{"id":1450,"date":"2022-03-07T08:54:23","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T13:54:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=1450"},"modified":"2022-03-07T08:54:23","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T13:54:23","slug":"the-audience-of-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/03\/07\/the-audience-of-one\/","title":{"rendered":"The Audience of One"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is deservedly regarded as one of the great musical composers of all time.\u00a0
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During his own lifetime, however, Bach was largely ignored.
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He did not have a university degree.\u00a0 He had a reputation for being difficult to work with.\u00a0 He became the musical director of the four principal Lutheran churches in Leipzig, Germany, but only after the search committee had failed to hire their first three choices.\u00a0 His music was considered imitative.\u00a0 Was he nothing more than the German equivalent of Milli Vanilli?
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Bach worked in obscurity most of his life.\u00a0 Few people grasped the quality and the quantity of the music he was creating.\u00a0
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Take Bach\u2019s cantatas.\u00a0 A cantata is a fully orchestrated composition which often involves a choir.\u00a0 It may last from 30 minutes to several hours.\u00a0 These days an average church choir may perform one cantata per year, but only after months of preparation.\u00a0
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Bach wrote at least one entirely new cantata-length work every week <\/em>for seven consecutive years. <\/em>\u00a0Many of those numbers were performed only once, after which they were never heard again.
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Today we have in our possession about 200 of Bach\u2019s cantatas.\u00a0 Hundreds of others have vanished.\u00a0
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After his death Bach\u2019s family was in dire straits financially.\u00a0 They sold off an unknown number of his compositions. \u00a0Music historians lament that some of Bach\u2019s masterworks ended up as paper to start fires in fireplaces, or as a convenient way to wrap fish in the local market.
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And then there\u2019s the Brandenburg Concerto.
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In 1721, Bach was casting about for a new job.\u00a0 He wrote to a German official, the Margrave of Brandenburg, advertising his availability as a musical composer and performer.\u00a0 Bach decided to create an artistic resume.\u00a0 So he wrote a series of six concertos.\u00a0 In a cover letter he said they represented \u201cthe little talents which Heaven has given me for Music.\u201d
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As far as we know, the six concertos were never performed for the Margrave, since he didn\u2019t have enough court musicians on hand.\u00a0 They were eventually filed.\u00a0 And then forgotten<\/em>.
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When the Margrave died in 1734, the one and only copy of the concertos was sold for the modern equivalent of $24.\u00a0 They wound up in the Brandenburg state archives, where someone finally stumbled upon them 112 years later.
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And then, for the first time, they were played.\u00a0
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The world has been staggered by their beauty ever since.\u00a0 Music historian Christoph Wolff has commented: \u201cEvery one of the six concertos set a precedent in scoring, and every one was to remain without parallel.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, no one had ever heard anything like this before.
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You don\u2019t have to listen to all 16 and a half minutes of Concerto No. 2, for instance, to recognize its sheer brilliance and joy:\u00a0 Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 | Claudio Abbado & the Orchestra Mozart – YouTube<\/a>
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Until a century after Bach\u2019s death, no one knew that his Brandenburg Concertos were one of the world\u2019s great musical treasures.
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Most of us have never been mistaken for musical geniuses.\u00a0 But in other regards we may feel a bit like Bach.
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We\u2019ve worked hard on things, and nobody even noticed.\u00a0 No one said thank-you for the number we did on the house.\u00a0 Or the extra effort we put into that project at work.\u00a0 We knocked ourselves out trying to reconcile quarreling family members, but it\u2019s as if our best efforts were filed away and forgotten.\u00a0
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But this we know for sure:\u00a0 Our efforts are not unknown<\/em>.
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At the end of most of his compositions Bach personally inscribed three Latin words:\u00a0 Soli Deo Gloria.\u00a0 <\/em>\u201cFor God\u2019s glory alone.\u201d\u00a0 In the end, he wasn\u2019t writing for his employers, his family, or future historians.\u00a0 He never lost sight of his true audience.\u00a0
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Even when it seems that no one is paying attention, our call is still to do our utmost.
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To please the Audience of One<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is deservedly regarded as one of the great musical composers of all time.\u00a0\u00a0During his own lifetime, however, Bach was largely ignored.\u00a0He did not have a university degree.\u00a0 He had a reputation for being difficult to work with.\u00a0 He became the musical director of the four principal Lutheran churches in Leipzig, Germany, but only after the search… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1451,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[413],"class_list":["post-1450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-music-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1452,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions\/1452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}