Why Bach? Navigating 21st Century Scholarship, Performance, and Pedagogy

Bach Festival and Symposium marked the tenth anniversary of this biennial event.This is a notable achievement for any conference, and particularly for one focused on a single, if canonic, composer.The symposium's theme, 'Why Bach?: Navigating 21st Century Scholarship, Performance, and Pedagogy' , was timely and necessary.Johann Sebastian Bach's presence in twenty-first-century life is not in question; indeed, its absence would be more notable than its presence in locations from counterpoint exams to Halloween cartoons, weddingprocession playlists and lunchtime organ recitals.None the less, the need to justify and preserve Bach scholarship has never been so important as it is now.Bach scholarship should be justified on its intrinsic merits.But practically speaking, to be relevant, publishable and hireable in the twenty-first-century academic environment, Bach scholars must think and write about both what Bach means in modern society, and how Bach might help us shape modern society differently.The Amherst Bach Symposium broached both questions.Bach researchers are learning from the twenty-first century in both form and content.The symposium demonstrated this with a broad mixture of methodologies, representation from international scholars, relative gender parity amongst presenters and organizers, and a mixture of new and established voices.In 2025, broadening participation in an academic field is not a political pastime, but a practical necessity to sustain and enliven research and writing.Such changes also come at a cost, and these were not lost on attendees.The conference's rich diversity of participants meant that scholars had to explain both their research and their methodologies in mere twenty-minute slots; those who chose to speak for longer sacrificed valuable discussion time.Listeners were also challenged to formulate questions and dialogue outside their own lines of research.Interdisciplinary conferences make the Q and A sections especially important for a sense of direction and coherence, even as they make everyone vulnerable in a professional environment that sometimes rewards knowledge over curiosity.The symposium also demonstrated many places in which Bach scholars can influence twentyfirst-century thought.Each paper modelled ways in which studying Bach intersects with modern intellectual issues and methods, and showed how doing so inherently supports the biographical, musical and historical core of Bach scholarship.These intersections were united by an undercurrent of globalism and its seeming discontents toward the Western canon and its accompanying historical narrative.These arose in each of the symposium's three areas of interest: scholarship, performance and pedagogy.