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

There were good historical reasons for the shift away from this attitude. Today,
whenever we require music, we can have it at the flick of a switch (indeed, the
problem is sometimes how to escape it!) Before the advent of mechanical
reproduction one had to hire musicians for the occasion. Before the trade in printed
sheet-music became widespread, not only did one require performers, but also
someone to compose or copy the music they were to play. Furthermore, until the
eighteenth century the fundamental musical entity had not been not so much the
musical work itself as the occasion of the musical performance: the concert, opera,
mass, ball, or ceremony. The music director’s job was typically to provide (compose,
arrange, secure copies of) whatever music was necessary, and to rehearse and oversee
the performance from the harpsichord as well. Questions of originality were
secondary; fitness for the purpose and adequacy of supply were the essential
requirements. Bach was fulfilling his professional obligations equally when he
composed the cantata cycles, when he reworked his own concertos from Köthen for
the Collegium Musicum, and when he arranged and altered Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater
for performance at Leipzig. 86
As with any historical distinction it is possible to make too much of it,
however, and it is an exaggeration to say that the concept of the musical work and its
ownership by the composer had no significance at all before the nineteenth century.
Three English examples show the limits of tolerance in this area. For Giovanni
Bononcini to pass off a madrigal of Antonio Lotti’s as his own (as he did to the
Academy of Ancient Music in 1728 or 29) was clearly not acceptable practice,
although musical politics also played a part in his subsequent ostracism. By contrast,
Handel’s borrowing of entire movements to use, substantially unaltered, in his
oratorios (such as a canzona by J. C. Kerll for the chorus ‘Egypt was Glad’ in Israel in
86 See The imaginary museum of musical works: an essay in the philosophy of music (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), chapter 7: ‘Musical production without the work-concept’.
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