Music in the Castle of Heaven

The Sweet Triangle

On one level, John Eliot Gardiner's "Bach" is a biography of the most sublime composer J.S. Bach. But it is so much more than a parade of facts. It is endlessly informative and illuminative. 

Most of Bach's music was done as part of his work for the Lutheran Church, and according to its liturgical cycle. It is not surprising then that Gardiner deeply explores Bach's spiritualistic bearing. The works are directed to or from heaven, as indicated in the book's subtitle: "Music in the Castle of Heaven." Worth noting it is that Gardiner is penetratingly aware of the abyss between the trusting cantata writer Bach and today's world, mistrustful of such. We may never see another so strong in "imaginative gift, cratsmanship and human empathy."

Gardiner is a leader of the original instrument movement that arose in the 1970s He was a driver of a movement that sought a path to re-inhabit music that was becoming something of a lifeless carcass, and involved much more than new re-makes of old strings. 

That meant going back to Renaissance and Baroque music to find a new way forward to the Classical.

Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra Founder Gardiner is among the world's leading conductors, and a heck of a writer too! One gets the impression that he kept copious journals over 50-plus years. In the early years, but ever after, this was a quest to find the spirit presence in the music, via experiment and practice with instruments, vocal techniques, and conceptual approaches. 

Yes, he has come to inhabit Bach's music on a most intimate plane.

The questions asked of Bach by the young Gardiner - he started the Monteverdi Choir in 1964 - are the same one's Bob Dylan might ask of Jimmy Rodgers. 

In Gardiner's narrative, there is much in the way of guidance for artists of all ilks:

The trick for the conductor in the practice for the BBC Northern Radio Orchestra was: 

To know what to prioritize, when to intervene and what to leave to chance.

At the Ansbach Bach Festival, the admonition was:

To give concentrated care to pronounciation .. to bring out the drama and rhetoric, and sense of occasion. 

With the Orchestre revolutionnaire et romantique, playing Verdi, Debussy and others, the aim was always :

To strip away layers of accreted performance practice to reveal ... to locate the sharp and vivid elan in the music that appears to us now ... to approach afresh free of ritualized cliches.

I think these guides may be applied to blues, jazz, and rock n roll. I will swim some more in Gardiner's Bach. I will head out to Wisconsin for Bold Stumpalooza. - Jack Vaughan

Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven: Gardiner, John Eliot: 9781400031436: Amazon.com: Books

Throne of the 7th Heaven - James Hampton. Smithsonian.