Musicians - Johann Sebastian Bach

Home > Listing Index > Musicians > Johann Sebastian Bach

	Musicians - Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach (21 March 1685 O.S. – 28 July 1750 N.S.) was a prolific German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra and solo instruments drew together almost all of the strands of the baroque style and brought it to its ultimate maturity. Although he introduced no new musical forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust and dazzling contrapuntal technique, a seemingly effortless control of harmonic and motivic organisation from the smallest to the largest scales, and the adaptation of rhythms and textures from abroad, particularly Italy and France.

Bach's forceful suavity and vast output have earned him wide acknowledgment as one of the greatest composers in the Western tonal tradition. Revered for their intellectual depth, technical command and artistic beauty, his works include the Brandenburg concertos, the keyboard suites and partitas, the Mass in B Minor, the St. Matthew Passion, The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue and a large number of cantatas, of which about 220 survive. An example of some of these stylistic traits appears below, in the chorus Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe from the Christmas Oratorio, written in 1734 during his mature period.

Biography

Early years

Johann Sebastian Bach was a member of one of the most extraordinary musical families of all time. For more than 200 years, the Bach family had produced dozens of worthy performers and composers during a period in which the church, local government and the aristocracy provided significant support for professional music making in the German-speaking world, particularly in the eastern electorates of Thuringia and Saxony. Sebastian's father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was a talented violinist and trumpeter in Eisenach, a town of some 6,000 residents in Thuringia/Germany. The post involved the organisation of secular music and participation in church music. Sebastian's uncles were all professional musicians, ranging from church organists and court chamber musicians to composers. Contemporary documents indicate that just the name Bach had come to be used as a synonym for "musician."

Bach's mother died in 1694, and his father the following year. The 10-year-old orphan moved in with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, the organist at Ohrdruf, a nearby town. There, he copied, studied and performed music, and apparently received valuable tuition from his brother. This exposed him to the work of the great South German composers of the day—such as Pachelbel and Froberger—and possibly the music of North Germans and of the French composers such as Lully, Louis Marchand and Marin Marais. The boy probably witnessed and assisted the maintenance of the organ, a precursor to his lifelong professional activity as a consultant in the building and restoration of organs. Bach's obituary indicates that Sebastian would copy music out of his brother’s scores, but because scores were valuable and private commodities at the time, Johann Christoph forbade Johann to do so.

At the age of 14, Sebastian was awarded a choral scholarship, with his older school friend, Georg Erdmann, to study at the prestigious St Michael’s School in Lüneburg, not far from Hamburg, the largest city in Germany. This involved a long journey with his friend, probably partly on foot and partly by coach. His two years there appear to have been critical in exposing him to a wider palette of European culture than he would have experienced in Thuringia. In addition to singing in the a cappella choir, it is likely that he played the School’s three-manual organ and harpsichords. He probably learned French and Italian, and received a thorough grounding in theology, Latin, history, geography and physics. He would have come into contact with sons of noblemen from northern Germany sent to the highly selective school to prepare for careers in diplomacy, government and the military. It is likely that he had significant contact with organists in Lüneburg, in particular Georg Böhm, and visited several of those in Hamburg, such as Reincken and Bruhns. Through these musicians, he probably gained access to the largest instruments he had played. It is also likely that he became acquainted with the music of the North German tradition, especially the work of Dieterich Buxtehude, with music manuscripts from further afield, and with treatises on music theory that were in the possession of these men.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Johann Sebastian Bach ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Johann Sebastian Bach; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay