Bach's BWV 77 Cantata: Stunningly Complicated Counterpoint (Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, lieben) 

Yes indeed, only if history DOES repeat itself!!!!

Or a past.

Does he need a manager?

Yeah he's pretty good.

Maybe.

If you like Bach's continuo, you'll REALLY like Zelenka's.

@@therealrealludwigvanbeethoven based Zelenka listener

Dear Stu, as you can see : It‘s never too late...you love it there, I love it here, and this connects us all, regardless of our origin, age and nationality...

TRUTH I was like “awww Bach getting excited”

I don't know why, but I also imagined J.S. Bach with a large German pint of beer as he nudged his son with a jolly red face. LOL. Someone who took life too seriously did NOT write music this incredibly emotional. He had to be in tune with his emotions, including sheer pleasure and joy, to write music of this sort.

They are skippable if you have an ad blocker...

@@Richard.Atkinson Or pay for YT premium

Yes, absolutely right. Der macht einen positiv wahnsinnig. Mit 300 Jahre alter Musik, unfassbar.

Inside The Score on youtube has a great video explaining fugues

It's both!

That's actually the reason people with high IQ's enjoy 17th to 19th century music: it's complexity. It gives the brain something to enjoy and explore, with each exploration revealing new elements you had not discovered before. Almost like a problem that takes a long time to solve, thus retaining its novelty for greater periods of time.

@@davidbudo5551 I agree with you totally. However, in my opinion this particular work sounds to me labored. Look at the difference in a similar musical puzzle cantata 80.

@@shnimmuc I would recommend listening to Bach's other settings of dieses sind die zehn heilgen gebot for organ, they are both perplexing and beautiful.

@@sameash3153 I know them and like them.

@@roaschmo A few people. Very few

@@authenticmusic4815 I would say no one. Bach’s IQ relative to his profession and in general was unmatchable. Even William James Sidis can’t compare to Bach’s sheer intelligence. I SERIOUSLY doubt that online IQ estimates are correct for historical figures because: 1. The people usually weren’t alive to take a test. 2. IQ doesn’t even measure actual intelligence, just logical capacity (even though Bach was unparalleled in that regard too).

12:25 - Holy Sh**!

His German is solid as well!

I suppose I'm agnostic in the same way almost everyone is (we don't know for sure). But I'm also an atheist (I don't believe in gods), and also an anti-theist (I oppose the belief in gods and I think such belief is a negative force in the world). However, I grew up very religious, so I know the stories well!

@@Richard.Atkinson, I used to think the same way, until I began studying evolution. The evidence shows that not only are religious beliefs foundational to our genetic code, but people who believe in God actually have more stable genomes with lower levels of detrimental genetic mutations. This doesn't mean I believe there is a God, because my physics background won't let me lie to myself. However, I no longer see *certain* religions as more harm than good. In fact, without religion and belief in God, humanity would not have progressed as far as it did. Crazy stuff.

@@Richard.Atkinson The church is the concert hall where humans and the divine congregate to sing to each other. Though perhaps both sides have supsicions of the other's presence/absence. In the high domes, where the echo and reverberation add to the beautiful geometric complexity of sound; there's a truce between the dark and the light of the world. Being agnostic myself, i suspend disbelief of deities while i listen to Bach. --Thank you for your effort and knowledgeable explanations in these videos.

@@Richard.Atkinson This "negative force" forced Bach to create many "negative" compositions, as was the case with Mozart, the Haydens and a thousand other musicians and fine artists all over the world. Because of this "negative force" Bach signed all of his compositions with "Soli Deo Gloria".

salt2live True... mythology has inspired much great art throughout history. And in addition to that, most wars, the subjugation of women, genocide, suicide bombings, child rape by clergy, persecution of people based on sexuality, justification of slavery, etc. etc. Bach’s music exists as a testament to human ingenuity, independent of the repugnant ideology some of it was composed to to further.

Check my last video

That video is going to take forever to make. I already have a lot of it planned out in my head, but it's not going to be one of the next ones. Be patient!

There is a danger of listening to too much Bach: You might actually drift into a phase were all music except other baroque music sound terribly conceited. I'm a late romantic, classic modernism kind of guy. Wagner's chromatism is my lifeblood.I thrive on excessive writing. Or rather I used to. Then I listened to ALL of Bach within a year. And now stuff like Shostakovich or Strauss just sounds like a bloated mess to me and I prefer to listen to some Telemann or Handel instead. ;)

@@Quotenwagnerianer :) I know the feeling! Exactly the same with me, seems like this is the top of the foodchain in music! :)

I would love to do the whole thing.

@@Richard.Atkinson can't wait!!!

Yes, it's brilliant!

Lets hope he is surpassed! That would be exciting.

Honestly, just "Herr unser Herrscher" does it for me. You can FEEL the jags and the edges in that composition. And the fact that he did it in the chromatic scale with augmented chords unheard in classical music until the 1910s and 1920s is astounding.

Yes, I thought about using the other one on IMSLP but I didn’t like how it looked for some reason... I guess your reason is better than mine!

One of the next few videos: The Ring.

The Tristan chord definitely deserves some more attention

This "dense" of music is definitely an acquired taste. The mind has to tell the ears to like it. The ears don't prefer it by themselves.

Hahaha! Well done.

She had two points! Didn't you see them?

Go back to the 6:09 mark...

I also have some major problems with this recording, some of which I mentioned in the video. The out-of-tune, sometimes very nasal singing (didn’t mention this in the video) is probably the worst of these, but I still chose this recording over my second choice (Bach Collegium Japan), because this performance does the best job of accentuating the augmentation canons, which is the main point of the composition. Almost every other recording of this work is a failure in my opinion, for this reason alone.

I'm a great fan of BWV 54. I think Bach would expect any professional musicial of his time to understand the niceties that are being explained by Richard in this wonderful video. I suspect Bach would have been a little optimistic, concerning his contemporaries. But this is about three centuries after the fact, another musical culture altogether and I don't think many listeners would grasp all this without it being pointed out to them. And percieving the complexity of such a piece is a a major part of the pleasure I have when I listen to it. There are many pieces of Bach I can greatly enjoy by listening to them without making the effort of trying to understand the clockwork, so to speak. But there are pieces like this where Bach deliberately put a tremendous lot of contrapuntal high-tech and I'm pretty sure he had lots of fun doing so and being able to share part of the fun is a wonderful experience. Maybe you are not sensitive to that, but to denigrate the pleasure of others is not the most civil attitude, in my opinion. You seem to use the word theory as a pejorative, but here I believe the correct word would be research. Bach was a researcher. It would be a pity to miss that side of Bach. By the way, BWV 54 was the first Cantata Bach composed following the recommandations of a pastor called Neumeister, who advocated church music be composed in operatic style, that is as a succession of arie/recitativi/arie which the occasional chorus or chorale interspersed as need be. Bach wrote his first attempt in the form of the minimal Neumeister form: a solo cantata with 1 aria, 1 recit, 1 aria. The generating cell. That alone shows he thought like a mathematician... And the result is gorgeous.

You're completely wrong, as Bach taught theory and took it seriously.

In my humble opinion, it is often not necessary to have an in-depth knowledge of the mechanics of a piece of music in order to derive great pleasure from it. However, personally speaking (and especially in the case of Bach), I often find knowing that extra technical info frequently enhances my enjoyment of the piece; and - perhaps crucially - it almost NEVER detracts from it (I can't think of a single example of where, for me, "knowing" too much about a piece has subtracted enjoyment)....And I find that last point in particular applies for pretty much any of the "great" composers - perhaps even those who have not taken any great pains to conform to any of the established forms (or indeed those who try consciously to "break free" of them); composers who perhaps rely more on melodic gift and pure instinct, etc....Even in those cases, there is usually something interesting to discover the deeper you look.

I always put in something like that to see who's paying attention...

Some of these videos cause me carpal tunnel syndrome...

I’m putting it on my listening list.

Probably not in a church cantata... they likely would’ve played it on the organ. I don’t actually hear any keyboard instrument in this recording though.