Free Republic

Finding the Church in a Bach Fugue Msgr. Charles Pope • July 31, 2017 • credit: Jaclyn Lippelmann, Catholic StandardMany of you have likely read the classic description of the Church from the 1951 novel Dan England and the Noonday Devil, by Myles Connolly. It is a wonderful reminder that the Church is not an institution, but a Body, made up of members who, each in his own unique way, give witness to the one Body, which is Christ. Here is an excerpt from the book: What is the Church?The Church to me is all important things everywhere. It...

Enjoy this music, an outstanding achievement of human accomplishment and Western civilization.

A non-political thread just for the heck and beauty of it. I offer for your consideration Johann Sebastian Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. From the Wikipedia Entry: The Well Tempered Clavier is a collection of solo keyboard music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. He gave the title to a book of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys, dated 1722, composed "for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study". Bach later compiled a second book of the same kind, dated 1742, with the...

The "Air" by Johann Sebastian Bach from the 3rd Suite for Orchestra (D major; BWV 1068)

Eleanor Bartsch was performing with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, during which she played Bach’s Concerto in D Minor. During the performance, she noticed two elephants outside a tent at the back of the Circus World Museum, who seemed to be reacting to the music.

"It took Bach for me to figure out there was something mighty and substantial in classical music," Thile said before the concert, sitting with mandolin in hand, his left foot resting over his right, alongside conductor Jeffrey Kahane. "It always seemed to me that it wasn't grooving – which is very simplistic. It grooves, in a different way. To me, it was a revelation; it was mesmerizing to my core." The desire to learn Bach's solo Sonatas and Partitas for violin pushed Thile to teach himself to read music, he said, as learning Bach by ear "was slow-going."

LEIPZIG, Germany — For 800 years, the St. Thomas Boys Choir has been filling churches with pure, young voices. Now it’s confronting a confounding phenomenon: Every year, those voices are cracking with teenage angst just a little earlier than before. Other boys choirs have been noticing it, too, as an unrelenting march of puberty sweeps voices into rebellion. Over recent decades, the already-short careers of their sopranos have started to end between six months and a year earlier, challenging them at times such as Easter, for which choral music such as J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion was written with difficult...

Manasquan, NJ --(Ammoland.com)- Freedom rest on our shoulders — let’s stand proud and defend it together”‘ says three term NRA Board member Scott Bach. “If all we have left to muster is sheer force of will and bold intention, we will always find a way to defend freedom – always.” These words embody the spirit of a tenacious Second Amendment activist, who has devoted more than a decade to defending gun rights both nationally and on the “front lines” of the Northwest – where politicians who control government are hostile to firearms freedoms. As president of the Association of New...

HERE goes. This article completes my two-week project to select the top 10 classical music composers in history, not including those still with us. Left, 1. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). From top left, 2. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), 3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 — 91). 4. Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828). From middle left, 5. Claude Achille Debussy (1862 — 1918), 6. Igor Stravinsky (1882 — 1971), 7. Johannes Brahms (1833 — 97). From bottom left, 8. Giuseppe Verdi (1813 — 1901), 9. Richard Wagner (1813 — 83), 10. Bela Bartok (1881 — 1945). I am about to reveal my list,...

YOU know that a new year has truly arrived when critics stop issuing all those lists of the best films, books, plays, recordings and whatever of the year gone by. These lists seem to be popular with readers, and they stir up lively reactions. snip... Yet in other fields, critics and insiders think bigger. Film institutes periodically issue lists of the greatest films of all time. (“Citizen Kane” seems to have a lock on the top spot.) Rock magazines routinely tally the greatest albums ever. And think of professional tennis, with its system of rankings, telling you exactly which player...

AmeriCorps Inspector General Shredded White House Documents at Request of Agency’s Spokeswoman Thursday, November 12, 2009 By Fred Lucas, Staff Writer (CNSNews.com) – The acting inspector general of AmeriCorps said he shredded White House documents at the request of an agency press spokeswoman that pertained to the controversial firing of the previous inspector general, who was ousted after investigating a political ally of President Obama. The e-mail message from agency spokeswoman Ranit Schmelzer seemed urgent, as she wrote: “WH documents were sent in error. Can you please destroy them? And can you confirm you receive this e-mail?” Acting IG Kenneth...

New software has enabled researchers to recreate a long forgotten musical instrument called the Lituus. The 2.4m (8ft) long trumpet-like instrument was played in Ancient Rome but fell out of use some 300 years ago. Bach's motet (a choral musical composition) "O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht" was one of the last pieces of music written for the Lituus. Now, for the first time, this 18th Century composition has been played as it should have been heard... the Lituus produced a piercing trumpet-like sound interleaving with the vocals. Until now, no one had a clear idea of what this...

Catherine Bach has traded her daisy dukes for a pair of Jessica Simpson mom jeans. The 55-year-old former "Dukes of Hazzard" star filled up her tank in L.A. yesterday. Daisy Duke's got gas, y'all.

Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March 1685 [O.S. 21 March] – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity. Although he introduced no new forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust contrapuntal technique, an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organisation in composition for diverse instrumentation, and the adaptation of rhythms and textures from abroad, particularly Italy and France. Revered for their intellectual depth, technical command and artistic beauty, Bach's works...

Staying recently in a South Yorkshire town called Rotherham—described in one guidebook as “murky,” an inadequate word for the place—I was interested to read in the local newspaper how the proprietors of some stores are preventing hooligans from gathering outside to intimidate and rob customers. They play Bach over loudspeakers, and this disperses the youths in short order; they flee the way Count Dracula fled before holy water, garlic flowers, and crucifixes. The proprietors had previously tried a high-pitched noise generator whose mosquito-like whine only those younger than 20 could detect. This method, too, proved effective, but the owners abandoned...

More has been said and written about Glenn Gould than about any other classical musician of the 20th century. The late pianist and broadcaster is classical music's Elvis, growing larger in death than he was in an already public life. Only instead of Elvis's kitsch factor, he had a peculiar geek factor. Instead of helping popularize a new kind of music, like Elvis with rock 'n' roll, Gould made an old kind of music sound new again. As we approach what would have been his 75th birthday on Tuesday – and the 25th anniversary of his death on Oct. 4...

Johann Sebastian Bach Life and Work by Martin Geck Translated by John Hargraves Harcourt, 752 pp., $40 J.S. Bach A Life in Music by Peter Williams Cambridge, 418 pp., $35 It was the biologist and popular author Lewis Thomas, writing in Lives of a Cell, who proposed that mankind use Bach's music to say hello to any sentient life in the universe. Thomas recommended beaming Bach--all of Bach--into outer space, over and over again, so that if by chance another civilization were to tune in, mankind would have put the best possible face on the encounter. If extraterrestrials do indeed...

A note sounds. Then it sounds again. But everything has changed. Not only is the note colored by a different resonance the second time around, but featureless time has been marked with the beginnings of a grid. The one note at the start defined only a before and an after. The second discloses a pulse. In accordance with this pulse, a third sound appears, but up a step, encouraging the accompaniment—which has not drawn attention to itself so far—to move conversely down. We have reached only the beginning of the second measure of the Goldberg Variations and already a process...

BERLIN — A previously unknown work by Johann Sebastian Bach has turned up in a crate of 18th-century birthday cards removed from a German library shortly before it was devastated by fire last year, researchers said Wednesday. Experts say the work for soprano and string or keyboard accompaniment, composed for a German duke's birthday, is the first new music from the renowned composer to surface in 30 years. Researcher Michael Maul from the Bach Archiv foundation found the composition, dated October 1713, in May in the eastern city of Weimar. The Leipzig-based foundation said there was no doubt about the authenticity of...

Famous works attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach were not penned by the great composer but by his second wife, researchers believe. A study by an academic who has spent more than 30 years looking at Bach's work claims that Anna Magdalena Bach, traditionally believed to be Bach's musical copyist, actually wrote some of his best-loved works, including his Six Cello Suites. Martin Jarvis, a professor at Charles Darwin University School of Music in Darwin and the conductor of the city's symphony orchestra, said that "a number of books would need to be rewritten" after presenting his findings to a Bach...