 Hello, everyone. Welcome to Tripoli's first fall lecture. I wanted to just mention that our annual meeting, which will be brief, will be held right before our October 9th lecture. I'd now like to introduce Beth Wood, who will tell us a little bit about our speaker today. Beth? Welcome to our fall series, everyone. It's really good to be back. Our first speaker today is James Stewart. James earned his master's in music from the University of North Carolina School for the Arts. He holds a doctorate from the Heart School of Music at the University of Hartford. James has composed music for children's shows, for rock bands, and for symphony orchestras. And you may recognize him from some of the fine presentations he's given to Tripoli in the past, and also as the afternoon host on Classical Station of Vermont Public Radio. So a very warm welcome back to James Stewart. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for inviting me to be here with you today. I'm going to go ahead and start sharing my screen and share my sound as well. We were going to present this particular presentation back in March just before everything went crazy with COVID-19. So we've been holding on to this particular presentation for a while, and it's my pleasure to be able to share it with you today. I want to take just a moment to talk about the latest series of timeline episodes that we've been doing from VPR. When the pandemic hit, I actually, we were so busy, there was so much to be done. In fact, I'm sitting in my home studio where a lot of my VPR classical hours are done now. We had to figure out how to do things from home and to kind of change the way that we were doing our daily jobs. And so I stopped doing timeline for a little while until I found a new story that really piqued my interest. And so we've been doing stories about hibaku instruments. And what do I mean by that? It's been 75 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and out of the ashes and out of the rubble of those explosions. They've actually been rescuing or have rescued in the past musical instruments, pianos, violins, other kinds of instruments as well that have been taken and restored. One particular piano tuner will restore the inside of these pianos, but leave the outside with all the marks and damage. And then he actually puts these instruments into a truck and they travel around Japan and plays for children for senior centers all over the place, just sharing the message of peace. And right now we're in the middle of a series talking about a very particular violin that was owned by Sergei Patrikov, who was a teacher in Hiroshima. But he actually the story of his violin begins with the 1917 Russian Revolution and the civil wars that went with that and then of course surviving the bombing of Hiroshima, and then he immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. And in 1987, they donated the violin to Hiroshima and it gets played every year. And so we've been following the story of that particular violin, like to invite you to check out every single one of those episodes. You can find them at vpr.org slash timeline. You can also find timeline wherever you get podcasts. It's available on iTunes, Google Play, but my favorite way to listen to it is through Spotify. I love the way that that one works. But you can find it again vpr.org slash timeline. Today's presentation is really an expansion of a presentation and a concert that we gave last year at VPR and Stetson Studio one alongside Vermont pianist Paul Orgel. He was pairing together nocturnes by Chopin along with excerpts from and preludes and fugues from J.S. Box, Will Temper Klavier book two. And it's really this idea of pairings that got me started to really being interested in this. You know, there are some things that just really go well together like peanut butter and jelly and macaroni and cheese, and maybe for those with a perhaps more sophisticated palette and aged Vermont sharp cheddar with an earthy peanut noir. I have to admit I had to look at that last one. There's also some unusual pairings as well that you may not expect like strawberries and tomatoes, or kiwi and oysters, or this one I still have yet to try olives and white chocolate. The idea is to take two things that seem to be quite different from one another, place them together and then experience how they contrast or complement one another. And that's what we're going to be doing today in this lecture we're going to be taking two composers they're separated by a century by geography, philosophy and style of course. And we're going to be placing them side by side, exploring their lives and their music and I believe we're going to learn something new and unique. As a result, we're going to be diving into the lines of JS Bach and Frederick Chopin. And after we look at their lives a bit we're going to look at their music one particular project from each of them. And then we're going to listen to short excerpts from their works side by side and get a chance to kind of see how they're the same and how they're different from one another. And then at the end we'll have a chance for some Q&A. So thanks for thanks for being with us. Let's begin with JS Bach. For the Bach family in Germany, music was a family business. Over the course of two centuries there are over 50 members of the Bach family that were notable musicians or composers. The most famous and arguably the most important was Johann Sebastian Bach, who we think of when we say the name Bach. Now if you went back in time and said to Bach, hey, look how popular you are in the 21st century, he would have said you are crazy. Because for him, music was about right now. There was an immediacy to the music that he created to the music that he composed and to the music that he performed. It was for the moment and it wasn't for future generations. We'll talk a little bit more about that dynamic shift that happens a couple of centuries later. Bach was the youngest child in his family. His first music lessons were most likely from his father, who was a violinist, Johann Ambrosius. At the age of nine, though, both of Bach's parents passed away. It's very tragic. And he and his brother Jacob went to live with their older brother, Johann Christoph, who was an organist. Now the story goes that J.S. Bach was learning the organ from his older brother. He was starting to play in church services, but Christoph would not allow him to play certain manuscripts or create music from scratch. Composition was not a priority and actually forbidden for J.S. Bach to do. So Johann Sebastian Bach taught himself composition by copying and studying music by moonlight and candlelight. And this is one of my favorite images. If you can picture a young J.S. Bach huddled over a candle at night, trying to scribble down some musical ideas. Bach's musical style is grounded in the Baroque era. The Baroque era starts about 1600. It's a bit, and it was a departure from music of the Renaissance in this way. There was this idea of rhetoric, of the power of speech, to be able to move an individual, the audience from one emotion to another, so that you start with people who are against your idea and through the way that you speak and through the words that you say, you move them to being for your idea. We call this the doctrine of the affections. And in the beginning of the Baroque, it was this belief that music could do the same thing. The music could take somebody that was feeling one way and through the music make them feel a different way. So these affections would be pouring out of the music and would actually change the way that you feel, the emotion that you have as a listener. And as a result, many Baroque pieces are rather short, the movements are rather short, because one little piece of music, one movement, could only express one doctrine, one affection at a time. So it could either be sad or happy or melancholic or you get the idea. It was one thing at a time. And so you wouldn't have a piece that was moving from one to another. And this very much described the music of J.S. Bach, but at this time, the time of Bach, Baroque music had been around for over a century. And so it's actually rather old fashioned the style of music that Bach was composing at the time. Bach spent a lot of his teenage years bouncing from town to town, if you can imagine a musical vagabond. And he was actually already gaining a reputation as a virtuoso organist. And he was also known for being a bit of a hothead. He immediately started a street brawl with a bassoon player in Arnstadt. Eventually at the age of 23, he settled down in Weimar and married his first wife, Maria Barber, and it was there that they started a family. During this time as well, it was the, there was a system of the way that musicians and composers would support themselves and their families and we call it the Capelmeister system. For a job working for a nobleman or for a rich family, maybe for the aristocracy, you would be working for a court like Franz Josef Haydn and the Esther House Court. You would be composing music for them on a regular basis, making sure that they had the entertainment and the dance music that they needed. And Bach was doing the same kind of thing, especially for churches in the area. I looked behind a huge musical legacy, but what I'd like to do is spend a little bit of time looking at his family legacy. So we're going to look at Bach and his children. J.S. Bach had two wives. His first wife died at a young age and between the two marriages they had 20 children. But sadly, the only 10 of those children lived to adulthood. But of those 10, four of them became notable composers. And each of them have their own story, their own hometown, and their own relationship with their father's music. We'll start with the oldest. You'll see him up here. He's our first one. His name is Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. You'll see Dresden Bach. That is the city or the town that each one has a name like this. That was the name of the city where he spent most of his career. He was Bach's eldest son, and he was a chip off the old block. His musical style was a lot like his father's. Unfortunately, he did not inherit his father's disposition. Even though Johann Sebastian was a hothead, he did get along very well with his employers, with the churches that he worked with Wilhelm Friedemann. That wasn't the case by all accounts. He was extremely difficult to work with. To put it frankly, Wilhelm was a jerk, and he had constant disputes with his employers, and it had him bouncing from one position to the next. As a result, he ended up dying in poverty at the age of 71. The next JS Bach offspring that we'll talk about is arguably the most famous and most prolific, Carl Philippe Emmanuel Bach. We call him the Berlin Bach or the Hamburg Bach. And he got one of his names from another fellow composer, Georg Philippe Telemann. It's actually his godfather. And the Telemanns in the box were actually rather close. And so Telemann had the honor of being the godfather of CPE Bach. CPE Bach's music stands in the gap between the broke and the classical eras. It was this really bridging of music. We had talked just briefly a moment ago about the doctrine of affections that in the broke era of music and only express one emotion at a time. But Carl Philippe Emmanuel Bach started to embrace a style that we call the impensheimer still or the sensitive style. And this was an attempt to express true and natural emotions. In other words, he was writing music that would change throughout the course of a piece. So it could start moody and turn hopeful or start expressively buoyant and then go to somewhere melancholy all within the same piece of music, which was revolutionary in the 1760s and 1770s. His music was a huge influence on Carl, on Carl Maria von Weber, and which eventually trickled down to Richard Wagner. Up next is the sibling, I mean, the sibling of CPE Bach, who we probably know the least about. Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach. We know him as the Buckelberg Bach. Now, at the age of 17, he went to school, went off to school to study law. Many times in music history when you're studying composers, so many of them start off studying law and they turn to composition because they can't get away from it. Well, for Johann Christoph Friedrich, he was already in a musical family, but he wanted to be a lawyer. However, his father fell very ill and ended up passing away in 1750. Johann Christoph Friedrich left the university and took a position at the court of Count Wilhelm in Buckelberg. Perhaps there was a lack of money to pay for his education. Perhaps he was trying to help out the family financially. But whatever the reason, he remained in Buckelberg till his death in 1795. His music was actually more influenced not by his father, but by his employers. And they preferred a much simpler Italian style, think 18th century opera, that kind of style of music, rather than the deeply contrapuntal style of Johann Sebastian Bach, his father, or the deeply emotional style of his brother Carl Philippe the manual Bach. And as a result, the music of J.C. F Bach is a little less well known. And it brings us to the last of J.S. Bach's composing offspring, Johann Christian Bach, we know him as the London Bach. Johann Christian and Carl Friedrich Abel put on many concerts of new music together in the city of London and became rather famous for doing that. J.C. Bach's music, it has a lot less in common with his father, because J.S. Bach passed away when Johann Christian was only 15 years old. Johann Christian's music is an example of what we call the glott style of music. It's very courtly, and it has lots of balanced phrases and emphasis on clear melody and a clear accompaniment. I think the early works of Franz Josef Haydn and the work of Johann Christian Bach was the greatest single influence on a young composer that you probably have heard of Mozart. Bach's music may be an institution today, but during his lifetime, his music was functional for church services and was relatively unknown everywhere else. His work was seen as old fashioned compared to the glott style that was becoming popular at the end of the Baroque. Now there are anecdotes of Bach's children, the ones we just talked about, using old manuscripts, the written down by hand pieces of music that Bach had spent so long writing that they had used those pieces of paper to line the floor of bird houses. No one expected the music to last. This was disposable music. Bach's compositions stand out from his contemporaries because they have this contrapuntal complexity, and it was this complexity, this intellectualism that left his music mostly ignored. Bach left behind two passions, over 300 church cantatas, numerous choral harmonizations, and many instrumental works for large ensembles and chamber groups and soloists. And there's a sad fact that there are quite a few pieces of Bach that we don't have. They've been lost to time. But Bach's influence continues. In the early classical era, there was a librarian whose name was Gottfried von Steeden. He lived in Vienna. And he was a very wealthy librarian. I love the idea of a wealthy librarian who gets to spend his wealth on wonderful things like musical manuscripts. And he collected manuscripts of Baroque composers, including J.S. Bach. He would send them in his house. He had a harpsichord and a clavichord and all kinds of different instruments at his house. And he would invite prominent composers in Vienna to come and look at his collection and to pour over and perform the manuscripts that were there. Among those were Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven. And according to one account, when Mozart saw the music of Bach and started playing through, especially some of the preludes and fugues, this is what one person said Mozart said. Finally, a composer I can learn from. Beethoven called Bach the progenitor of harmony. For the first 50 years after the death of J.S. Bach, his music remained mostly unpublished and unperformed. But the 19th century saw an unprecedented return to his music and what we call the Bach revival. Now today, the vast majority of our concert repertoire, which you hear symphonies perform, is composed of music from the past, composers and pieces from generations and even centuries long gone. But it wasn't always this way. Until the early 19th century, music was much more immediate. Works were composed and performed for the moment in which they were written. Now there are exceptions to this. Of course, there are some historical composers who remained in the musical consciousness of Europe, like the works of Palestrina, Purcell, Louis and Handel. These were never forgotten. However, other composers' works were not so fortunate and this idea of writing music for the moment persisted into the classical era. And it was really Beethoven who challenged this idea. There's a wonderful story of after Beethoven had been composing his string quartets, especially his final string quartets, very forward-looking works of music. Music critics and other composers and other musicians came up to him and were like, these are great, but I don't get it. I don't understand this music. And Beethoven said, well, they're not for you. These pieces of music are for future generations. They are not for you. The early romantics became enamored with the past, past thought and past art in a movement of what we call historicism. And this was especially prevalent in Germany at the time. After the embarrassment of the Napoleonic Wars and all of that, there was this desire to go back to what made that country great. And that included a religious revival, a resurgence of Protestant Lutheran faith, Martin Luther. And naturally, JS Bach became an icon of that movement. A group of intellectuals began to collect manuscripts and organize historical concerts of Bach's music. And this underground movement began to gain momentum. And all of this culminated in 1829 with a performance, well with a 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, who conducted the Zing Academy in Bach's St. Matthews Passion. This performance that day moved the audience in a way the original never did a century before. All of a sudden, Europe couldn't get enough of Bach's music. And publishing houses began to churn out new editions and never before seen works. Some of them were authentic and some of them weren't. And because of that, in 1850, the Bach Gesellschaft was formed. This was a society entrusted with the task of putting together a definitive edition of all of Bach's work. And that was a job that would take them 50 years to complete. Bach Revival was the first example of an explosion of research that opened up the entire depth of the Western musical tradition to modern audiences. The fact that today you can attend performances of music from the Brogue back to the Renaissance to the Middle Ages and even beyond that is all thanks to the scholarship that was pioneered in the early years of the 19th century. Let's talk a bit about Chopin. In the Romantic era, composers were no longer employed of the aristocracy. We talked about the Capelmeister system that J.S. Bach was a part of, as well as most of his children. It was a system that Mozart tried so hard to get out of and it was a system that Beethoven all but ignored. And by the time of Chopin, it was actually more common for composers to be working for themselves, making money off of publishing or from teaching or from their performances. There was one exception to this and that was Richard Wagner, who actually took a position in a court. For this freedom of not being an employee of the aristocracy, for composing for the people, this freedom was actually a double-edged sword because although it allowed these artistic geniuses like Berlioz and Liszt and Wagner to flourish, it also spawned a generation of composers who happily wrote these crowd-pleasing disposable immediate pieces of music for commercial success. Composers like Chopin rejected this popularization of music and retreated actually from public performance and refused to compromise his emerging artistic style. Ironically, Chopin's music became and has remained extremely popular. Chopin's father immigrated from Poland to Poland from France. So he began in France and immigrated to Poland and had a profound spirit of patriotism for his adopted country, which he imparted to his children. Now, even though Chopin spent the majority of his career in Paris, so he went from Poland to Paris, he never forgot his Polish roots. Chopin was a child prodigy, much like Mozart. At the age of six, it became clear that he was destined to be Mozart's successor, especially on the keyboard. The piano was Chopin's greatest love. He wrote almost exclusively for that instrument. It's believed that Chopin was mostly self-taught on the keyboard, which accounts for his breaking of traditions and his inventive techniques. He was writing for the piano in new and interesting ways, in ways nobody had before. And that's probably because he was teaching himself how to do it. As a young man, he became known as the National Composer of Poland. But Chopin desired wider acclaim and musical experience, and that led him to Vienna and then to Paris. Hats off, gentlemen, a genius. That was the way Robert Schumann declared and responded to Chopin as he quickly flashed on the Parisian music scene. Although his performances were legendary, Chopin barely performed 30 times in public during his entire career. Chopin was convinced that sheer talent was not enough to compete with the force of nature that was Franz Lest. We can talk about Franz Lest another time in the way that his concerts were setting them up basically as the world's first rock star. Chopin wasn't interested in all of that. Chopin was much more interested in composing, publishing his works, and becoming one of the most sought-after keyboard instructors in Paris. Chopin was also a figure of controversy and rumor. There were reports of his ongoing battle with tuberculosis as early as 1836. It's a long time to be sick with TB. His affair with novelist George Sand was the stuff of tabloids, and after their relationship fell apart, Chopin's health continued to decline. However, he was forced to continue to make public appearances despite his sickness. See, he needed the money. The rise of the Second French Republic forced him to stop giving lessons, and small performances were the only way that he could support himself at the time. By the time he turned 39, this is one of my saddest stories for Chopin, by the time he turned 39, he was so sick and tired, he said, the music has left me and died not long after. Chopin's have come to his illness on October 17, 1849. 3,000 mourners attended his funeral, which was accompanied by an extravagant performance of Mozart's Requiem. Let's take a look at these two composers, compare them side by side. J.S. Bach was a family man with deep religious devotion. Chopin was a consummate bachelor with no real religious ties. Both were sought after performers, Bach on the organ and Chopin on the piano. As composers, Bach's music was all but ignored until well after his death, and Chopin's work has always been popular. Both Bach and Chopin wrote with Wagner called absolute music. That's music without a program or story. It didn't have to have a story to tell you, like the pastoral symphony or like the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Many of Chopin's contemporaries like Liszt and Schumann gave their pieces evocative titles like Children's Pieces or Mephisto Waltz. But Chopin, like Bach, was happier just to let the music speak for itself. He wrote a nocturne, a prelude, a concerto. These two composers also have quite an ambitious project in common, and that was writing pieces in every possible key. That brings us to Bach's WT Klavier. The WT Klavier showcases an ability that we take for granted in modern music. Today we have the ability to play with anyone and any key thanks to our modern standards of tuning and temperament. What do I mean by that? When you hear an orchestra tuning up before a performance, they are tuning to a standard frequency. What we call A440, that's the A above middle C if you're looking at a keyboard. It has to vibrate at exactly 440 cycles per second, but it hasn't always been that way. Some scholars believe that the pitch of broke instruments could have been as low as 415, it's almost a half step lower. But tuning a single note is just the beginning. Figuring out how to tune multiple notes to each other has become the real challenge. The word temperament is used to describe how we tune or create scales. Those are the building blocks of Western music. And today we utilize a tuning system called equal temperament, where the octave is split into 12 equal steps that we call semitones. But history is filled with different ways that the scale could be tuned. In box day, the standard tuning was called mean tone temperament. The limitations of that system meant that a single keyboard could only play in five or six related keys. And what that means is that you would have to have multiple keyboards in order to play in all the available keys. Can you imagine having multiple keyboards around? This brings us to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. That title simply means that a single keyboard is tuned in such a way that the performer can play in all 24 keys, 12 major and 12 minor. And this was a revolutionary idea. We aren't sure if Bach had our modern method of tuning in mind, probably not, but he set up to compose a prelude and fugue in every key possible on a single instrument. He liked this idea so much that he did it twice, once in 1722 and then again 20 years later. That's how we have books one and book two. Bach was such a believer in the well tempered system of tuning instruments that there's a story that I love and I'm going to tell this story, even though I'm not 100% sure it's true. Bach and a particular organ maker were having a correspondence back and forth because Bach wanted an organ that could play in all 24 keys. He wanted a organ tuned to the well tempered system. Well, the organ that he had in Weimar was not tuned to that. It was tuned to a mean tone. There was a very limited number of keys that he could play in. And he was not pleased with this and they would go back and forth. But can you imagine the cost of having to retune an organ from one temperament to another? You'd have to take all the pipes and cut them down. The amount of work would be impossible. One particular Sunday, Bach is up in the organ loft, which in those days was behind the pulpit right in front of the congregation. And he looks out at the congregation and sees that organ maker in a pew. And so Bach turns and begins to play the prelude to a chorale in the key of C sharp major, which is every sharp. Of course, there was not a key that the organ was made to play in and it sounded horrible like nails on a chalkboard. It was out of tune. It was difficult to listen to. And so according to the story, the organ maker knew exactly what Bach was doing. Got up out of his pew, came up into the organ loft and the two of them came to blows on a Sunday morning over the well tempered system. Whether it's true or not. I just love that story. In Bach's own words, the well tempered clavier was written for the profit and use of musical youth, desirous of learning, and especially for the past time of those already skilled in this study. These manuscripts weren't published. They were copied and circulated widely throughout Europe. The work actually did not reach a publisher until 1801. But you can hear the influence of the well tempered clavier and the compositions of the high classical era in Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, all of them studied these works very, very closely. Today we still feel the influence of Bach's well tempered clavier. Some pianists even refer to the well tempered clavier as the Old Testament and Beethoven's piano sonatas as the New Testament. This work is a Bible for musicians and it certainly was true for Chopin. Chopin wrote that his style was greatly influenced by two composers, Mozart and JS Bach. Chopin had his students practice Bach every single day in order to exercise and warm up their fingers and perfect their technique. Many of Chopin's contemporaries declared just how attached he was to the work of Bach. But there was very little scholarly evidence of this, very little evidence that Bach was, that Chopin was so interested in the music of Bach until we found what I'm showing you right now on my screen. This is a 1801 Swiss copy of Bach's well tempered clavier and it was found with copious notes in Chopin's hand. He was obviously using the score to teach one of his students and made metronome and dynamic markings. You can see them here. I have a little blown up image. He made these markings inside. This is in Chopin's handwriting. Then telling his student how to play the piece. Chopin often criticized other Bach scholars saying that he understood Bach's music far better than most of them did. And in this student copy, we see that Chopin had a very clear vision of how Bach's counterpoint and the emotional content that's there is supposed to be approached and expressed. So by following these notes and by following the way that Chopin wrote into the score, you can sound like Chopin playing Bach. Now Chopin's Opus 28 owes a great deal to Bach's well tempered clavier. This is a showcase of 24 preludes, again one for every key major and minor. It was published in 1839. Chopin called these short pieces preludes, which we often think of as introductions to something bigger, a larger work. But each of these short pieces stand on their own. Chopin was redefining a genre here and challenging the role of short pieces, especially in a concert setting. The arrangement of Chopin's 24 preludes and Bach's well tempered clavier are quite different from each other. See, Bach went systematically. He started at C major and C minor, then went to C sharp major, C sharp minor, D sharp E F. You get the idea. He's going slowly up the scale. However, Chopin followed a different way. He followed the circle of fifths. Chopin began with C major and then went to A minor, then to G major and then to E minor. You get the idea going around the circle of fifths. Perhaps Chopin's intention was for someone to play the preludes one after another after the other. Maybe that was his intention, but Chopin himself never played more than four of the preludes in a single concert. Bach wrote his well tempered clavier for educational purposes. He never intended to make money on those, on those preludes and fugues that he wrote. Chopin wrote his 24 preludes to fulfill a commission. The piano maker and publisher Camille Playel paid Chopin 2,000 francs for the work today, counting for inflation. That's just under $30,000 for those 24 preludes. Not everyone liked these preludes when they were first published. Some of them are quite short. One is only 12 bars long. Robert Schumann wrote, they are just sketches. Beginnings of etudes. They're all disorder and wild confusion. Franz Liszt liked them a lot, saying they are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet who cradles the soul in golden dreams. What I'd like for us to do, and the time that we have left before we go to some questions, is we're going to listen to a prelude by J.S. Bach from the well tempered clavier, book one, and we're going to listen to a prelude by Chopin. Both are an E minor. And what I want you to listen for are the similarities between these two composers and the way that they approach this key. We have that piece, that prelude, and of course it gets followed after by the fugue in E minor. And you can see the way that he's at the beginning, holding on to individual notes in the upper voice, and he has this accompaniment happening in the lower part. He has these chords that are happening in these middle voices. And then he has this moment of explosion of motion. It doesn't really change the emotion of it, but this explosion of movement that happens near the end. So I want you to listen to Chopin's prelude in E minor, and tell me that these two aren't connected in some way, shape or form. Do you see what I mean? There's that wonderful moment, there's that wonderful beginning of Chopin's prelude, where we have those sustained notes and we have that harmony underneath. And then close to the end, we have this explosion of emotion that brings us to the conclusion. It really feels like they're connected, like Chopin knew exactly what Bach was doing and that there's something that connects them through the styles, even though they're separated by 100 years by different nationalities and by different styles, there's something that connects them. And I do believe it's the chromatic color. I hope that this lecture has opened up a bit for you to maybe be interested and excited yourself. And getting interested into learning more about these composers, not just that they wrote music in, but to realize that they are human beings, and that they have history and a past and that's a lot like yours and mine. And that behind the music, there are individuals and characteristics and personalities, and as well that all of it is happening in a historical context. And I believe it adds depth to our appreciation of music when we do that, just that. Thank you so much for inviting me and letting me be a part of this first virtual lecture for EEE it's been my pleasure, and I understand that we're going to open up for some Q&A. Yep, so I, I'm going to have, I'm asking the Q&A's by the way so I have 405 going on here so the first one. Did any of J.S. Bach's daughters become composers. Not that we know of. It's, it's known that a couple of his daughters became musicians, but no composers. You have to understand the time period that they were in. Female composers had the deck stacks so much against them. So no, is the simple answer, but there are exceptions to that role of female composers and it's something that we're diving into a bit more at VPR classical as we are striving to show more diverse voices and show you that yes there, there were female and 17th and 18th and 19th centuries and we want to make sure that they get heard too. So here's sort of a follow up question, did Bach encourage the women in his family to study, compose or perform music? Perform, yes, but you also have to understand the time that they were living in. Even Clara Schumann wrote this heartbreaking letter about how when she was younger she was impetuous and thought that she could compose. And, but then she said no this is a man's game and the idea that I would be able to do that is foolhardy. I believe that she couldn't do it, even though Clara Schumann was a phenomenal composer as well as a performer, and that's 100 years, more than 100 years after Bach. And we even have in the 20th century, Lili and Nadia Boulanger, French sisters who Lili Boulanger was a wonderful, wonderful composer, but her sister Nadia Boulanger actually thought the composition was not a female, was not a female game and this was into the latter part of the 20th century. So you have to understand the world that female composers were against. And so I can't see any evidence that J.S. Bach was fighting for his daughters to become composers, but we do know that they were some of them at least were musicians. What made you choose these two particular giants for comparison? Well, the first thing was the project that we did last year with Paul or Gell, as he was already deciding to pair together nocturnes by Bach, I mean by Chopin as well as well, and he had excerpts from the WTK Book II by Bach and he put them side by side, he would just perform one and go directly into the other and have them in similar keys. And listening to it was very striking. When I was doing research into the two composers, it was when I found that 1801 copy of the Waltembourg Clavier that had markings by Chopin telling his students exactly how to perform the music of Bach that I was like, okay, that's real, like Chopin's connection to Bach's music is a real thing. Let's look deeper into how they are connected. And I think you can make a really good case that they, that at the very least Chopin was highly influenced by Bach's music. What were the major ways the youngest Bach's son influenced Mozart? It was a couple of things. And I believe it was the bucking of the Capellmeister system. Johann Christian Bach was more interested in putting on performances of new music with his partner Carl Friedrich Abel, and the two were very popular in the city and these musical concerts brought in a bit of money. And Mozart saw that as a business example. And then there's also the case of the musical style, which is all about balanced phrases. Think about it as four bar phrase with simple accompaniment underneath, something that people can listen to, and then start to sing after one listen. That's something Mozart was very interested in. That really helped to define his style when he was younger, and then something that he developed further on in his career. So that's really the biggest influences I think are the musical style, these balanced Golan style of music as well as a business sense that's looking past the Capellmeister system and more towards a self-sustainable composition performance model of making your money. What were some of the aspects Chopin invented for the piano? Oh boy. A lot of it has to do with the way that he is calling for stretching of the fingers beyond what would be normal for somebody to do. And it would take a pianist to go a little bit deeper in for you to show you all the innovations that Chopin is looking for. One of the things that I find very Chopinian is his use of polyrhythms, the two against three is something that bronze took from Chopin and brought into solo piano music. You can also see are these slipping chords. If you looked at the E minor, if you're watching the music go by as we were listening to the E minor prelude, you'll see how he starts off with a chord and then just adds one flat and then another and then things start to shift and move. Those kind of harmonic motions and movements were something that was not normal to do at the time. It was something that Chopin was doing because it felt good under his fingers, he says, the way I look at it. He was like, look at this voice leading, look at the way that this chord moves it to this thing and creates this beautiful melancholic way of, you know, you watch this E minor melt as he's going along. So it's those kind of things, but again, you could spend an entire doctoral thesis pointing out all the ways that Chopin improved or pushed the technique of the piano. I also have to realize that the piano was not in its fully formed form. It was an instrument in flux in the 19th century. The piano was, they were still trying to figure out how many notes, how many keys to have on the piano, how many pedals the piano should have. There are examples of Beethoven's music, Beethoven's solo piano music, where at the top, and I'm thinking about the hammer Cleaver Sonata, at the very top of the range of what he's playing on the piano, you think the melody should go just a couple of notes higher. You're like Beethoven, why didn't you go up all the way to that note? Why didn't you go up all the way to that B? Why are you hanging on this G? And then why he did was that he didn't have that note on those pianos that were written at that that were being built at that time. He was writing music for the piano that he had. Chopin was one of the first composers to show off what this 88 key fully fledged piano could do. So we have one more question and then Carol is going to do some concluding remarks. So the last question. Can you give an example of how a baroque piece changed the people's thinking by the time it ended? Oh my goodness. Well, I'm going to ask you, can you think of a time that music changed your mind that you can think of a time the music changed the way you were feeling in a particular moment. The first thing that comes into my mind is Handel's Messiah, right? As the Hallelujah chorus comes and the Pope stands. We all stand because the Pope stood in that moment. We don't have in the Renaissance era, we don't have examples like that. We do see that there was a explosion of musical popularity past the past the church of these scholarly pursuits of music that happened after the Baroque era. Also, what the Baroque era actually helped us to be able to do is to create a very easily sung vocal style. So you have a single line that you're focusing on and you have a simple accompaniment underneath it supporting it. So you have your singer and you have this chords underneath supporting it. If you think about what that means, that means that you can have these pieces of music like popular songs that then you can hold on to and it really helped to bring about what's the word I'm looking for? It looked for drama and opera was born out of the ability to have those songs come out. So you have the storytelling elements, the singability of the music. That's all comes out of the Baroque. James, this has been absolutely a treat. What a fun, fun way for us to begin our fall lecture series. Thank you, thank you. Everyone, thanks for joining us. We'll see you again next Friday.