It was the cutting-edge new music of its day,” argues Boren. Modern students and audiences may relate more to the immediacy and drama of the latest streaming sensation, and Bach’s church music “was not so different, in the way it was heard, and the way there was a market for it. There are only different recordings of this piece of which there is no original recording.” As a result, music scholarship and performance have, of necessity, focused primarily on Bach’s scores. “Bach we don’t think of as a cover version. Most of us associate the music of, say, Elvis or Simon & Garfunkel with single canonical recordings, says Boren. Supported by an NEH grant and state-of-the-art computational methods, an interdisciplinary team led by Boren is digitally reconstructing the soundscape of the eighteenth-century Thomaskirche to determine just how Bach’s music would have sounded to the composer when it was first performed. He was known, for example, to have preferred composing for the Thomaskirche over Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche because he deemed it superior for choral music. As a composer, Bach would have been highly attuned to the effects of a church’s acoustics on the performance of music. Matthew Passion, and Mass in B Minor, making Thomaskirche arguably one of the most significant performance spaces in the history of Western music.īach, admired in his day as a gifted organist, also freelanced as an organ installation consultant, notes Braxton Boren, an assistant professor of audio technology at American University. Thomas Church choir, including 265 cantatas, the St. Thomas Church), the late Gothic church where composer Johann Sebastian Bach spent the last 27 years of his life as Thomaskantor and director of church music? It was there that Bach wrote some of his most famous choral pieces for the august St. What then might have been the sounds conjured by the vaults and crevices of Leipzig’s Thomaskirche (or St.
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