[HN Gopher] Bach's Cantata Calendar
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Bach's Cantata Calendar
Author : Schiphol
Score : 71 points
Date : 2024-02-19 10:11 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (whichbachcantata.be)
(TXT) w3m dump (whichbachcantata.be)
| ramesh31 wrote:
| His music is divine manna gifted from the heavens, but I just
| can't stand the cantatas. Too church-y.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| You're in luck, today's is a secular cantata.
| bowsamic wrote:
| That's kind of the point, they're literally called "church
| cantatas"
|
| Also, it's weird how you make an explicit and positive
| religious reference and then express distaste at the religious
| context that Bach composed for and in. In what sense is it
| divine then, if you dislike the music he wrote for the church?
| gumby wrote:
| There are other paths to divinity than christian and perhaps
| the commenter prefers one of those.
|
| A good example would be Plato's cave metaphor (predating
| christianity by centuries), arguing that there is an
| intangible divine world. Mathematics, clearly also beloved to
| Bach, is a nonreligious tool to appreciate that divine world.
|
| One can listen to the intricacies of the Passacaglia und Fuge
| c-Moll and glimpse an inscrutable world behind it. Is that
| not divine?
| bowsamic wrote:
| I don't know, I have no sense of the divine. I enjoy the
| music and hear that Bach was a Christian. I am a huge Bach
| fan but I don't know what the divine is and doubt I'll ever
| know. I am like a p zombie but for spiritual matters
| gumby wrote:
| I find when I listen to these fugues my mind is drawn to
| and becomes lost in the overtones and the mathematical
| depths and recursion. Being transported to another place
| that way, out of my body and sense of where I am, I
| consider divine.
|
| Bach is not the only such, but he is the master.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I can't think of anything more Earthly than enjoying the
| beauty of mathematics and music
| matt-attack wrote:
| Wouldn't mathematics transcend our tiny blue dot? Sure
| topics like geography, biology and history don't surely
| math and physics do!
| bowsamic wrote:
| No, I think mathematics and physics are invented by
| humans in a human form for humans, but then again, I'm a
| theoretical physicist, so I'm biased
| gumby wrote:
| Wow, for me things that can't be physically represented
| (at a human scale anyway) such as most of mathematics,
| physics, and frankly music are fascinating, definitely
| feel real, can be explored, but yes, are beyond concrete
| representation.
|
| Could one write a 16-part invention? I doubt it;
| certainly I think it would be hard to conceive of playing
| it, but I can "look into" a complex invention as I hear
| it and see how it could subdivide and get an idea of
| where that could lead. Certainly anything beyond the
| physically representative is to me sublime, and still
| able to trigger synesthesthetic response.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I don't have synesthesia, and I don't really have a
| concept of the sublime. All of reality is "the same" to
| me
| zoogeny wrote:
| There isn't a singular experience of the divine that you
| either have or do not have. The Bhagavad Gita, for
| example, in large part discusses the multitude of ways
| one can experience the divine. It strongly makes the case
| that doing ones duty is equally valid to both worship and
| seeking spiritual wisdom.
|
| The story is based around a warrior prince named Arjuna
| having a conversation with the manifestation of God in
| the form of Krishna. Arjuna is confused because Krishna
| is explaining that giving up all earthly desire is the
| path to union with the divine. Yet Krishna is also
| imploring Arjuna to do his duty as a warrior prince and
| to fight in a battle to regain his kingdom. This is
| obviously a contradiction, since desiring to defeat his
| opponents and regain an earthly kingdom is in opposition
| to our traditional understanding of religious observance.
|
| The idea these ancient authors were trying to communicate
| to us is that not everyone is going to be a monk. You
| need bricklayers, bakers, doctors and programmers. The
| trick is to realize that fully being a human, engaged in
| some activity, is equivalent to experiencing the divine.
| Nowadays we might feel more comfortable with the secular
| "flow" ideas, that mental state some experience when
| completely absorbed in their work.
|
| So don't worry if you can't find the divine through
| ritual worship or through the exploration of spiritual
| wisdom. The divine is right there and possible for anyone
| to experience (if you believe the ancient authors of
| spiritual works like the Gita).
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I took the parent comment's "contrast" as a bit of joke, but
| even if it wasn't intended that way, I think it expresses
| something very real about the way some of us experience
| "spirituality" - i.e. that the rituals and "orderliness" of
| say, the Catholic church, seem to get in the way of
| spirituality more than they help it. Contrasting this with
| sacred music can help illuminate what I mean - music seems,
| in some way, to bypass much of the "logical" aspects of the
| ritual and hit us somewhere a little bit deeper.
|
| I'm not quite sure where I stand on this, as a lapsed
| Catholic and also as a lapsed "New Atheist" who's found
| himself somewhere in the middle (the dreaded and wishy-washy
| "spiritual but not religious" category).
|
| I share a general... mistrust of heavily ritualized /
| dogmatized religion. But at the same time, I recently
| attended a Catholic funeral for my grandma, and was very
| affected by some of the procedures. In particular, the final
| funeral blessing at the end of the mass, where the priests
| swung the censer over the casket, was quite beautiful - the
| smoke slowly ascending, lit by the stained glass, and the
| walk out with the casket with light streaming through those
| windows.
|
| These rituals stick around for a reason - it doesn't have to
| be a supernatural reason, but it certainly felt, during that
| service, that the whole mass had been very well designed to
| hit at some deep-seated and primal feelings within the
| attendees.
|
| So anyway, as seems to be my pattern on these matters, I find
| myself somewhere in the middle - able to appreciate both the
| ritualistic and naturalistic approaches to spirituality. (But
| never quite able to come down hard for one side or the
| other!)
| MengerSponge wrote:
| The style has endured mostly in sacred music, so I get the
| association. They aren't all church-y though!
|
| The Coffee Cantata, for example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nifUBDgPhl4
| swannodette wrote:
| I felt that way at first, but after getting around to listening
| to a few of them you start to realize he repurposed a lot his
| favorite material from these cantatas into his instrumental
| works. For example, one of Bach's innovations was the keyboard
| concerto - where the keyboard played the central solo role. The
| profound Harpsichord Concerto in D minor BWV 1052,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZX_XCYokQo, is actually
| reworked from the cantatas BWV 146 & 148.
|
| While there's obviously plenty to enjoy w/o dipping into the
| cantatas, you might miss out on making these kinds of
| connections which I think really enriches our understanding of
| the instrumental works.
| villasv wrote:
| There's one about a lady addicted to coffee
| motohagiography wrote:
| Amazing that it never clicked for me that yes, these were written
| for calendar events. It's hard not to get into Bach without
| triggering any latent apophenic urges, and now I need to go
| through each of these pieces looking for intentional geometric
| relationships to the calendar events they were written for.
|
| An interesting AI challenge might be to determine whether a given
| thing is or contains a puzzle.
| HuShifang wrote:
| John Eliot Gardner's "Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven" is a
| sort of musical biography featuring a (very) deep dive on the
| cantatas.
| acheron wrote:
| WCRB in Boston does a Bach show every week which is available for
| streaming. Lots of times there's a cantata that fits the
| calendar.
|
| https://www.classicalwcrb.org/show/the-bach-hour
| sumpmonster wrote:
| Very well done! You might also be interested in my Bach cantatas
| app (https://www.cantatasapp.com) for iOS and Android which has
| an infinite liturgical calendar and lots more of information
| about Bach's wonderful cantatas (complete text, instrumentations,
| hymns, readings and even score references).
| terminalcommand wrote:
| Great app, but unfortunately google play in Turkey says "this
| item is not available in your country.". Was this something you
| were aware of?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| This data is crying out for a calendar view.
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(page generated 2024-02-19 23:01 UTC)