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p>Bach

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p>Harmonies
Candlelight
Many voices

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p>Painting with Sound
Creating with Harmonies

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p>String and wind and voice
Woven into music
Harmonic Fires with Ruby Hearts
and Silver traceries in the mind.

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p>Pounded keys
wind-created jewels in the mind
spinning like flames within the soul,
flowing, like the water of life but only in the mind.

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p>Your long-darkend eyes beneath their tufted brows,
still watch, still listen, still an Elder Shepard,
Watching over all who perform you music
from some other realm.

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p>Silently, the your distant, unseen lips move, the eyes
gleam
like silver and flame in the darkness of the mystery of time
your baton, invisible but still palpable, blesses.

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p>Music was born in your hands and mind and soul

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p>in those soul- fires
were shaped
harmonies, that continue to come forth
now, new and old.

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p>Water and Wood
Wind and Fire
Shaper of Music and the Soul.

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p>Deborah Sirotkin Butler
March, 2008

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p>Have you ever heard of St. Paul’s Boy’s Choir in Cambridge?  My son sang there for four years, and it was an incredible journey for our entire family.    

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p>There is, still at present, no written evidence about how Sebastian felt about Jews, being as there is hardly a scrap of evidence about how he felt about much except alcohol, gifts from friends, his spouse and children, his standards for musical performance and his legacy.

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p>But it is pretty clear that the pietism of his age was attractive to him, his favorite bible was a heavily annotated pietistic one, and the pietistic texts of his age held his musical imagination, as we can see from the Kantaten and the Passionen.

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p>As I get older, having spent nearly 45 years now in the thrall of the Johannespassion, I find myself pulled hard towards and away from the exquisite harshness of it.  

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p>I’ve come to the point now where I don’t want to hear any more of it after Ach, mein Sinn.

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p>Which version did you do this year?

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p>I think we used the 1724 version … or the 1740 version, which is pretty much the same.

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p>(On the other pretty inevitable thread – you guys must miss Craig.  I’m deeply sorry for your loss.  What a blow.  Do everything you can to keep our little redheaded Peter healthy, now!  We need a Bach like him in our world!)

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p>Bach’s parishoners in Leipzig were quite correct.  They recognized opera when it confronted them and called it what it was.  

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p>Poor guy.  He didn’t want to compose opera, wasn’t interested in the superficiality of the story lines.  But drama was more or less the motif of his life.