Bach Against Modernity by Michael Marissen (review)

Reviewed by: Bach Against Modernity by Michael Marissen Paul Westermeyer Bach Against Modernity. By Michael Marissen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 184 pp. + xvi. This author, a seasoned Bach scholar and writer who is Professor Emeritus of Music at Swarthmore College, calls this book a "follow-up" to his book Bach and God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). That book is longer (257 pages) with seven chapters divided into four parts and includes much material on anti-Judaism. In contrast, this shorter book has eleven chapters in five parts. The first part of this book, "Constraints of History on Interpretation," has two chapters concerning "broad problems of inattentiveness to historical considerations … about Bach's relation to the present" (ix). Part two, "Brief Commentaries," has four chapters concerning "brief but close critical rehearing of key individual works of Bach" (x). The third part,"Texts," concerns "detailed problems in modern comprehension and rendering of the partly archaic German texts that Bach set to music" (xii). The fourth, "Jews and Judaism," has two chapters on "Bach's music and premodern versus enlightened attitudes toward Jews and Judaism" (xii). In the fifth and final section, the "Theological Character of Secular Instrumental Music," the author apparently thinks the title of this section is self-explanatory and simply repeats it in the preface without further explanation. Three indices at the end of the book have a little over six pages of works cited, two pages of Bach's works, and two pages of names and subjects. In the preface Marissen gives the origins and sources of past assignments and publications that led to the chapters in this book, which makes it a compendium of his writing about Bach. It is a detailed and very helpful study with perceptive insights about Bach through his handwritten entries in his Bible, specific examples of his music and librettos, and how theological themes influenced his secular music. Marissen notes in the first chapter that this is a study of music on the human plain, with age compared to age. There the author defines terms and notes how "modernity" is an "extremely thorny topic" (5). He uses Louis Dupré' s understanding of modernity as End Page 104 "exalting reason above revelation … and exalting human autonomy and achievement … religious tolerance … cosmopolitanism … and social and political progressiveness" (5). Behind this topic is a larger issue that Marissen does not intend to address but which his book raises, specifically, the church and its music generally, though Bach himself does this better. That is, Bach uses the culture's musical vocabulary against the culture. He proclaims the church's message, which says that we are not more "enlightened" (Part IV) than previous cultures, that texts "archaic" (Part III) to any culture can be set musically to transcend themselves, that every culture is ingrown, and that thought in our age as in the past about reason, human autonomy, achievement, religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and social and political progressiveness is broken. The message of the gospel undermines our culturally-conceived and discriminatory thoughts—including thoughts and practices like anti-Judaism and whatever else we may be doing and those who have gone before us may have done knowingly and unknowingly against others. Those who follow us will see only too clearly current problems in the same way that we are able to look back on Bach and the past and see theirs. The remarkable thing is that, in the midst of our human brokenness, Bach was nonetheless able to craft music both for his generation and for those to come. Paul Westermeyer Luther Seminary Saint Paul, Minnesota Copyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.