florida state university college of music performance practice

that concretely sheds light on how he viewed himself in the annals of history. However,
his actions do suggest that he consciously made steps to provide a legacy of how he
viewed himself and how he would like to be remembered.
Bach‟s obituary written in 1750 by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach and Johann
Friedrich Agricola, and published four years later, described Bach‟s natural talent, his
work ethic and his originality in terms of composition. Bach was able to contribute to
these character descriptors by first researching his genealogy and demonstrating the
musical thread that ran throughout his family‟s pedigree of musical talent and that it was
natural and innate. 213 Second, his work ethic is alluded to in the account of copying his
brother‟s manuscripts by moonlight, a story undoubtedly retold to C.P.E. Bach by his
father, and corroborated with quotes such as, “What I have achieved by industry and
practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.” 214 Lastly,
the part of his obituary that reads, “His melodies were strange, 215 but always varied, rich
in invention, and resembling those of no other composer,” suggests that Bach and others,
were conscious of a significant disparity between the consistent level of craftsmanship
present in Bach‟s compositions that was lacking in his peers.
While there has been debate over the amount of uniformity present in Bach
interpretation there is, as never before, a nationalistic diversity among the performers and
researchers. Fifty years ago the majority of influential personalities of Bach interpretation
would have featured a preponderance of musicians from Germany or England. Not so
anymore. Featured among those who are considered to be an authority in Bach research
and performance are many Americans, Argentineans, Australians, Belgians, Dutch,
Japanese, French, Korean, Israelis, Italians, Swedes, Taiwanese, to name a few, that
shows a globalization in colossal proportions in terms of Bach interest and research. 216
Nicholas Baumgartner, thanks to two generous awards from the Theodore Presser
(1997) and the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (2000), has spent several years following
modern German Bach interpretation and consequently became fascinated, among many
other things, in the upsurge of British, Dutch, Belgian and French Bach interpretive
213
Wolff, “Images of Bach in the Perspective of Basic Research and Interpretative Scholarship,” 513.
214
Wolff, ed. The New Bach Reader, 346.
215
Wolff describes that the word “strange” has been translated from the German word sonderbar, which
can be more accurately translated as “apart or away from others.”
216
Refer to Appendix I for a list of nationalities for the conductors who were used in this dissertation.
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