Bach against Modernity

"Many scholars and music lovers hold that Johann Sebastian Bach is a "modern" figure, as his music seems to speak directly to the aesthetic and spiritual or emotional concerns of today's listeners. This collection of essays suggests that by the standards of what eighteenth-century thinkers believed to be forward-looking and modern, Bach and his music in fact reflected and forcefully promoted a premodern world and life view. Part I of the book concerns problems of inattentiveness to historical considerations in academic and popular writing about Bach's relation to the present. Part II puts forward brief interpretive reassessments of key individual works by Bach. Part III examines problems in modern comprehension of the partly archaic German texts that Bach set to music. Part IV explores Bach's music in relation to premodern versus more enlightened attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. And Part V enquires into the theological character of Bach's secular instrumental music. The bottom-line judgment is that while we are arguably free to make use of Bach and his music in whatever new ways we find fitting, we ought also to be on the ethical alert for a kind of cultural narcissism in which we end up miscasting Bach in our own ideological image and proclaiming the authenticity of that image, and hence its prestige value, in support of our own agendas" -- Provided by publisher