Description: Bach's cantatas are among the highest achievements of Western musical art, yet studies of the individual cantatas that are both illuminating and detailed are quite few. In this book, Eric Chafe combines theological, historical, analytical, and interpretive approaches to the cantatas to offer readers and listeners alike the richest possible experience of these works--that is, given the composer's intentions as well as the enduring and universal qualities of the music itself.
Concentrating on a small number of representative cantatas, mostly from the Leipzig cycles of 1723-24 and 1724-25, and in particular on Cantata 77, Chafe illustrates how Bach strove to mirror both the dogma and the mystery of religious experience in musical allegory.Review Quotes: "...Chafe has worked to push Bach studies beyond formalist analysis and to demonstrate how the composer represented Lutheran theology by means of musical language and structures...Perhap's Chafe most interesting contribution is the application of his own pioneering studies of modality in Monteverdi to Bach's compositions."--Theological Studies
"Chafe is a major Bach scholar, and this book will become a classic in the literature."--Choice"Informed examination of the Bach cantatas still yields new information and interpretations. Eric Chafe's Analyzing Bach Cantatas is a good example...of most interest to music scholars, and particularly to Bach specialists. However, it is good for the rest of us to be reminded occasionally that there is-or should be-more to church music than just entertaining sounds, for church music is itself a theological statement."--Southwestern Journal of Theology"....Analyzing Bach Cantatas is recommended for anyone who has a serious interest in gaining a deeper understanding of Bach's cantatas and one of the musical-allegorical means Bach may have employed to embody the meaning of the text."--Journal of American Musicological Society"[A]n extremely ambitious work...consistently clear and straightforwardChafe offers powerful interpretive tools to his readers."--Current Musicology"The chief strengths of Analyzing Bach's Cantatas lie in its ability to enhance our sensitivity to Bach's use of tonality and in Chafe's numerous astute and eloquently expressed insights into aspects of Bach's sacred vocal works."--Journal of American Musicological Society"The book's observations are firmly grounded in the realm of the heard, or the felt. The results achieve the aim of all good analysis: a direct impact on the reader's musical encounter. Listeners, who now mainly experience Bach's cantatas in the context of the concert hall rather than the church, will find their hearing altered by their new awareness of the network of sacred meaning that Chafe brings to light."--The Eighteenth Century Current Bibliography