Bach’s Cantata Calendar | Hacker News Reader

Bach’s Cantata Calendar

whichbachcantata.be

75 pointsSchiphol23 comments

Very well done! You might also be interested in my Bach cantatas app (https://www.cantatasapp.com) for iOS and Android which has an infinite liturgical calendar and lots more of information about Bach’s wonderful cantatas (complete text, instrumentations, hymns, readings and even score references).

Great app, but unfortunately google play in Turkey says "this item is not available in your country.". Was this something you were aware of?

Thank you, just published an update, should be available in Turkey right now!

John Eliot Gardner's "Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven" is a sort of musical biography featuring a (very) deep dive on the cantatas.

WCRB in Boston does a Bach show every week which is available for streaming. Lots of times there's a cantata that fits the calendar.

https://www.classicalwcrb.org/show/the-bach-hour

Amazing that it never clicked for me that yes, these were written for calendar events. It's hard not to get into Bach without triggering any latent apophenic urges, and now I need to go through each of these pieces looking for intentional geometric relationships to the calendar events they were written for.

An interesting AI challenge might be to determine whether a given thing is or contains a puzzle.

This data is crying out for a calendar view.

His music is divine manna gifted from the heavens, but I just can't stand the cantatas. Too church-y.

You're in luck, today's is a secular cantata.

That's kind of the point, they're literally called "church cantatas"

Also, it's weird how you make an explicit and positive religious reference and then express distaste at the religious context that Bach composed for and in. In what sense is it divine then, if you dislike the music he wrote for the church?

There are other paths to divinity than christian and perhaps the commenter prefers one of those.

A good example would be Plato’s cave metaphor (predating christianity by centuries), arguing that there is an intangible divine world. Mathematics, clearly also beloved to Bach, is a nonreligious tool to appreciate that divine world.

One can listen to the intricacies of the Passacaglia und Fuge c-Moll and glimpse an inscrutable world behind it. Is that not divine?

I don’t know, I have no sense of the divine. I enjoy the music and hear that Bach was a Christian. I am a huge Bach fan but I don’t know what the divine is and doubt I’ll ever know. I am like a p zombie but for spiritual matters

I find when I listen to these fugues my mind is drawn to and becomes lost in the overtones and the mathematical depths and recursion. Being transported to another place that way, out of my body and sense of where I am, I consider divine.

Bach is not the only such, but he is the master.

I can't think of anything more Earthly than enjoying the beauty of mathematics and music

Wouldn’t mathematics transcend our tiny blue dot? Sure topics like geography, biology and history don’t surely math and physics do!

No, I think mathematics and physics are invented by humans in a human form for humans, but then again, I’m a theoretical physicist, so I’m biased

Wow, for me things that can't be physically represented (at a human scale anyway) such as most of mathematics, physics, and frankly music are fascinating, definitely feel real, can be explored, but yes, are beyond concrete representation.

Could one write a 16-part invention? I doubt it; certainly I think it would be hard to conceive of playing it, but I can "look into" a complex invention as I hear it and see how it could subdivide and get an idea of where that could lead. Certainly anything beyond the physically representative is to me sublime, and still able to trigger synesthesthetic response.

I don't have synesthesia, and I don't really have a concept of the sublime. All of reality is "the same" to me

There isn't a singular experience of the divine that you either have or do not have. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, in large part discusses the multitude of ways one can experience the divine. It strongly makes the case that doing ones duty is equally valid to both worship and seeking spiritual wisdom.

The story is based around a warrior prince named Arjuna having a conversation with the manifestation of God in the form of Krishna. Arjuna is confused because Krishna is explaining that giving up all earthly desire is the path to union with the divine. Yet Krishna is also imploring Arjuna to do his duty as a warrior prince and to fight in a battle to regain his kingdom. This is obviously a contradiction, since desiring to defeat his opponents and regain an earthly kingdom is in opposition to our traditional understanding of religious observance.

The idea these ancient authors were trying to communicate to us is that not everyone is going to be a monk. You need bricklayers, bakers, doctors and programmers. The trick is to realize that fully being a human, engaged in some activity, is equivalent to experiencing the divine. Nowadays we might feel more comfortable with the secular "flow" ideas, that mental state some experience when completely absorbed in their work.

So don't worry if you can't find the divine through ritual worship or through the exploration of spiritual wisdom. The divine is right there and possible for anyone to experience (if you believe the ancient authors of spiritual works like the Gita).

I took the parent comment's "contrast" as a bit of joke, but even if it wasn't intended that way, I think it expresses something very real about the way some of us experience "spirituality" - i.e. that the rituals and "orderliness" of say, the Catholic church, seem to get in the way of spirituality more than they help it. Contrasting this with sacred music can help illuminate what I mean - music seems, in some way, to bypass much of the "logical" aspects of the ritual and hit us somewhere a little bit deeper.

I'm not quite sure where I stand on this, as a lapsed Catholic and also as a lapsed "New Atheist" who's found himself somewhere in the middle (the dreaded and wishy-washy "spiritual but not religious" category).

I share a general... mistrust of heavily ritualized / dogmatized religion. But at the same time, I recently attended a Catholic funeral for my grandma, and was very affected by some of the procedures. In particular, the final funeral blessing at the end of the mass, where the priests swung the censer over the casket, was quite beautiful - the smoke slowly ascending, lit by the stained glass, and the walk out with the casket with light streaming through those windows.

These rituals stick around for a reason - it doesn't have to be a supernatural reason, but it certainly felt, during that service, that the whole mass had been very well designed to hit at some deep-seated and primal feelings within the attendees.

So anyway, as seems to be my pattern on these matters, I find myself somewhere in the middle - able to appreciate both the ritualistic and naturalistic approaches to spirituality. (But never quite able to come down hard for one side or the other!)

The style has endured mostly in sacred music, so I get the association. They aren't all church-y though!

The Coffee Cantata, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nifUBDgPhl4

I felt that way at first, but after getting around to listening to a few of them you start to realize he repurposed a lot his favorite material from these cantatas into his instrumental works. For example, one of Bach's innovations was the keyboard concerto - where the keyboard played the central solo role. The profound Harpsichord Concerto in D minor BWV 1052, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZX_XCYokQo, is actually reworked from the cantatas BWV 146 & 148.

While there's obviously plenty to enjoy w/o dipping into the cantatas, you might miss out on making these kinds of connections which I think really enriches our understanding of the instrumental works.

There’s one about a lady addicted to coffee

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