Steven Vlad

• Mass in B Minor, BWV 232 by Johann Sebastian Bach

This was the culmination of a project I set for myself several months ago.

First, if you don’t know the B minor Mass you should. It a fantastic piece of music and most musicians would probably agree that it sits near the top of the greatest works of Western music.

My goal was to go through each movement and document the form of each, the major key areas, the melodic themes, and to generally understand the mid-to-large scale structure of each. I also wanted to understand something of the history of the work and how it came to be written.

And I’ve done that. I won’t say I’m now an expert but I certainly have a greater understanding than I did before. I can’t possibly go into the details here. But for those of you who might be interested, there were two books that were very valuable and I have been constantly dipping into them over the last several months.

The first is:

• Bach: Mass in B Minor by John Butt

This is an excellent little guide to everything about this work. It includes the history, the source of each movement (almost all were originally written for other purposes), a short theoretical analysis of each, and aspects of how the movements fit into Bach’s corpus. It’s written for people who read music and have some basic training in Western music theory, but large parts of it will be intelligible to the layperson.

The second is:

• Listening to Bach: The B Minor Mass and the Christmas Oratorio by Daniel R. Melamed

This is also excellent and is geared towards the non-musically trained. Melamed’s goal is to help the layperson understand how someone of Bach’s generation would hear these works (i.e. each movement). He shows how the they fit into what listeners of the time would expect, and how they would break those expectations. The reader comes away with a better understanding of the styles of each movement and how Bach modified each to fit into the whole. It’s accompanied by copious audio examples that the reader gets access to on buying the book.

Surprisingly, Wikipedia also has a pretty good article on the structure of the piece and gives a nice summary of some of the scholarship on it. Recommended.

So that’s that. I’m not sure what my next big project will be or whether there will even be one.