On WKCR, Bach at the Still Point

For a number of years – years when I was writing Reinventing Bach – there was a certain piece of Bach’s music that I listened to only once a year.

It happened this way. On a day in late July or August, a day when, like the day before and the day after, the city sat on simmer, the air hot and thick and immobile, the daylight constant, I would take out a disc of Bach’s works for flute and click through to the sonata for solo flute.

The single line of it; the elemental simplicity of the sound produced by a metal pipe animated by air transferred from the pipe of flesh in the musician’s chest; the lightness of it – all these seemed to me to capture the apex of summer, the still point of the year.

This past August, I was traveling with family in South Africa, and I didn’t take out the sonata for solo flute this year. But yesterday WKCR took it out and played it. Every December for three decades or so the station – the first FM station, at Columbia University – has played the music of Bach for a week or so. The Bach Festival was my first serious encounter with the music of Bach, a life-changing experience renewed round the clock year after year, Christmas after Christmas.

This Christmas was characterized by other music – a Ray Charles Christmas record, especially – and the Bachfest was kept on standby, to be turned on from time to time.

So it was that while I was making toast in the kitchen yesterday I turned on the transistor radio and there it was, the simple single line of the sonata for solo flute.

Summer in New York is winter in South Africa, and vice versa – and this year the solo flute sonata did its work antipodally, slicing through the seasonal to mark the still point of the year.

• 27 December 2014
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