The Other New York Marathon

Some great philosopher – was it Isaiah Berlin? – said that the great quandaries of our society aren’t matters of scarcity, but of abundance.

So it is with the quandary of J.S. Bach’s organ music – a quandary I’ve taken up in a piece (the first of many, I hope) on the New Yorker website.

Bach wrote several hundred works for pipe organ: the something like 200 works whose texts we have today, and something like a quarter more which have been lost, and are submerged offshore, a buried treasure challenging our ideas of quantity and completeness.

What you feel, listening to the organ works, is that you will never get to the bottom of them.. Their abundance is not an abstraction, like infinity. A recondite theological term catches the sense of it: supererogatory, which means “more than is necessary for salvation.”

How (I asked in Reinventing Bach) are we supposed to listen to so much music all of it so good?

One way is to hear it over a lifetime, the way churchgoers since Bach’s time have done, encountering the pieces in many months of Sundays.

Another way is to swallow it whole through recordings. Ever since Albert Schweitzer played a selection of the organ works for the recording machine at All Hallows-by-the Tower in London, recordings of the organ works have come in box sets, the pieces listed by catalog number, and to play the music in bulk is an experience without parallel in live music or in our usual encounter with recordings.

And another way is to attend a live organ marathon, such as the one WQXR organized at St. Peter’s Church in midtown Manhattan the Saturday before last as part of its monthlong Bachstock: 30 Days of Peace and Music. That’s what I did, and my account is on newyorker.com. Takeout:

Bach proposed that the purpose of music is “the glory of God and the refreshment of the spirit.” By the time I got to the church, in midafternoon, I had driven twice from Brooklyn to Randall’s Island, watched four matches from the sidelines, seen the end of the Arsenal-Manchester United match on NBC, and toted a frozen turkey home from the Greenmarket in Fort Greene Park. I was ready for some spiritual refreshment.

Video of the event – eighteen hours of it – is here. Have a good marathon.

• 5 December 2014
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