I don’t like a lot of old music. Mozart, Brahms, et al. don’t really whet my whistle, tickle my fancy, float my boat, or light my fire. Having said that, I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Bach. I think counterpoint is just about the coolest dang thing any musician ever thought of, and nobody’s ever done it better than Johann. That’s why I was so excited when I read about Don Freund (composer and professor at Indiana University) putting a series of lectures on YouTube called “Composition Lessons from J. S. Bach.”
They seem to be geared toward an audience that may not have a thorough technical understanding of the music already, but there is a lot of compelling information in them. Freund runs through a significant chunk of the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, pointing out anything that he finds particularly interesting. That’s really a lot of what composers do when they listen to music, though. “Hey that sounds neat. I’ll take some of that.” Here’s a couple of the videos Freund has posted: part of the introduction, and part of the discussion of the C-sharp minor fugue. I encourage you to check out more of them on his YouTube channel.
Despite spending a week or so being nervous about Saturday’s John Corigliano masterclass, I think it went pretty well. I presented Falling up the down escalator, a saxophone quartet that H2 has recorded. The format of the masterclass was very different from the one John Adams described on his blog last week. Corigliano was not interested in his or anyone else’s opinions about the music. “That’s meaningless,” he said. He wanted to demonstrate to us what musical material people were able to observe and retain after one hearing. After all, in most situations, that’s all anyone is likely to hear a new piece of music.