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Contemporary Views Of Bach

Contemporary Views of Bach

Toward the later part of J.S. Bach's life, he worked at St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig. He continued playing as its organist and composing in his polyphonic style of music. However, a new French style galant was emerging. It viewed music in a totally different way than Bach.
Bach was considered the preserver of the old to his contemporaries. And as he aged, his music became more abstract from the contemporary French style galant invading Leipzig. Consequently, according to Gerhard Herz in his book Essays on J.S. Bach, he never became fashionable and his musical style became isolated. Bach's contemporaries distinguished him as an "uneducated and outdated master" (Herz 10). They blamed him for having "stood on the shoulder of the past generations instead of participating in building the present and future of music" (Herz 10).
Max Graf, author of Composer and Critic described Bach's situation as a "lonely island on which Bach had been writing his scores was surrounded by the inexorably rising waters of new music" (Graf 75). For example, Bach's Art of Fugue written during the musical style galant was "dismissed as an anachronism by the progressive majority of his time" (Herz 150). During his time, as Max Graf explains, Leipzig was very receptive to new ideas and "Bach must have felt himself a stranger there, for on every side he met with uncongenial modern ideas" (Graf 73). The new French music entering Leipzig was very different from Bach's "great polyphonic compositions of the past (Graf 74). Thus, Sebastian, a more prolific composer than his son was considered the "old Bach" after his death and Philipp Emanuel was called the "great Bach" (Herz 150).
Much of Bach's life was teaching. Even with his exceptional musical talent he needed a job and taught at a few different places. Therefore, much of the information that I have been gathering has been reported from his contemporary students. They were all quality...