CLARTMU005 - The Music and Life of J. S. Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach is regarded as one of the greatest composers of Western music. During his lifetime he achieved some renown as a teacher and organ virtuoso, but for 27 years he worked as a church musician in Leipzig, a relatively provincial city. As cantor of St. Thomas Church, he prepared weekly performances for the city’s five churches and taught at the church school, while also composing many of his most beautiful works, including several hundred church cantatas. In this course, we study the wide variety of vocal and instrumental genres that Bach composed in and learn how he transformed and perfected the traditional forms and techniques of the German Baroque.
Course Details
David Ferris, Ph.D., is an associate professor of music in the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. He teaches seminars on classical style, jazz, Mozart, Romantic song, the Schumanns, Verdi and Shakespeare, Russian opera, musical biography and folklorism in 19th-century music. His work has been published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Routledge and has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Journal of Musicology, Music Theory Spectrum and Music & Letters. He holds a doctorate from Brandeis University.
On campus
This course will be delivered on campus/in person. Classroom and parking information will be sent prior to your course start date.
- Introduction: Biography and influences
- Virtuoso of the keyboard
- Dance and variation
- Church cantatas
- Passion oratorios
- Transcription and rearrangement