《Lecture 16耶鲁大学开放课程《聆听音乐》讲稿 》.pdf

Yale University Listening to Music Lecture 16 Professor Craig Wright: Today were going to start talking about music of the Baroque period, 1600 to 1750, exemplified by J.S. Bach. Today will be the first of two presentations about the music of Bach: one, today, dealing with Bachs vocal music, the other coming in sections--yes, we have sections on Thursday, Friday and Monday--having to do with the instrumental music of J.S. Bach. So were going to start now with Baroque music and Bach, and a word, first, about Bachs biography. Bach came from a very long line of musicians. Indeed, ten generations of Bachs were musicians. It goes back to old Veit Bach in the sixteenth century and continues generation after generation into the nineteenth century. In the area in which Bach was born, this small town of Eisenach--you can see the towns name up there and the date in which he was born, 1685--in this area of Thuringia, the region in which Eisenach sits, the word Bach was eponymous. In other words, a Bach simply meant a musician just like we have the word Kleenex, for example, or we have the word Xerox, that begin to take on the connotations of an entire class. So to be a Bach in that area was to be a musician. Johann Sebastian Bach was simply the most talented of this long-lived clan of musicians. From the age of nine, J.S. Bach was orphaned. Both his parents had died by that time, so he was raised for the most part by his older brother, Johann Christoph Bach, who was a student of our Johann Pachelbel. So there is this connection between the Bachs and Pachelbel, and for the most part, J.S. Bach was self-taught. How did he teach himself music? Well, he copied music. He copied music for two reasons: One, to learn the musical style and two, to get music, because you simply couldnt go to a photocopying machine and copy this--the music of Corelli or the music of Vivaldi. You had to copy it down yourse