Although my day job is a Violinist (also Viola and Viola d'amore) specialising in the historically informed performance of our Baroque and Classical music, I tend to post not so much on my specific area of expertise. I'm not really sure why that is, I guess it had to do with the fact that I live and breathe music for the better part of my day and live... And so when I hit up STEEM for a bit of distraction and relaxation, the last thing I want to be doing is writing about the things that I've been doing for the rest of the day!
However, every now and then (especially if I'm on tour and have lots of free time to craft a longer post) I will put together something about music. Sometimes it will be about a specific piece of compost, sometimes about my experiences playing a piece, sometimes the technical demands of an instrument, sometimes a bit about an instrument or instrument type... Or a broader explanation of how historically informed performance differs to what people think 'Classical' music is.
Well, in this particular post from last year, I wrote a fairly long introduction to one of the masterpieces of the Baroque era of music, The 6 Brandenburg Concerti. To be honest, it is really more like 6 masterworks, as each concerto is a unique creation that would stand as a legendary piece in it's own right!
This post was inspired but some performances that I had done recently (at the time) of the entire set of concerti. It is common to see one or two of the concerti in a single concert... but there are very few groups that have either the musical and technical depth across so many instruments and the financial backing to put on concerts of the whole set of 6 in a single concert. One the groups that I play in is fortunate to have both prerequisites to have done a worldwide tour with these concerti in a single concert.. and so, given that I had these concerti on the brain at the time, it was only obvious that I would be writing about them!
JS Bach is a composer from Western history that really needs very little introduction. One of the legendary composers of the Baroque era from what would later become Germany, he is seen as one of the pillars of the development of Western Music. Hailing from a Lutheran background, much of his output is religious in nature... with hundreds of cantatas (cantati?) celebrating the various Sunday liturgies of the year and large works like the Matthew Passion, B minor Mass and Weihnachts Oratorio being landmark creations of musical genius hailing from an age when audience concentration limits were longer than several seconds.
Speaking of these masterworks... I am in a Weihnachts tour at the moment... I probably should write some words about this great set of cantatas as it is really something that is should be known to more people!
The Six Brandenburg Concerti were written as a job application to the Margrave of Brandenburg. In those times, court musicians were a sort of "tenured" job that would require the patronage of a particular noble. These days, we eat the crumbs from the street...
The Six Brandenburg concerti were a sort of "job application" for JS Bach to the court of Christian Ludwig (the Margrave of Brandenburg). As a sign of how important Bach considered the pieces, he wrote the music out in his own hand, rather than entrusting the transcription work to a copyist, as was the tradition at the time.
The style of composition of the Concerti follows the older Italian Concerto Grossi format, where a smaller ensemble of solo instruments are embedded within a larger tutti ensemble. In all the concerti, there are unusual and unique combinations of solo instruments... in fact, they were so unique, that in most cases the same combination has never since been successfully applied by any other composer in the intervening centuries!
Unfortunately, in the intervening year since the first post, most of the music examples that I had posted to the post have since been removed for various reasons... Luckily, all the text (around 1700 words) is still up to date and relevant! When doing these music education posts, it is really important to find the best examples of the pieces with great performances. In these days of easy access to publication to the internet don't necessarily make for high quality performances across the board!
However, if anyone is interested, I can post new examples if there are requests in the comments! I'm about to head into a concert myself and don't have the ability to listen around to find outstanding performances of these works!
... and in case anyone was wondering... Bach did NOT get the job!
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