Listening to Bach
Modern audiences can learn to listen to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor BWV 232 and Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 in ways that reflect eighteenth-century sensibilities and that recognize our place in the tradition of the works’ performance and interpretation. The sacred music of Bach’s time recognized both old and new styles. In the Mass in B Minor, Bach contrasts, combines, and reconciles them to make a musical point. Listeners can also learn to hear musical types and musical topics that were significant in the eighteenth century, including sleep arias, love duets, and secular choral arias, and how Bach put these types to use. A sensitivity to musical style also offers ways to listen to and think about music created by parody—the reuse of music with new words—like almost all of the Mass in B Minor and most of the Christmas Oratorio. Parody, though interesting, is almost never audible and is of little consequence compared with what listening tells us about a piece. Modern performances are stamped with audible consequences of our place in the twenty-first century. The ideological choices we make in performing the Mass and the Oratorio, the present-day way of performing the Christmas work in relation to the calendar, and the legacy of reception and interpretation have all affected the way his music is understood and heard today.