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Big fan of pop music, mostly secular, from 1300s-1850s. Studying Bach manuscripts directly (or repros, as I had to settle for) indicated to me that publishers d
by tomcam 4y ago
Big fan of pop music, mostly secular, from 1300s-1850s. Studying Bach manuscripts directly (or repros, as I had to settle for) indicated to me that publishers did a lot of guesswork over the years, some of it obviously wrong, but a bunch more of it just their best guess. I decided I was just ignorant about the number of errors I saw.
I managed to score a lunch with Yo-Yo Ma at a charity event a few years ago & was proven satisfyingly right. He had to make a ton judgment calls but found that over the years many errors have been introduced by publishers. Of course he was able to study the originals.
Also the British Museum will give almost anyone with a passport surprisingly liberal access to their collections. Traveled there from the US with my teenage kid only to find out the "almost" part, which is that you must be 18 or older. Understandable, but... sigh.
- kashunstva 4y ago> many errors have been introduced by publishers Indeed. Much of Beethoven’s correspondence with his publishers has been preserved. Constant kvetching about errors. Access to the manuscript is so important. My daughter is a violinist. One of her editions of the 6 Sonatas and Partitas edited by Galamian contains a reproduction of the manuscript. So while he makes editorial choices, there’s immediate access to the original. In some cases I prefer this to the vaunted Urtext editions. Even the manuscripts contain errors though. I’m thinking of Mozart, where little harmonic errors and accidental accidentals (!) crop up with some frequency. “Pop music of the 1300s - 1850’s” - love the terminology!
- tgv 4y agoNice, but IMO you can't call Bach 1700s pop music. It simply never was popular.
- stereo 4y agoBach quotes pop music all the time, for example in the Quodlibet of the Goldberg variations: https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/BWV988-Quodlibet[Braatz].htm https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/BWV988-Quodlibet[Braa... It's probably easiest to listen to the Bergamasca melody which was used endlessly in pop songs at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Lohr99FQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Lohr99FQA , one German version Bach's contemporaries would have been familiar with at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHypa4P7jT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHypa4P7jT8 , and compare with the Quodlibet at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvZfe35c410 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvZfe35c410
- ot 4y agoThe fact that Bach quotes pop music doesn't, on its own, make Bach music pop.
- tomcam 4y agoI don’t really care how you want to label the music I enjoy. There just isn’t a taxonomy for it that I know of. It’s mostly but not always secular. It’s often folk, but sometimes it’s classical or baroque. It’s mostly from the west, but also the East and Middle East. And it always has a catchy melody.
- AlanYx 4y agoDuring his lifetime, that's true. However, there was a period in the first part of the 1800s when his works flirted with popular acclaim, especially after Mendelssohn revived the St. Matthew Passion in 1829.
- hdb2 4y agowhat a fascinating story! I had no idea that it was so easy to get that close to Bach's actual manuscripts. I would love to hear more about your conversation with Yo-Yo Ma. have you written down any of this stuff somewhere?
- tomcam 4y agoIt wasn’t a conversation that most people would have any interest in. It was a very specific set of questions about how he got access to the music, how he decided what was a mistake or not, practice techniques, and so on. I will tell you that, like most very smart people his answers were clear, economical, and never couched in obscure jargon.