
and this is why Classical Music is dead today. JEG the quintessential British musical scholar... SNORE.
So wait....he was trans?
G'day, Jon Wall! No, he wasn't. The title is "Genre bender", not "Gender bender".
Mr. Gardiner, if you love Bach , why don't you learn to play the organ instead of speaking so much?
annam cancarini lol
Why are you on all these videos making horrible comments?
what a sad human being you must be...
This has to be one of the more ignorant comments that I've lately seen!
Stupidity of this level is monumental.
He wrote a biography of Bach, called “Music in the Castles of Heaven”
His voice is nice but... this is completely uninteresting if you're in to thoughts rather than pretentious drivel about dead masters.
What is "pretentious" about anything he said? Where did he try and display his importance by taking about Bach? Pretentious is one of the most grossly misused words in the English language and is a lazy criticism to make against someone, and usually the person making the criticism against the "pretentious" individual just had no interest in what the other person is talking about. It's the equivalent of Homer Simpson yelling "boring!" In the middle of someone talking.
Well agreed. Instead I would like to shout "Boring!" then. And what the fuck is this on Big think for? It's not the first time this man rambles on about Bach. Do not see the point.
superhund14 These are interesting points on a career decision Bach made. It concerns Bach's own work. Either you are interested in music, and, hence, one of the most brilliant musicians that have ever existed, or you're not.
casualdespair
oh haha, so if I am not interested in Bach I am not interested in music, is that what you are saying? My my, I smell an only child.
It should however be noted though that I hold Big Think in High Regard so whenever it's not good I get a bit provoced by it which is a bit immature. If people find inspiration in this en masse, well good for them. :)