I uses to think that I knew a huge amount of the music of Bach, because I was familiar with more of his music than my friends were, but the more I study his opus, the smaller the estimate of my familiarity with it shrinks!
I encountered Bach in these ways:
1. When I was but a child, My dad was in the habit of playing a favorite Bach tune at bedtime: Jesu joy of Man's Desiring (an miserable metrical English replacement for the first line of the German chorale), a number in Cantata 147. This chorale was wildly popular in Britain, and as a result, also in Sri Lanka. Our recording was by the legendary Bach Choir of London, led by Sir Reginald Jacques, on an old 78 rpm bakelite disc, played on our (non-electric) phonograph!
The reverse side had two movements from the B minor orchestral suite: the Rondeau, and the Badinerie, which I loved greatly.
2. When I started school at Wesley College, Colombo, I heard the choir sing the selfsame chorale from BWV 147. I resolved to sing in this fabulous choir as soon as they would let me, and when I was 12, I did.
3. A couple of years later, I began music lessons, for exams of the Trinity Schools of Music, and my first piece was a Bach minuet. (This piece was from the Anna Magdalena music collection—curated by Bach's second wife, many of whose entries have recently suspected of being not by Bach, but by his contemporaries. The three minuets have been generally considered beyond suspicion for more than a century. But the needs of musicologists will intermittently drag all of Bach's works back under the microscope.)
4. Once my elder relatives happened to notice my interest in Bach, I was given sundry Bach music and recordings, the latter of which I played incessantly.
5. A certain teacher at school, who had recently returned from graduate school in England, and was a Bach enthusiast, was temporarily given in charge of our school choir. He wasted no time in inserting chorales from the Christmas Oratorio into our Christmas carols. The next term, for Prize Day, the choir prepared and sang another well-known chorale: Wachet auf, or Sleepers wake. Soon my passion for Bach choral music was kindled!
6. My father was appointed Chaplain to one of the campuses of the University of Ceylon, and we found ourselves surrounded by Bach lovers, who were ever ready to form impromptu choruses to sing at every church celebration. From there, it was just a short step to having to rein in my Bach mania, because not everyone was happy with a never-ending stream of Bach music all the time.
7. When I arrived in Pittsburgh for graduate school, I discovered that American libraries had not only books, but collections of recordings, and even phonographs and headsets with which library users could sit and listed to the recordings at all hours of the day and night, until they were expected home for meals. Furthermore, the university bookstore stocked inexpensive recordings of the Bach orchestral works ($1.98) which I bought, one on each payday! I played these at as high a volume as I was allowed, and I presently acquired a tape recorder, with which I recoded all the Bach music onto cassettes. Then I got a little cassette player on which I could play the cassettes, even as I was walking between classes, waiting for classes to begin, or walking home.
8. Across the plaza from the Pitt Library, was another library: The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which had sheet music! I lost no time in acquiring the scores of my favorite movements, and playing them with my friends. They were impatient with how slow I was with sight-reading; they could play anything at sight.
Then came the Internet (maybe shouldn't capitalize the word anymore), and now Bach material was everywhere, and I'm not going to itemize from where Bach information was seeping into my brain. Then I arrived in Williamsport, and it was the home of the John V Brown library, which had a great collection of recordings, and also sheet music. At this point, I foolishly assumed that I could consider myself sort of an authority on Bach. But, in the nature of the subject, different people could consider themselves authorities on different parts of the study. By playing organ to accompany church services for years, I found myself memorizing the Bach harmony for numerous hymns. (Bach harmony has long been the preferred harmony, by the Church of England, for hymns not usually associated with Bach, for instance Now thank we all our God, and From all that dwell below the skies.)
Arch, on Bach's Old Style birthday anniversary
