by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Tune In for Superabundance
“On me your voice falls as they say love should: / Like an enormous yes.” That’s the poet Philip Larkin, describing what he felt when he heard the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet’s records in grim wartime England – the glimpse they gave him of a world of pleasure and frolic, of unanticipated transcendence.
That is akin to what I felt when I heard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach as a college student – heard it for hours at a time, days at a time, through WKCR-FM’s annual Bachfest, which began last Saturday this year and airs (and streams) through New Year’s Eve.
I’ll be a festival guest tonight from 6 to 9 Eastern time, playing recordings and telling stories about them drawn from Reinventing Bach, now out in paperback.
Like so many people, I first fell for Bach through a Glenn Gould recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations: I was driving up a mountain, and the music corresponded exactly to the blind curves and switchbacks of the road and the clean, chilly air at the top. Aha: so this was why some people were mad for classical music!
Back in New York, I went in search of Bach – and found the Bachfest. Since the seventies, I think, the Columbia University radio station has carried on the practice of playing the music of Bach at Christmastime. I tuned in for jazz and there was Bach, morning, noon, and night. I listened and listened and felt my life changing: music had never sounded so good as the music of Bach coming out of a boombox tuned to 89.9.
Another year and I was versed in the rite of the Bachfest: the abrupt midmorning change-over from Charlie Parker on alto saxophone to Bach on harpsichord; afternoons devoted to different versions of the Well-Tempered Clavier, or the solo violin works, or Bach’s music played on microtonal instruments; the commentaries by Columbia professors or jazz superstars like Keith Jarrett; the evening “cantata request” hours; the red-eye broadcasts of the works for organ, the dry metallic sound pulsing off the antenna atop the Empire State Building and out and out in concentric circles to the multitude of radios, my boombox among them, that were kept on faithfully through the night.
Described that way, Bachfest sounds like a marathon, but it feels like the opposite: a prayer flag or giant quilt of music gifted to the city, a catered spread of Bach’s plenty.
The festival seems to me to deliver a superabundance distinctive to its namesake. The power of Bach’s music derives, in large part, from the quality of superabundance: it is enough, and more than enough. The music itself is superabundant, made so as Bach’s genius is doubled through counterpoint and multiplied through the pattern of invention. There is more of the music than even Bach himself could know well, and in our time that the superabundance has been compounded by recordings.
If you listen to Bachfest, suddenly Bach is everywhere, omnipresent: you are surrounded by Bach, in the midst of Bach. It feels like a holiday in the old, holy sense of the word – feels the way the passage from Christmas to Epiphany must have felt to believers when belief was most believable, as a fruitful immersion, a plunge into the depths, a time of rest that is charged with purpose.
Bachfest streams at wkcr.org. At 6 tonight host Nick Diamand and I will go though a couple of dozen Bach records that encapsulate the history of recording told in Reinventing Bach – from Albert Schweitzer and Pablo Casals to the Beatles and Paul Simon to John Eliot Gardiner and Chris Thile (a mandolinist; that’s him up top).