J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

Mendelssohn, Schumann, Spitta, Widor, Schweitzer, and dozens of other
propagandists and activists felt that they were engaged in a task of crucial importance,
and did not rest until Bach’s complete works were published (in the most uneconomic
manner possible) and his position secure at the heart of the Western canon. The study
of Bach ‘mattered’ (and continues to matter today) in a way that the study of Stölzel
never has. Why is this? It is no answer to say that Bach is canonical and Stölzel is
not, merely a restatement of the question. We say that Bach’s music is ‘greater’ than
Stölzel’s; but our ideas of musical greatness are in part shaped by our experience of
Bach’s music. There is no independent aesthetic criterion according to which we can
evaluate the works that make up the musical canon. The canon is its own standard.
This is not to say that the analysis of canonical works is a fruitless exercise;
rather, that such analysis is closer to hermeneutics or exegesis than what we usually
mean by critical writing. Hermeneutic analysis is not necessarily uncritical in any
pejorative sense; Jim Samson speaks of how ‘the unified musical work’ is ‘celebrated
by the institution of analysis’. 13 In seeking to unfold the meaning of a work whose
value is not, for the moment, in question, we naturally favour accounts that
demonstrate both the work’s complexity and its coherence; that is to say, accounts that
show faith in the composer’s competence. Wordsworth put it this way:
If an Author by any single composition has impressed us with his talents, it is useful to consider this
as affording a presumption, that, on other occasions where we have been displeased, he nevertheless
may not have written ill or absurdly; and, further, to give him so much credit for this one
composition as may induce us to review what has displeased us with more care than we should
otherwise have bestowed upon it. 14
13 ‘Celebrated’, rather than ‘justified’ or ‘demonstrated’: ‘Analysis in context’, Rethinking music, ed.
N. Cook and M. Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.42.
14 Preface of 1800, Lyrical Ballads (London: Oxford University Press, 1911), ed. H. Littledale, pp.251-
52.
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