For Everyone Who Wants It

with Ellen Exner‍  ‍doctor of musicology  former Vice-President, American Bach SocietyIs Bach's music really for everyone? Musicologist Ellen Exner — vice president of the American Bach Society and a student of Christoph Wolff at Harvard — argues it isn't, and that the honest answer is more interesting than the comforting one. Recorded in Philadelphia while I was performing with the Philadelphia Orchestra, our conversation traces how Bach's sacred vocal music went nearly forgotten for fifty years after his death, only re-entering the concert world through Mendelssohn's Berlin revival of the St. Matthew Passion and the slow, complicated process of divorcing these cantatas from the Lutheran liturgy they were written for. We talk about canon, curriculum, and who gets to decide what belongs in it; what it means to perform theology you don't personally believe; and why Bach never imagined his music traveling beyond the small Leipzig world he wrote it for — let alone into a Hong Kong concert hall centuries later. Ellen's answer to the episode's central question — "Bach is for everybody who wants it" — reframes the whole project.The episode closes with the aria "Und du von Not erhörte Kreatur" from Cantata BWV 121, Christum wir sollen loben schon, written for the second day of Christmas 1724. Scored for tenor and oboe d'amore, it turns the shepherds' encounter with the infant Christ into a meditation on scale — the vast creator made small and pitiable to save the flesh through flesh. It's a fitting close to a conversation about music built for one specific time, place, and purpose that somehow keeps finding new listeners who want it.Full episode credits, transcript, and video can be found at: https://www.bach52.nicholas-phan.com/episodes/ep3This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects