Bach’s Cantata Calendar
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Bach’s Cantata Calendar
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Re: Bach’s Cantata Calendar
#2His music is divine manna gifted from the heavens, but I just can't stand the cantatas. Too church-y.
Re: Bach’s Cantata Calendar
#3His music is divine manna gifted from the heavens, but I just can't stand the cantatas. Too church-y.
You're in luck, today's is a secular cantata.
Re: Bach’s Cantata Calendar
#4His music is divine manna gifted from the heavens, but I just can't stand the cantatas. Too church-y.
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Re: Bach’s Cantata Calendar
#5His music is divine manna gifted from the heavens, but I just can't stand the cantatas. Too church-y.
That's kind of the point, they're literally called "church cantatas"
Also, it's weird how you make an explicit and positive religious reference and then express distaste at the religious context that Bach composed for and in. In what sense is it divine then, if you dislike the music he wrote for the church?
Re: Bach’s Cantata Calendar
#6Amazing that it never clicked for me that yes, these were written for calendar events. It's hard not to get into Bach without triggering any latent apophenic urges, and now I need to go through each of these pieces looking for intentional geometric relationships to the calendar events they were written for.
An interesting AI challenge might be to determine whether a given thing is or contains a puzzle.
Re: Bach’s Cantata Calendar
#7John Eliot Gardner's "Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven" is a sort of musical biography featuring a (very) deep dive on the cantatas.
Re: Bach’s Cantata Calendar
#8WCRB in Boston does a Bach show every week which is available for streaming. Lots of times there's a cantata that fits the calendar.
Re: Bach’s Cantata Calendar
#9Very well done! You might also be interested in my Bach cantatas app (https://www.cantatasapp.com) for iOS and Android which has an infinite liturgical calendar and lots more of information about Bach’s wonderful cantatas (complete text, instrumentations, hymns, readings and even score references).
Re: Bach’s Cantata Calendar
#10His music is divine manna gifted from the heavens, but I just can't stand the cantatas. Too church-y.
That's kind of the point, they're literally called "church cantatas" Also, it's weird how you make an explicit and positive religious reference and then express distaste at the religious context that Bach composed for and in. In what sense is it divine then, if you dislike the music he wrote for the church?
There are other paths to divinity than christian and perhaps the commenter prefers one of those.
A good example would be Plato’s cave metaphor (predating christianity by centuries), arguing that there is an intangible divine world. Mathematics, clearly also beloved to Bach, is a nonreligious tool to appreciate that divine world.
One can listen to the intricacies of the Passacaglia und Fuge c-Moll and glimpse an inscrutable world behind it. Is that not divine?