[MUSIC] So, there's the great man. The only authentic likeness of J.S. Bach. He's holding a canon, a round, because canons are difficult to create. This shows not only that Bach was a musician, but a learned musician. Bach, the learned musician, that's the title of a book by my colleague at Harvard, the great Bach scholar Kristof Wolf. Our sessions on Bach and Handel, of course, will take us to the music of the late Baroque in it's mature style. These are long, complex pieces, done with great ingenuity and great integrity. Bach and Handel were both Germans and they were both born in the same year, 1685. And they were born even near one another, in Germany as we'll see. But let's start with the Bachs. The many faces of the Bachs. Indeed, they were a dynasty of musicians. From the 16th through the 19th Century. Ten generations of Bachs, here we see. The most famous J.S. Bach, top of, upper left hand corner there, Johann Sebastian Bach. And then his son, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, and then another son of J.S. Bach, Johann Christian Bach, and then another one, Wilhelm Friedman Bach, and then over to the far right, I have no idea but we can be sure, it's a Bach. If we look down at the bottom there, bottom left, we see a portrait of Bach's father, Ambrosius Bach. Bach's father was a town musician, who often played in the town wind band, he played an instrument called the shawm, that we've talked about before, and here's what a town band looked like, as we can tell by glancing at this early 17th century Dutch painting there on the lower right hand side of this slide. This first map shows where Bach was born in 1685. And rather soon, both his parents died. Actually they were both dead by the time he was 11. And so he became a ward of his older brother. And then, he went off, J.S Bach went off to prep school in effect. Where he was a boy soprano in the choir school at Lüneburg, way up in northern Germany. Singing paid his way through school. Thereafter, when his voice broke, at the age of 18. He took a job at the church of Arnstadt, a town then of about 3000 as an organist. Here we see the pipes of the original organ of Bach's day, the framework and the pipes. And here we see the console, in a sense the central processing unitwith keyboards of Bach's original organ. This is his original instrument, two manuals, two keyboards for hands, and a keyboard for the pedal, pedal keyboard. And we see the stops, those round knobs around the circumference of the in, instrument. They allow the organist to sound various groups of pipe. Sound one group which might have the sound of a trumpet or sound another group whichmight have the sound of an oboe or even a shawm. And if you pull them out all together you get a very big sound. Pulling out all of the stops. So again, this processing core went inside the original framework, the original casement of Bach's organ, and here we see it. When he was a young man at Arnstadt, Bach asked for a leave of absence. He wanted to visit the city of Lubeck. So off he goes, he walks the 225 miles one way, didn't have any money, couldn't fly, walked 225 miles up there to hear and meet Dieterich Buxtehude in Lubeck. And here's the church in which Buxtehude worked, Bach went up spent a couple of weeks there and then returned. Oddly enough Handel, Handel made the same sort of trip. Handel was in Hamburg and he went to Lu, Lubeck about this same time. So Bach walks to Lubeck and then walks back. And as you can see from this map here. He returns somewhat late, tardy or late into Orange dot and then moved on. And eventually is settled in Weimar, a slightly larger town in the court's center. The center of the Duchy of Weimar. So here Bach in Weimar was an organist in the duke's orchestra and a string player, violinist into Duke's orchestra as well. And some of Bach's most famous early organ works were composed here. The somewhat frightening sounds of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Now, a toccata is a type of keyboard music. Literally, it means something touched. So, when one touches an instrument. But as a musical Toccata is usually a free flowing unpredictable composition of some what improvisatory style. So here's the music of the Toccata in D minor. [MUSIC] You can see the organist is ornamenting auction original scores no doubt. [MUSIC] And his big diminish chord. [MUSIC] Ornamental resolution to a major chord. Well, this is a quick look at the life and music of young Bach. The beginning of the music of his mature period, for mature Bach, we'll move on to the city of Kothen.
