florida state university college of music performance practice

view, Dürr cautioned that a more evenly balanced interpretation was needed concerning
Bach‟s sacred vs. secular persona. 180
Apart from the academic pursuits, Bach‟s music was experiencing milestone
performances and recordings. Many of these recordings were heavily influenced by
research done and disseminiated in the 1950s. Examples like Wilhelm Ehmann who
recommended that smaller size choirs promoted clearer textures, ability for precise
rhythms and homogenous tone colors, and Arthur Mendel, who raised questions
concerning choice of tempo, tempo relations and lowering pitch. 181 David Willcocks and
Thurston Dart‟s 1960 recording of the St. John Passion (29 singers and 24
instrumentalists) and Nikolaus Harnoncourt‟s 1968 B minor Mass shows an early attempt
for eighteenth-century practices of lighter textures and employing copies of historical
instruments. 182 Many other performances, inspired by recapturing the historical approach,
ensued – too many to name here except one other groundbreaking project. In 1971
Nikolaus Harnoncourt, in collaboration with Gustav Leonhardt, embarked on the
adventurous project to record all of Bach‟s cantatas, a project fully realized in 1989.
At a November 1981 American Musicological Society meeting in Boston,
Massachusetts, musicologist, pianist and conductor, Joshua Rifkin unveiled his thesis
concerning the size and service of the chorus Bach used to perform his cantatas and
concerted vocal works. Rifkin notes that while Arnold Schering was on the right track to
deviate from the accepted practice of presenting Bach with colossal, Romantic-style
forces, the evidence suggests different conclusions concerning the actual number of
performers. The crux of Rifkin‟s thesis rests on the numerous instances where the
original performing materials from Bach‟s vocal works contain only one copy of each
voice part with no indication of where concertist or ripienisten sing. 183 Schering
acknowledged this inconsistency but proposed that the lack of indication for which vocal
part was to sing could be reconciled with the idea that the singers would follow the
designations written at the top of the score such as recitative, aria, chorus, etc. However,
180 For a bibliographic reference list see Daniel R. Melamed and Michael Marissen, An Introduction to
Bach Studies, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 34.
181 Fabian, Bach Performance Practice, 1945-1975, 36-37.
182 Fabian, Bach Performance Practice, 1945-1975, 39.
183 Joshua Rifkin, “Bach‟s Chorus,” reprinted in Andrew Parrott, The Essential Bach Choir, (Rochester:
The Boydell Press, 2000), 189.
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