September 2005 Newsletter

Sept , 2005 Volume 18 Number 1

Letter from the President

Dear Members:

As we begin a new concert season we can be sure it will be artistically successful under the direction of Dr. Janet Youngdahl, who introduces new soloists to our performances, and prepares each concert with dedication and musical insight. Her latest accomplishment was the birth of a lovely daughter, Sarah, born June 3. We hope she will join our choir practices.

The new concert season is printed in this newsletter so you can keep the information for future reference. And we encourage you to pass on this missive to others.The unique Bach Marathon, October 29, will again provide Calgary with many hours of Baroque music, performed by the finest musicians. You can come and go for only $10! There is no other concert like this in all of Calgary.

The Annual General meeting of the Bach Festival Society will be Monday Sept. 19, 6:00 PM at Knox Presbyterian church, 3704 37th St, SW. Please come to hear reports, meet the newly elected Board of Directors, and renew your memberships. Refreshments will be available

My 2 years as your President have been very rewarding. The Board and other volunteers are very talented people who care a great deal about this society and how it fills a niche in Calgary’s music scene. It has been a most interesting and enjoyable time; my thanks to you all.

Sincerely,

Constance Jackson

Calendar of Events

Calgary Bach Festival Society 2005 - 2006 Concert Season

The 18th Bach Marathon Saturday, October 29, 2005 1 - 7 pmScarboro United ChurchProgram will depend on musician participation

Bach Advent Concert Sunday, December 4, 2005 3 pmScarboro United ChurchCantatas No. 5 & 6 from the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248A. Corelli - Concerto Grosso Op. 6, No. 3 & 4

Bach Children’s Concert Saturday, February 4, 2006 1 pmLeacock Theatre, Mount Royal CollegeFrom 1:00 on, with instruments for children to tryConcert 2:00 pm featuring performances by children and the CBFS Choir

Bach Birthday Celebration Saturday, March 19, 2006 3 pmScarboro United ChurchJS Bach - Motet #4 BWV 227 Jesu meine FreudeMotet #6 BWV 230 Lobet den Herrn alle HeidenCantata BWV 82 Ich habe genung

A. Vivaldi- Concerto for celloGF Handel - Concerto Grosso Op. 6 No. 12 in B minor

Interview with Cody Obst

by Anna Carnell

Cody Obst’s greatest asset is his versatility. Piano performer, conductor and teacher, music consumes most of his time. He is pianist and rehearsal conductor with the Calgary Bach Festival Society and accompanist for the Calgary Children’s Choir, the Calgary Youth Choir and St. Giles Presbyterian. He teaches privately and is music specialist for two schools, the Calgary Waldorf school and Sunalta Elementary. Perhaps his greatest gift to students is his belief that a teacher should never limit their student’s dreams and ambition by their own perceptions.

Cody is open to creative performance concepts, including his most recent part in an evening of Mozart, where he read selections of Mozart’s letters between music performed by Janet Youngdahl and the Foremans. He conducted the Rutter Requiem for a special Remembrance Day concert and the latest CBFS childrens’ concert. He is also available for piano performance and was recently invited to perform an evening of light classics and Gershwin in Prince Rupert.

He earned his BMus concurrently with his BEd at Brandon University in Manitoba, specializing in piano and conducting. His work with Alan Ehnes and Earl Davey inspired a strong desire to hone his conducting gesture, a visual gateway into the musical conception of a work. At the University of Calgary he achieved his Masters in piano performance, studying with Marilyn Engle and Charles Foreman.

He has a flair for the dramatic in music, playing with extremes to heighten the sense of inner drama within the music. He is very cognizant of the fact that, while musical conception begins with the score, its dramatic impact doesn’t happen until the performance happens. Music is more than notes on a page, he says, citing ideas from a book called ‘Musicking’ by Christopher Small. Music is the entire process, from idea to performance. He admires composers with the same dramatic flair, namely Beethoven, the quintessential innovator, pushing boundaries throughout his life, and Debussy, the ‘colorist’.

Music philosophy makes up much of his reading list. (The historical and social context of music, why we perform, the rituals of symphony performance and the nature and values of music being but a few of the questions touched on during our interview.) Audience development is another consuming interest, how to create the combination of unique and inspiring selections that will not only draw but expand the audience. Art and art history books, also high on the reading list are the preview process. Piano study in Provence, and a choir tour in England gave him a fascinating opportunity see the real art works.

Intensely involved in many branches of his profession, Cody is on the way to developing the kind of broad perspectives on music that will help CBFS greatly in developing the audience they need, and in continuing our musical journey with Bach and friends.

J.S. Bach Biography - Mühlhausen (1707-1708)

When Bach was 22 years old, he arrived in Mühlhausen, a free city that had been governed for the previous 400 years by an elected council rather than by a royal court. This same council appointed Bach to the post of organist at the Blasiuskirche, a magnificent structure, dating from late Medieval times. For more than fifty years, the Blasiuskirche had previously employed the father and son, Rudolph and Georg Ahle, as organists. When the position became vacant after the death of the younger Ahle, Bach's cousin, J.G. Walther, first applied and then withdrew an application for the post, moving instead to Weimar. By the time Bach submitted his application, the position had been vacant for six months, indicating that Bach was not the council's first choice as Ahle's successor. In spite of some reluctance on the part of the city council to hire a young man with a less than exemplary employment record, the salary settled upon the new organist was equal to what Bach had earned in Arnstadt, and it was considerably more than that of his predecessor.

During Georg Ahle's tenure as organist, the musical standards of the church had decayed, but the post was still a respectable one, and several candidates played the organ at services as an audition for the post. Bach played on April 24, 1707 (Easter Sunday), and there may have been a performance that day of Cantata No.4., Christ Lag in Todesbanden. At the city council meeting on May 24th, no other name was considered, and on June 14th, Bach was interviewed, and an agreement was signed on June 15th. Soon afterwards, news of Bach's new appointment reached Arnstadt, and his cousin, Johann Ernst Bach, applied for the position at the Neuekirche on June 22nd respectively. Bach formally resigned at Arnstadt on June 29th, and he moved to Mühlhausen a few days later. However, Bach could not foresee that his tenure in Mühlhausen would last for a scant nine-month period, due to the religious philosophical controversy raging in Mühlhausen between two religious factions: Pietist and Orthodox Lutherans.

On August 10, 1707, Tobias Lammerhirt, Bach’s maternal uncle, died at Erfurt, bequeathing to his nephew a sum of 50 gulden. This inheritance was more than half of the composer's annual salary, making it possible for Bach to propose and subsequently to marry his second cousin from Arnstadt, Maria Barbara Bach (b October 20, 1684), daughter of Johann Michael Bach and Catharina Wedemann. The wedding took place on October 17 in the village church at Dornheim, near Arnstadt. The presiding minister, J.L. Stauber (1660 - 1723), was a friend of the family, who himself married Regina Wedemann in June of 1708. Once he had established a household as a married man, Bach began to take on students as apprentices, and at least one student may have come to Bach during his years at Arnstadt. J.M. Schubart (1690 - 1721) studied with Bach from 1707 to 1717, and J.C. Vogler (1696 - 1763) arrived at the age of ten, left for a time, and returned from 1710 until 1715. These two students were later to be his immediate successors at Weimar, and from this time onwards in his career, Bach always had apprentices and was a demanding and meticulous teacher.

On February 4, 1708, the annual inauguration of the Mühlhausen City Council took place, and for this occasion, Bach was commissioned to compose a cantata. The council placed the best musicians of the city at his disposal, and for the first time, Bach had sufficient musical forces at hand to give him considerable liberty in composition. The resulting composition, now known as Cantata No.71, Gott ist mein König was then performed. It must have greatly impressed those in attendance, since the council had not only the libretto published, as was usual, but also the entire musical score. It remains the only cantata by Bach to have been published during his lifetime. Shortly thereafter, Bach submitted a plan for repairing and enlarging the organ at the Blasiuskirche. The council considered his plan on February 21st and decided to act upon it. About this time Bach played before the reigning Duke of Weimar, Wilhelm Ernst, who offered him a position at his court.

On June 25th, Bach wrote to the city council asking them to accept his resignation. Bach's enthusiasm for his position at Mühlhausen was dampened by his dissatisfaction with the theological controversy that was ongoing in the city, since Mühlhausen was a center of Lutheran Pietism. While there is some evidence that Bach was drawn to the more devotional style of worship advocated by the Pietists, he could not have rested comfortably with their attitude of indifference toward the liturgical arts. It did not take long for Bach to realize that Pietism was moving toward an aesthetic like that of the Calvinists, in which artistic, technically demanding music was viewed as a detriment to pure worship. Pietists were increasingly uncomfortable with music more complex than unadorned motets and musically simple hymns. Pastor Johann A. Frohne of the Blasiuskirche was a Pietist, but there no evidence to suggest that he and Bach did not get along well. However, the people of his congregation did not like Bach's music, and their treatment of him and his new bride was less than warm. Bach developed a close acquaintance with Pastor Georg Christian Eilmar of the Marienkirche in Mühlhausen, who for a decade before Bach's arrival, had defended Orthodox Lutheranism in the ongoing debate with Pietism. Pastor Eilmar supplied the texts for some of Bach's cantatas from this period. Eilmar and his family stood as godparents for Bach's firstborn daughter and son.

Undoubtedly, the larger salary offered at Weimar was highly attractive to Bach, but it is clear, even from his tactful letter to the city council, who had always treated him well, that there were other reasons for his desire to leave. Bach stated that he had come to Mühlhausen in order to compose a body of "well-appointed church music," and that given his present circumstances, he perceived the attainment of that goal to be impossible, and he had decided to leave in order that he might achieve his goal elsewhere. He also said that he had encouraged such music, not only in his own church, but also in the surrounding villages, where the harmony was often "better than that cultivated here." Bach had also gone to some expense to collect "the choicest sacred music." But in all these endeavors, members of his own congregation had consistently opposed him, and their attitude, stemming from their Pietist viewpoint, was not likely to change.

The city council reluctantly accepted his resignation on June 26th and let him go, asking him only to supervise the organ building at the Blasiuskirche. No matter how poor Bach's relationship with his congregation may have been, he remained on good terms with the city council. They paid him to return and perform a cantata at the council inauguration service in 1709, using the refurbished organ, but all traces of this work have been lost. Much later, in 1735, he negotiated on friendly terms with the city council on behalf of his son, Johann Gottfried Bernhard who was thereafter employed in the city.

Editor's Website Picks

Interested in contacting other choral groups in Calgary? You will find the Calgary Region Arts Foundation client list at http://www.craf.org/clients4.html

The Academy of Ancient Music at http://www.aam.co.uk/ has program notes on works and shows pictures of artists, such as Bach. To find these, click on News and Features.

A little embarrassed that you don’t know some musical term like appoggiatura? You won’t be if you check out the Glossary page of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem at http://www.bach.org/bach101/suites/glossary.html

The Denton Bach Socety revisits Bach’s first Leipzig Christmas at http://www.dentonbach.com/archive/magnificat9.htm where you can find program notes, commentaries, pictures and the full texts of the Magnificat in Latin and English.

For a site with a multitude of links to all sorts of Bach info try http://www.bachfaq.org/Interesting trivia about Bach can be found at: http://www.spiritsound.com/bachbits.html

Bach Cantatas Website URL: http://www.bach-cantatas.com

Don’t forget our own http://www.bachcalgary.org with newsletters back to September 2000, pictures of the choir and orchestra and profiles of our conductors.

Membership Information

The Calgary Bach Festival Society has a large library of cantatas which can be rented. If interested, please contact us at 282-8525 or e-mail Bill Zdep tcprint@telus.net

Volunteers are welcome and needed for several positions and projects. If interested, please contact us at 282-8525 or e-mail Bill Zdep tcprint@telus.net