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Bach Quotes

Browse 30 quotes about Bach.

Bach Quotes

“When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer. 'If that is possible,' we say to ourselves, 'then everything is possible'; a new phase in the history of human awareness has been opened up, just as it opened up when people first read Dante, or first heard Bach's 48 preludes and fugues, or first learned from Hamlet and King Lear(/I> that the complexities and contradictions of human nature could be spelled out on the stage. This being so, it is a great exasperation to come face to face with new art and not make anything of it. Stared down by something that we don't like, don't understand and can't believe in, we feel personally affronted, as if our identity as reasonably alert and responsive human beings had been called into question. We ought to be having a good time, and we aren't. More than that, an important part of life is being withheld from us; for if any one thing is certain in this world it is that art is there to help us live, and for no other reason.”

ArtHuman NatureIdentityIdentificationModern ArtHamletDanteBachWays Of SeeingArt TheoryKing LearArt CriticismPostmodern Art
Book:The Meanings of Modern Art, Vol. 3: History as Nightmare
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“But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach. Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness. Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.”

SadAlonePianoBachLast Man On Earth
Author:Arthur C. Clarke
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“You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life … when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings … when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors … when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats...”

LoveLifeFreedomMoneyOpinionSecurityWorkersPoliticiansTeachersDiplomatsBachBeethoven
Book:Listen, Little Man!
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“There is much more to playing the clavier than playing written music. Do you realize with accompanying there is often nothing written out but the bass line--the left hand? There might be a few notations as to a suggested harmony, but it is up to me to fill in the music, at the proper volume, style, and harmony for the soloist--often instantly. I've heard it said that Bach questioned wether the soloist or the accompanist deserves the greatest glory.”

MusicHarmonyBach
Book:Mozart's Sister
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“I feel Bach's voice in those three notes, like a message in a bottle, trying to cross the ocean of harmony he himself has created. What's the message? Those notes don't say we're in a place. How could they? We're still en route. But they remember being in a place. They remember having a home, while the chords, time, life keep shifting on.”

MusicBachWell Tempered Clavier
Book:Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons
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“When natural music is heightened and polished by art”, he said once, “there man first beholds and can with great wonder examine to a certain extent, (for it cannot be wholly seized or understood) the great and perfect wisdom of God in His marvellous work of music, in which this is most singular and indeed astonishing, that one man sings a simple tune or tenor (as musicians call it), together with which three, four or five voices also sing, which as it were play and skip delightedly round this simple tune or tenor, and wonderfully grace and adorn the said tune with manifold devices and sounds, performing as it were a heavenly dance, so that those who at all understand it and are moved by it must be greatly amazed, and believe that there is nothing more extraordinary in the world than such a song adorned with many voices.”

MusicClassical MusicBach
Author:Martin Luther
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“When natural music is heightened and polished by art, there man first beholds and can with great wonder examine to a certain extent (for it cannot be wholly seized or understood) the great and perfect wisdom of God in His marvellous work of music. In which this is most singular and indeed astonishing: that one man sings a simple tune or tenor (as musicians call it), together with which three, four, or five voices also sing, which, as it were, play and skip delightedly round this simple tune or tenor, and wonderfully grace and adorn the said tune with manifold devices and sounds, performing as it were a heavenly dance, so that those who at all understand it and are moved by it must be greatly amazed and believe that there is nothing more extraordinary in the world than such a song adorned with many voices.”

MusicClassical MusicMartin LutherBach
Author:Martin Luther
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“My favourite letter, of all the ones I have received. "Hello. I cried in a museum in front of a Gaugin painting - because somehow he had managed to paint a transparent pink dress. I could almost see the dress wafting in the hot breeze. I cried at the Louvre in front of Victory. She had no arms, but she was so tall. I cried (so hard I had to leave) at a little concern where a young man played solo cello Bach suites. It was in a weird little Methodist church and there were only about fifteen of us in the audience, the cellist alone on the stage. It was midday. I cried because (I guess) I was overcome with love. It was impossible for me to shake the sensation (mental, physical) that J.S. Bach was in the room with me, and I loved him. These three instances (and the others I am now recollecting) I think have something to do with loneliness… a kind of craving for the company of beauty. Others, I suppose, might say God. But this feels too simple a response. Robin Parks”

ArtTearsEmotionsCryingLouvreBachGaugin
Book:Pictures and Tears
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“The fact that the work today has become common property may console us for the other fact that an analysis of it is almost as impossible as it is to depict a wood by enumerating the trees and describing their appearance. We can only repeat again and again—take them and play them and penetrate into this world for yourself. Aesthetic elucidation of any kind must necessarily be superficial here, What so fascinates us in the work is not the form or the build of the piece, but the world-view that is mirrored in it. It is not so much that we enjoy the Well-tempered Clavichord as that we are edified by it. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter—to all these it gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.”

Classical MusicBachJohann Sebastian BachWell Tempered Clavier
Author:Albert Schweitzer
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“The concentrated structure of musical form, based on dramatic climaxes, gradually breaks up in romanticism and gives way again to the cumulative composition of the older music. Sonata form falls to pieces and is replaced more and more often by other, less severe and less schematically moulded forms—by small-scale lyrical and descriptive genres, such as the Fantasy and the Rhapsody, the Arabesque and the Étude, the Intermezzo and the Impromptu, the Improvisation and the Variation. Even extensive works are often made up of such miniature forms, which no longer constitute, from the structural point of view, the acts of a drama, but the scenes of a revue. A classical sonata or symphony was the world in parvo: a microcosm. A succession of musical pictures, such as Schumann’s Carnaval or Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage, is like a painter’s sketch-book; it may contain magnificent lyrical-impressionistic details, but it abandons the attempt to create a total impression and an organic unity from the very beginning. [...] This change of form is accompanied by the literary inclinations of the composers and their bias towards programme music. The intermingling of forms also makes itself felt in music and is expressed most conspicuously in the fact that the romantic composers are often very gifted and important writers. In the painting and poetry of the period the disintegration of form does not proceed anything like so quickly, nor is it so far-reaching as in music. The explanation of the difference is partly that the cyclical ‘medieval’ structure had long since been overcome in the other arts, whereas it remained predominant in music until the middle of the eighteenth century, and only began to yield to formal unity after the death of Bach. In music it was therefore much easier to revert to it than, for example, in painting where it was completely out of date. The romantics’ historical interest in old music and the revival of Bach’s prestige had, however, only a subordinate part in the dissolution of strict sonata form, the real reason is to be sought in a change of taste which was in essentials sociologically conditioned.”

UnityRevivalRomanticismBachFragmentism
Book:The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism
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“We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the center of the wilderness, someone will soon come along to look over your shoulder and tell you how to play your cards. This was the principle of Method C. We unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the wing, completely uncaring.”

LifePhilosophyFreedomTravelFlyingPlanesBachRichard
Book:Nothing By Chance
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“As a contrast to the Bach of pure music I present the Bach who is a poet and painter in sound. In his music and in his texts he expresses the emotional as well as the descriptive with great vitality and clarity. Before all else he aims at rendering the pictorial in lines of sound. He is even more tone painter than tone poet. His art is nearer to that of Berlioz than to that of Wagner. If the text speaks of drifting mists, of boisterous winds, of roaring rivers, of waves that ebb and flow, of leaves falling from the tree, of bells that toll for the dying, of the confident faith that walks with firm steps or the weak faith that falters, of the proud who will be debased and the humble who will be exalted, of Satan rising in rebellion, of angels on the clouds of heaven, then one sees and hears all this in his music. Bach has, in fact, his own language of sound. There are in his music constantly recurring rhythmical motives expressing peaceful bliss, lively joy, intense pain, or sorrow sublimely borne. The impulse to express poetic and pictorial concepts is the essence of music. It addresses itself to the listener's creative imagination and seeks to kindle in him the feelings and visions with which the music was composed. But this it can do only if the person who uses the language of sound possesses the mysterious faculty of rendering thoughts with a superior clarity and precision. In this respect Bach is the greatest of the great.”

Classical MusicBachJohann Sebastian Bach
Book:Out of My Life and Thought
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“Bach represents standing and moving, resting and hurrying, elevation and depression, with a naïveté almost characteristic of the first beginning of art. Without abandoning this minute detail-painting in his later works, his method now becomes, as it were, transfigured. His thought, vision, and emotion have remained unchanged, but in the later works the tone-painting is not so isolated; it is part and parcel of the melodic form that constitutes the basis of his movements, and his genius provided him with themes that contain, in their germ, all the possibilities of expression that the movement will afterwards require.”

BachJohann Sebastian Bach
Author:Johann Theodor Mosewius
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“Nowhere so well as in the Well-tempered Clavichord are we made to realise that art was Bach’s religion. He does not depict natural soul-states, like Beethoven in his sonatas, no striving and struggling towards a goal, but the reality of life felt by a spirit always conscious of being superior to life, a spirit in which the most contradictory emotions, wildest grief and exuberant cheerfulness, are simply phases of a fundamental superiority of soul. It is this that gives the same transfigured air to the sorrow laden E flat minor prelude of the First Part and the care-free, volatile prelude in G major in the Second Part. Whoever has once felt this wonderful tranquility has comprehended the mysterious spirit that has here expressed all it knew and felt of life in the secret language of tone, and will render Bach the thanks we render only to the great souls to whom it is given to reconcile men with life and bring them peace.”

BachJohann Sebastian BachThe Well Tempered Clavier
Author:Albert Schweitzer
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“Ce que cherchait Glenn Gould dans la musique de BACH, par son jeu staccatissimo - et les innombrables commentateurs ne l'ont pas vu - ce n'est rien d'autre que la lisibilité des voix contrapuntiques de ladite musique. En d'autres termes, Gould voulait rendre le plus nettement possible la spécificité de chacune des voix qui composent, par exemple, une fugue. La forme-fugue incarnant la quintessence de la musique du Kantor. Hélas, cela était impossible, comme c'est impossible pour tout instrument à clavier dont la nature sonore, l'identité sonore, est trop uniforme, le piano en tête ! L'orgue a bien quelques sonorités (jeux) à sa disposition, mais ce la ne suffit pas. La seule solution pour rendre aussi fidèlement que possible l'esprit contrapuntique de la musique de BACH, c'est de transcrire sa musique pour divers instruments ayant chacun une voix - une sonorité - très identifiable. C'est ce que j'ai modestement tenté par le moyen de diverses formations musicales (trios, quartets, quintets...) inventées spécialement à cette fin, savoir, redonner vie aux différentes voix du contrepoint. Un unique instrument ne pourra jamais même s'approcher de l'essence du contrepoint : il erre dans les limbes de l'harmonie et ne peut atteindre à aucune horizontalité - linéarité - des voix. Glenn Gould, cet anachorète des studios, n'a de cesse de chercher par quel biais technologique on pourrait rendre lisible ce fameux agencement des voix. Il se heurte à un problème de départ, insoluble : le son uniforme du piano. Ergo, cet instrument est sans aucun doute le dernier, avec le clavecin, qui convienne à la musique de BACH. Il existe, Dieu merci, d'autres compositeurs dont la musique ne pose pas le problème de la superposition de voix contrapuntiques purement linaires. L'ironie du sort voulut que Gould jouât du piano et ne goûtât pas Chopin, lequel était pourtant le seul qui a écrit - à ce jour - un musique qui épouse totalement la sonorité même du piano.”

FugueBachGlenn GouldContrepoint
Author:Leontsky
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“Wanneer ze de straat in loopt, bespeurt ze een verandering in zichzelf, een concentratie van aandacht richt zich, voordat ze bewust iets hoort, in haar op als een cobra voor een fluitspeler. Een snoer van klanken komt haar tegemoet, muziek die omhoog- en omlaagwelft alsof zij precies de beweging van een wandelaar in de heuvels van Boeda volgt. Wat is dat voor instrument, waar komt die warme bas vandaan in de diepere regionen, die alt in de hogere? Het lijkt op de gordonka van de zigeuners, de gardon van de boeren. Het is hetzelfde, het is niet hetzelfde. De muziek komt uit de tuin van het huis waar ze haar bestelling moet afleveren. In de schaduw van hoge bomen zit een elegant gezelschap in aandacht verzonken voor een musicus die voor haar een muzikant is, het subtiele verschil kent ze nog niet. Het wordt haar toegestaan vanaf een stenen trap naar de keuken mee te luisteren. Ze vraagt wat voor muziek het is die daar ten gehore wordt gebracht. De huishoudster is zo vriendelijk het voor haar te vragen. De tweede cellosuite van Bach. Ze prent het zich in, om het nooit meer te vergeten, de tweede cellosuite van Bach. De vermoeidheid van de wandeling valt van haar af, ze is opgewonden omdat er muziek bestaat die een illusie van oneindigheid oproept, een streling van de ziel die nooit meer ophoudt.”

BachZielMuziekCellosuite
Author:Tessa de Loo
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“Io protestavo, ma Bach procedeva sicuro come il destino. Cantava in alto con passione e scendeva a cercare il basso ostinato che sorprendeva per quanto l’orecchio e il cuore l’avessero anticipato: proprio al suo posto! Un attimo più tardi e il canto sarebbe dileguato e non avrebbe potuto essere raggiunto dalla risonanza; un attimo prima e si sarebbe sovrapposto al canto, strozzandolo. Per Guido ciò non avveniva: non gli tremava il braccio neppure affrontando Bach e ciò era una vera inferiorità. Oggi che scrivo ho tutte le prove di ciò. Non gioisco per aver visto allora tanto esattamente. Allora ero pieno di odio e quella musica, ch’io accettavo come la mia anima stessa, non seppe addolcirlo. Poi venne la vita volgare di ogni giorno e l’annullò senza che da parte mia vi fosse alcuna resistenza. Si capisce! La vita volgare sa fare tante di quelle cose. Guai se i geni se ne accorgessero!”

VitaMusicaBachItalo SvevoLa Coscienza Di ZenoGenio
Book:La coscienza di Zeno / Senilità
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“The audience was transported, not only by the work but also by the fine dynamics of the choir, which were something unusual in those days. Not less powerful was the religious impression made by Bach’s music. “The crowded hall looked like a church,” writes Fanny Mendelssohn. “Every one was filled with the most solemn devotion; one heard only an occasional involuntary ejaculation that sprang from deep emotion.”

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Author:Albert Schweitzer
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