(听写)Royal Academy of Music Lectures Bach

检查过一遍的稿。从学术的角度认识小溪大神。

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Situated in the centre of London, the Royal Academy of Music is one of the most prestigious music conservatoires in the world. It has, as the name suggests, a royal charter and patronage from the royal family. Founded in 1822, the academy has a long history and traditon. And it has produced numerous world renowned musicians. Its impressive alumni include the conductor Simon Rattle and the composer Michael Nyman. Elton John and Annie Lennox are also graduates of the academy. A wide range of disciplines such as Jazz and musical theatre are offered alongside classical music. Talented students are drawn from around the world. At present, there are nearly 700 students from over 50 countries studying at the academy. Highly respected performers and composers make up the academy’s teaching staff. The mission of the academy is to nurture talent and develop outstanding musicians. Open from 7:00 am until 11:00 pm, the rehearsal rooms are always packed with students. This First Class series is presented by Professor Timothy Jones and Professor Joanna MacGregor. Professor Jones is a renowned musicologist whose aclaimed works include recreating music of Mozart and Hydn from fragments of scores. He teaches music history and music theory at the academy. His passion and his indepth knowleadge of his subjects inspire students to explore the more academic and sometimes challenging elements of the course. Professor MacGregor is the head of the piano at the academy. Regarded as one of the most innovative and creative pianists in the world, she is a celebrated concert soloist as well as a successsful composer, conductor and experienced curator. This series of lectures explores the connection between music and society through the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin. It looks at how the society of their time influenced their work and how music in turn responded to and even challenged their culture. Finally we discuss the role of the contemporary musician today.

Lecture One is about the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It’s about the 17th century culture in which he grew up, in which music served the functional purpose where they are serving the state through courts or serving god through the church. How this affected Bach’s career and how the music he wrote engaged with those questions of the individual belonging to a community that served a greater purpose.

Lecture One

Bach – Music of Service for Divinity and Monarch

Thank you very much. I’d like to begin with an image that confronts me on my way into work into the academy everyday. This is what I see on the train everyday. People lost in their own worlds with headphones on. Some of them awake, some of them asleep. I don’t know what they are listening to. They don't know what each other is listening to. But clearly they’ve got something on their machines that mean a lot to them, and it makes the commute, well, at least tolerable. What does it tell us about the work our musical society today in the way we listen to music? Well, first of all, whatever they are listening to is infinitely reproducable, just go back and listen to the track again. It’s mediated. There’s a lot technology that’s gone into all that. It’s disembodied unless they’re performers themsevles of being in recording studios or being to lots of concerts. They are not going to really know what went in to producing the sound they are listening to. And most importantly of all and perhaps saddest of all is the fact it’s completely atomised. They are having a personal experience which they can’t share with anyone else. Now this is a very late modern way of experiencing music. For most of the history of western music, it’s been experienced in a completely different way. It’s been live. It’s not been repeatable. It’s been embodied. In that, you have the performers in front of you, you can see what they are doing and you can see how they are making the sound. And above all, it’s an experience that 5:09 shared its communal. Now this series is going to explore what that means for listening to music and perceiving it and thinking about it. If music is intrinsically social, how did societies in the past actually go back shaping their musical practices? How did those musical practices in turn shaped the way that composers’ careers developed? And how did those composers then go on to shape their own music to meet the needs of that society and equal(5:45) importantly to try and perhaps change that society in some way? From what I want to begin today, by going back to that towering figure that definitional figure in western classical music Johann Sebastian Bach, and look at the society in which he grew up in central Germany in the late 17th century, and how that shaped his music and his career.

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German musician and composer of the baroque period. He is regarded as on of the greatest composers of all time. Bach served various royal courts and churches. He created many outstanding works for secular and religious music.

Let’s begin them by thinking a little bit about the context of Bach’s life. He was born in the town of Eisenach in the central part of Germany known as Thuringia in 1685. He was orphaned by the age of ten and taken under the wing of an older brother Johann Christoph and educated another 6:55 in town called Ohrdruf. He excelled at school. He’s also a very boy. He’s also very well read esecially in philosophy and in theology. And he showed very early mucial promise. Now it’s perhaps not surprising he showed early musical promise because Bach came from one of the most musical families that Germany has ever produced. There were over 50 of them who held really quite important posts as professinal musicians in the 17th and 18th centuries. Bach, of course, is the peak but many of his father’s cousins were aslo significant composers in the second half of the 17th century. So he’s born into a fantasic familial network of musicians that stretches throughout most of Germany. So most of his work after he came of age, the music we remember him for, was written in the 18th century. However, he was educated as a 17th century musician in the closing 15 years of that ealier century. And so if we want to think about how German society and the society of the small princely court and these towns in the central Germany shaped Bach, we’ve got to think about what it was to be a musician in the 1600 and what thinkers thought about the relationship between the individual and society at that time. This is Thomas Hobbes’ book Leviathan which was published in 1651. And I think it displays very clearly some of the fundamental ideas that were commonly held in Europe about the relationship between the individual and the community of which they formed apart.

Leviathan is a politically and philosophical work written by Thomas Hobbes. The work concerns the structure of society and government. He argues that justice, civil peace and social unity are best achieved by strong undivided government which justifice the role of an absolute sovereign.

Now we can see here, this giantic figure of the sovereign looming over countryside, a landscape which has both a townscape in it and small villages and the rural setting. Now this enormous figure of the king is holding two things – the sword in the right hand which represents temporal power, that is the secular force of the state, and in his left hand, he’s holding a crosier which represents the power of the church in the state. And Hobbes talks a lot about the reciprocal power that's held between the church and the secular authorities in any state. But what I think is particularly interesting for our purposes today is the fact that the body of the sovereign is made up of small individuals. They are all facing the head. And what this incapsultes visually is the idea that one defined oneself as an individual in the 17th century by the community that one was part of. So the idea of society as a community was absolutely key to their thought. As a member of the community, you had a function. You seved a higher good in some way. Now in secualr terms, this would mean that you serve the state, I mean you could be, as a civil servant, as a soldier, you could be a merchant, you could be in commerce, but you serve the entire state through your activities. More personally, it meant that you could serve the sovereign, the head of that state as a functionary at a court. So when Bach holds positions at princely courts, he would have seen himself as part of the community that were serving the sovereign and thereby serving the state. The other community that everybody would have belonged to in Germany at this time was the religious community of a congregation. In that way, of course, you would have been serving your individual church, you would have been serving your denomination, but most importantly of all, you would have been part of a community of believers who were serving god. So when Bach writes music for the church, we need to think about how he’s contributing to the sense of cohesion that his familial believers would have being part of a community serving god. Now let’s go back and think about some of the instrumental music that Bach wrote when he was at the court at Köthen in the 1720s because this is a time when he really puts together a lot of his best instrumental music.

Prince Leopold von Anhalt-Köthen had a deep understanding of music and appreciated Bach’s musical talent. Bach spent a fruitful time at the young princess’ royal court and composed many masterpieces there.

These include the six Brandenburg Concertos which he completed in 1721. But I think that the highlight of his Köthen years were the six sonatas and partitas he wrote for solo violin. And I’d like to ask Chieri to come onto the stage and play us the gigue from the D minor partita. Now the gigue was an English dance originally in the 16th century. And it was very lively. It was all about leaping and it was a dance that could be danced individually or in a small group. I don’t know have you ever been to Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank of the Thames, so if you’ve seen plays, what happens at the end of a play at the Shakespeare’s Globe? They dance a gigue. And it doesn’t matter what sort of drama it is, if it’s a comedy, you think, well, good, everybody is sort of energetic and lively and therefore an energetic and lively dance, is a right thing to end with. But if it’s a tragedy, you know, I’ve seen Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Globe, in the end, when they were dead, they all got up again and danced a gigue because there were something cathartic about dancing a gigue. So the gigue was the most lively type of dance in a suite written for a court.

Thank you very much. So what we have here is a dance from a dance suite. It’s absolutely emblematic of the function of court music at the time. It was always representing something bigger than itself. Two sort of underlying factors of music for the court – first of all, the richer the music the more it reflected back on the wealth and power of the patron. So if this is a dance that is overwritten, and we might talk in a moment about whether that’s overwritten in some way at all, it is complex in order to praise not just the power and the wealth of Prince Leopold von Anhalt-Köthen but also his ability to perceive quality in music, in other way to his connoisseurship for instrumental music. Now we’ve been talking about the idea of community here and clearly this would have been for the entertainment of the community. But there’s nothing very sort of communal about a solo violinist with one instrument under their chin playing a dance, doesn’t need any accompaniment at all. I mean it seems to be music that is complete in itself. But you know, we could be thinking that the violin as not so much a tool but as a sounding body which it’s got a community of four strings because as we just saw and heard in order to play this gigue, you are constantly having to be leaping between the different strings. When you are playing the gigue, are you thinking about joining up the different registers or do you think about the different character of the strings? Do the strings have a different character for you?

“I think, yes, it has a different character. I always try to think of a baseline and bring in depth during I am playing.”

I wonder if a baseline underpinning this piece in somewhat problamatic because there 17:35 time when as listeners we have to imagine notes that aren’t actually there. I just wonder whether it could be demonstrated there? Would you mind playing the opening reprise, it’s the first section of the dance? And I’ll just hold the few notes down on the piano to highlight the continuity of the baseline which isn’t actually sounded when you play it all alone. This is a very bad taste, of course, but it illustrates the point very clearly, I hope. OK.

So we see that there’s a sort of continuous base actually underpinning it which we have to reconstruct for ourselves. But you can further than that and think, you know, if you 18:33 sort of jam on it a little bit and improvise around it, could we make up an entire trio sonata which had three voices? Shall we have a go with that? This is an even worse taste but might illustrate the point even more strongly.

So we could do something like that probably. OK. I think more that illustrates is that by writing this little one instrument, Bach isn’t scaling his music down, if anything, he’s scaling up by making us as a group of listeners do the work to see what’s not there, and what’s virtually not there in reality. Now there is, of course, a movement, a monumental movement that concludes this partita in D minor when nothing is missing at all. It’s a different type of dance, dance called chaconne. Now the chaconne was a theatrical dance in the 17th century. It was the very grandeur social dance in French operas for example. There were also lots of English examples of it. The chaconne was a social dance which revolved around repeated variations on a baseline. And the greatest of them all, I don’t argue, is this one. (BWV1004)

Thank you. That is, of course, only the first part of the chaconne. There’s a large section in the major key and then it goes back to the minor key at the very end. What the chaconne shows us very, very strongly, I think, are some characteristics of Bach’s musical thinking which come to the fore in the last decade in his life. The first is that he has a sense of totalities. He wants to trump the achievements at other people have had in various genres. He also writes the best chaconne there and he wants to write the most momumental piece of unaccompanied violin music. He gussets by demonstrating to us how wonderful his variation techniques are. It’s an abosolutely compendium of how to vary a basic theme. And in doing so, I think he gives us a very powerful symbol of the sort of relationship again between the individual and the community that we saw in the frontest piece for Leviathan because each of those variations has its own identity in terms of its energy curve and in terms of the figuration at the violinst has to play. But each of them ruled, if you like, by the sovereign which is that repeated baseline that governs each of the progressions. Then after that happy period, he obviously decided that he needed to move his career forward even further. And he got a job again, he left his court position and got a job as a town musician. But this time, he was as the most important town musican in the whole of Germany. The title of his job 25:40 was cantor of St. Thomas’s school and seated director of music in Leipzig. Bach auditioned for the job along with various other well-known composers like Telemann. Bach was not the first person to be offered it. The auditions suggest he’s the third composer to be offered it. But clearly, you know, Leipzig got a good figure when they appointed him. And he stayed there for the remaining 27 years of his life. I think the next thing we need to do is to think about 17th century music in the context of the church. Let’s take Bach’s job at Leipzig and what the services were in Leipzig. Well, there was a principal morning service called Hauptgottesdienst, the most important religious service of the day. It was three hours long. And it started at 7:00 in the morning. Although the religion in Leipzig was the reformed religion of Lutheranism, the liturgy, the shape of religious worship was based very firmly on the catholic precedence of the mass, the idea of celebrating Jesus Last Supper by reenacting it. But in a Lutheran setting, the other parts of the service had a different perspective and a slightly different emphasis that may have in a catholic liturgy. There was much more important on sharing the word of god by bible readings and in educated function, the idea of explaining what those bible readings contained. So the opening part of the service would go like this. The organist would begin by improvising on the first hymn. This would lead into the singing by the entire congregation of the first hymn. That was really important because the choirs by singing together as a congregation, they became a cohesive musical body to start the service. It reinforced the sense of community. Then 28:01 the series of prayers, then the series of biblical readings which would culminate in the reading from the gospel that is from a story from the life of Jesus. And following the gospel would come what was known as the Hauptmusik and what we would call a cantata. Now in Leipzig for the first three years he was in post, Bach wrote one cantata every week for every Sunday, an amazing feat of musical production. Then after the cantata had been performed would come the singing of the creed by everybody. This was the state with the communal belief and doctrinal belief that the entire congregation had. So again, it was a means of social cohesion and the sense of community of believers. That was 28:50 followed by the sermon. The semon would have started at 8:00 in the morning, so already an hour into the service. And the sermon always lasted an hour. Just sort of that sinking. (?) So if you’ve been in a church at 7:00 in the morning, I didn’t know whether you've sat in pews at St. Thomas, not very comfortable. They weren’t meant to be. You were there to pay attention, not to enjoy yourselves and certainly not to catch upon your sleep. But the sermon starts at 8:00 in the morning, it goes on until 9:00 and then the Last Supper, the commemoration of the eucharist, then hammered it in the last hour of the service, accompanied by lots more hymns and prayers. But it’s important that the cantata, the Hauptmusik, was situated between the gospel and the sermon. In other words, it’s at the heart of the bit of the service, that’s about educating the congregation. So Bach’s cantatas become like musical sermons in some way. And they always respond to what the gospel of the day has said and look forward to what the sermon was saying. Now rather keep on talking about this in abstract, I think it’s time that we actually look at a particular example of this and then we’ll consider how members of the congregation in Leipzig might have listened to this music and what they would have taken from it. The cantata that we are going to play is the first movement of Ich habe genug. Ich habe genug, we know it was performed in Leipzig at St. Thomas on 2 February, in 1727. And it was a feast which the Germans called Mariae Reinigung which means the Purification of Mary. This commemorated the ritual moment after the birth of Jesus when Mary and the baby Jesus went to the temple to be blessed and purified after the birth. And as the story goes, they got to the temple and they were seen by a very old man called Simeon who saw this little baby and realised that it wasn’t just a baby that he was seeing, it was the embodiment of god. And Simeon is supposed to have burst out with the statement. “I have seen this child who's going to be everybody’s saviour and now I can die happy.” And I’d like to ask Nick and Tom to come up and we’ll perform the opening aria.

How would Bach’s congregations have read that aria? Well, first of all, let’s work out from the smallest details to the big picture here. You’ve got a base singer representing the old man Simeon. Clearly the base voice is embodying the words of the man. But what’s the oboe doing? I throw open to you. What do you think the function of the oboe in this aria? If the voice is the body, what might the instrument be? “The voice of the soul?” I think so. I think for Bach’s congregation, the duality would have been between the body and the soul. And 36:26 the voice is tied to the words, the oboe can play freely and more loosely around the ideas without being tongue (36:35) to the actual syllables of the German. It’s much as anything else. So here we’ve got a dialogue between the body and the soul. Then there’re the shapes that they play. Let’s think about the bodily shape of that opening gesture. We’ve got a very energetic sharp in take of a breath followed by a long exceleration. It’s always like the effort for breathing of somebody who is on the point of death anyway. So even there’s a musical shape that represents somebody who is at least (?) wishing to die even if he is not dying. Then you’ve got the lulling figure that is played in the strings if you had an entire ensemble here. What sort of gesture does that imply? I just wonder if… it’s almost the idea of, it’s like a lullaby, it’s almost taking in it, it’s also a musical representaion of the old man taking the baby in his arms.

“And also the old man is saying that he is ready to die, so he’s ready for asleep?”

Yes, exactly. You are absolutely right. It’s not much a baby sleeping but it’s the idea of death asleep as well that comes into this. So immediately at this immediate level of gesture and voice against instrument and different types of rhythmic patterns, we can see a very complex, sort of musical exploration of the ideas lettering the text of Ich habe genug. But we could take it further than that. You are listening to the base line, it begins with ♬♬,this was part of what was called the Lamentobass in the 17th century. You’ll hear a falling figure weaving up towards 39:19. which underpined laments both in opera and in church music of the period. Now in this aria, that Lamentobass appears over and over again, right the way through the opeing section with the oboe but also when the voice comes in and sings the words Ich habe genug. So if I play from just before the voice comes in, again the base goes ♬♬. And again, ♬♬ and so on. Right the way through the opening section of the aria. It’s only towards the end of the aria when the text talks about departing this life with joy, in German, Nun wünsch ich, noch heute mit Freuden Von hinnen zu scheiden. That is, I wish from today with joy to depart from here. That something different happens in the baseline. Let me just play what the 40:55 in those bars. This is from 40:58. So as you can hear there at the end, the long peddal note C which keeps appearing bar after the bar, then becomes much more energetic. I think the symbol that Bach is setting up here is that the repeated Lamentobass is the chain holding the body and soul here on earth. When the base gives up that pattern, it’s as though letting those chains go and the soul can fly away as the text says it can depart with joy. So even 42:28 stucture in the entire movement, Bach seems to be putting in a symbol for the meaning of the words. OK, so much for a little bit of Bach giving his congregation a theology lesson. What would have been special about having this lesson in music that they couldn’t have got from a clergyman standing in the pulpit and delivering a sermon 20 minutes later? Well, part of it it’s to do with the fact that it’s a very sensual piece of music. It sounds beautiful and the very beauty of the music would have engaged the minds of the listeners in the way that perhaps a rather dry theological sermon wouldn’t have. The other thing that it does which sermons would find very difficult to do is to collapse historical time, because as a member of congregation listening to that performance, we are clearly meant to empathise with Simeon, the speaker of the word that to be sung to us and being explained to us through Bach’s musical symbolism. And to empathise with his position, he’s not an old man who lived 1700 years ago, he’s somebody who is in front of us in the here and now. (43:43) So having compelling musical settings of this biblical text, one of the most important things that Bach’s doing is collapsing that historical time and making those biblical events very immediate for his musical congregation. By making them very immediate, what he is trying to do again is to bind this sense community. So if we were sitting there, it’s not our idea, our theological idea of what Simeon’s song is about 44:17. Bach is actually showing us what it can mean to us. He’s not just telling us, he’s showing us. Now, of course, we’ve a solo singer here and therefore we are inevitably going to identify as individuals with the words of that individual old man from 2000 years ago. How many of you have actually heard the cantatas as part of a church service? That’s really interesting. I don’t know about you (44:50) , but the idea of getting up and sitting in an uncomfortable and cold church from 7:00 in the morning, waiting for half an hour and then you know only got the prospect of an hour long sermon after the cantata, I am not sure, particularly commit to that myself. The question is, can we, if we really want to get into the mindset of Bach’s congregations, 45:15 go and hear the stuff 45:17 but prepare for it beforehand? Do a bit of reading about, you know, read the gospel of the day, even read some of the sermons that we know were read out in Leipzig that was subsequently published. To think about the liturgical context, try and think about what lesson is Bach trying to teach in this music, and possibly for us as musicians, particularly one to think, how is he trying to teach that lesson? And therefore how are we to take, well, the different elements that we discussed in relations Ich habe genug for example. Now as I say, in the last ten years of his life, Bach took this idea of wrapping things up, the final bit of compendious thinking that Bach does, I think the very greatest example is the 46:09 puts together in the last 18 months of his life. And that is the B Minor Mass. Now the real question is why did Bach, as a protestant composer, write a catholic mass that takes an hour and a half to perform? Clearly he had no sense that this would be performed as part of a church service. What he’s doing at the end of his life is giving us the very best of what he can produce as a composer and asking us just to think about how imaginative he is, how good his craft is and how he can link together craft and imagination to produce this absolutely riveting rich music. He was in his mid fifties, and he starts thinking not about what is the function of this piece, it’s going to be played tomorrow or next week, he starts thinking about how is my music going to be perceived by posterity by those after he died. But this is music that is only being heard in his head. He’s got no prospect of being performed in St. Thomas next week or next month. And so, I would argue that by the end of his life, Bach has almost got to the point of those two guys that we saw at the start of this lecture. He has equivelent in his late B Minor Mass choruses, of sitting there with his headphones on. It’s a personal individual repeatable experience, he can run choruses in his head as many times as he likes but he’s never going to have the embodied socially constructed performances that have characterised his career as a whole. And that is his posterity to us.

Thank you.