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In the walk through my own personal history, by way of exploring the musical debts that I owe in my development as a student and interpreter of Bach’s music, I left off at the end of my undergraduate years at the Hartt School, where I was steeped in an almost visceral, though certainly not anti-intellectual, Bach performance practice ideal.  But all that changed in graduate school.

Again, I was so lucky in my almost accidental choice of a conducting teacher in Marguerite Brooks at the Yale School of Music.  Maggi represented a new generation of choral conductors who placed a great value on scholarship, score study and a broader academic context.  Add to that the considerable resources of Yale, and I had several eye-opening experiences in graduate school.

Perhaps the most illustrative example of the crossroads in Bach performance practice in 1987 comes from my work as the harpsichordist in the Yale Bach Aria Group.  We had two coaches for this ensemble, and you couldn’t have two more perfect avatars of the diametrically opposed Bach camps at the time.

Ronald Roseman, who had been the oboist with the Bach Aria Group in New York for many years, was an old school “modern instrument” man, but was absolutely devoted to the music of Bach.  His musical decisions were based as much on his own instincts and experiences as they were on performance practice, but that is not to say that he was capricious in his music-making.  His sense of Bach interpretation had a striking integrity, and he always challenged us to get to the core of the meaning of each aria, always beginning with the text.  A deeply spiritual man, Roseman was the first Bach teacher I had who opened my eyes to the essential theological component of Bach’s music.

Ronald Roseman in Brandenburg Concerto No. 2

Jaap Schroeder, on the other hand, had established himself as one of the world’s greatest Baroque violinists, one of the early specialists in the emerging field of specialization.  His coachings were peppered with a more orthodox scholarship, and he would cite treatises and studies to support his assertions.  He would discuss Baroque dance forms so that we would understand the metrical basis of the movements we played, and he always wanted us to pare down our performance to reflect the basic structure of Bach’s music as faithfully as possible.  This was perhaps most challenging for me as the harpsichordist; with Roseman, the full-bodied continuo realizations that I would come up with were always encouraged, replete with trills and flair; with Schroeder, I was encouraged to drop as much as possible and provide the metrical core instead.

Jaap Schroeder playing Bach\’s E Major Violin Concerto

Reconciling these two influences has been at the core of my musical education—finding an interpretation that is based on solid performance practice techniques, but that is rooted in the theological questions that Bach himself struggled to understand and work out through his music.

I’d mention two other wonderful teachers I encountered at Yale, because they added so much to my understanding of the thoroughness that is required when dealing with Bach’s music.

The first was Paul Brainard, one of the most esteemed of the Bach scholar-editors of his generation.  Though he was semi-retired by the time that I took a seminar with him, he was still editing volumes for the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, including the Easter Oratorio.  As it had been with Kerala Snyder, it was inspiring (and humbling!) to see a top-tier musicologist at work.  The seminar that I took with Dr Brainard dealt with the St John Passion and the extant performing materials that Bach left behind, all of which provides essential information about decisions that we make as conductors in performing that and other Bach works.  That will become important in this journey through the B Minor Mass in the months to come, as we explore those movements which were based on earlier cantata movements, using the “parody” technique of re-composition.

The final influence that I’d like to mention from my formal education was Rosalyn Tureck, who spent a semester at Yale, where she gave a weekly lecture/masterclass on Bach’s music.  That was a real thrill: after all, Tureck has been called the “high priestess of Bach”, and she was one of the last Bach superstars of the pre-“authenticity” years.  From Tureck, I learned the importance of getting to the core of the musical material, its architecture and its harmonic structure, in order to understand how to transmit its essence.  Though she was a true virtuoso herself, I was struck how, week after week, she would dismiss those phenomenal graduate piano students who would sit down and play the most complex and showy of Bach’s keyboard repertoire.  She seemed unimpressed with their stellar technique for the sake of technique; instead, she exhorted them over and over again to strip away the flashy part of the pieces—especially the ornamentation—until they truly understood the melodies themselves.  (She never cared about the trills at all, in fact—only about the appoggiaturas that began them.)

Rosalyn Tureck plays the opening of the work that made her famous

There are more debts to repay before I can even begin to write about the B Minor Mass!!  Sorry about that, but bear with me— there’s a bit more to come…