Bach's surviving passions are an essential part of the modern repertory. These large, complex pieces are well loved, but behind these familiar passion settings lurk questions and problems that emerge from our distance from their original context. Bach scholar Daniel Melamed provides unique insight i[...]
"An Introduction to Bach Studies" is a comprehensive guide to the resources and materials of Bach scholarship, both for students beginning work in the enormous literature on J. S. Bach, and for the Bach specialist looking for a convenient and up-to-date survey of the field. Covering a broad range of[...]
This 1995 volume brings together essays on J. S. Bach and members of his family by a distinguished group of scholars. The essays address Bach's compositions, his knowledge of the musical past, his study of contemporaries, and the cultivation of his own music by later generations. The studies draw on[...]
The motets of J. S. Bach are probably the most sophisticated works ever composed in the genre. Nevertheless, Daniel Melamed maintains, the view that they constitute a body of work quite separate from the German motet tradition is mistaken. He starts by considering the eighteenth-century understandin[...]