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Composing music


von Faulkenstein

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Was there another church in Germany at the time?

Indubitably Yes. Though we should remember that 'Germany' as we know it today did not then exist. I knew even without thinking that Bach worked at one time for a Calvinist, who proved upon checking to be Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. During that time Bach had no church music to write (the prince had no use for it) and, funnily enough, didn't write much; confining himself mostly to the Orchestral Suites, the Partitas and Suites for solo violin, and the Cello Suites.

 

At the time of the Reformation, some of the German princes Reformed and some didn't. In Osnabrück they apparently had an arrangement where prince-bishops were for many years alternately Protestant and Roman Catholic. I forbear to comment on this.

 

In Thuringia, the state where Bach was born, there was at the time a minority of Roman Catholics. Centred around Erfurt, according to my research. There was also a [dwindling, apparently] small number of Anabaptists, a sect about which I know next to nothing.

 

No doubt there were others whom my necessarily limited research has not tracked down.

 

Bach wrote an enormous amount of church music, including the full liturgy cycle (masses etc for the four-year church cycle). Its difficult to argue that the chu[r]ch did not have a huge impact on Bach's work.

I do not contend the first part of your statement at all. His output was prodigious, especially cosidering how complex some of his polyphony is (My favourite fugue of his, if forced to choose, would be BWV 542 in G minor. Second would be the last thing he wrote - the final quadruple(!) fugue of Die Kunst der Fuge - which famously even thematically includes his surname in German musical notation: B-A-C-H) . But for much of his working lifetime writing church music was part of his job, and I respectfully submit that it would be equally difficult to argue that he could have made a living without doing so.

 

I look at it the other way round - Bach had a huge influence on music in general, in the long term - and also on church music as well.

 

As a final point, as well as once being admonished for admitting a female(!) into his organ loft, Bach was also once criticised by church authorities for quietly going to the tavern during the (hour-long!) Sunday sermons.

 

I must say that I've known similar organists.

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Great post finrod! :eek_big:

 

I suppose semantics got in the way of our mutual consensus.

 

Do you compose any music yourself?

*Finrod bows*

Thank you. My apologies for not making myself clearer. I've learnt that communicating through text alone can go... somewhat awry at times.

 

I was waiting for someone to ask me that question! Yes, I do - but only from time to time. My manuscript pad is full of unfinished four-stave sketches, the latest being based on the 'theme by Haydn' (the St. Antoni Chorale) that Brahms used in his Variations on it.

 

I once (foolishly!) offered to write an overture for an amateur production of Under Milk Wood and ended up 'doing a Rossini' - locking myself in a room a couple of days before curtain up and not emerging until I had the score completed and the synthesizer programmed.

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