The death of good music has been greatly exaggerated. Over the last year, just like in every year in recent memory, artists (and, it must be said, particularly young artists) have released so many stunning albums that keeping up with contemporary music is a practical impossibility. The following is thus an imperfect and very incomplete … Continue reading A Gertus History of Music’s Top 25* Albums of 2022
Tag: Bach
The Friday Symposium: Bach and The Martini
Leave it to academia to turn something wonderful into something dreadful. When most people hear the world "symposium" today, they think of a bunch of talking heads sitting on a podium massaging their own egos. In the Ancient World, however, a symposium was decidedly more fun--after all, the word symposium is derived from the Greek … Continue reading The Friday Symposium: Bach and The Martini
Searching for Truth: The Conversations
It was the Moonlight Sonata that started my obsession with musical Conversations. And no, it wasn't the Mozart link described in the prior entry. It is easy to find how Beethoven influenced subsequent composers. You can jump only a few decades forward to Frederic Chopin, for example: Ludwig van Beethoven, Sonata No. 14, Op. 27, … Continue reading Searching for Truth: The Conversations
A Conversation Without End
Bach is the beginning and end of all music.Max Reger I had no idea of the historical evolution of the civilized world's music and had not realized that all modern music owes everything to Bach.Niccolai Rimsky-Korsakov Bach is a colossus of Rhodes, beneath whom all musicians pass and will continue to pass. Mozart is the … Continue reading A Conversation Without End
Credo in unum Deum
The gnawing fear I have about trying to sum up the life’s work of history’s most important composers is the certainty that I have left something very important out. But, at least with Bach, I have no such concerns because up today is Bach’s titanic Mass in B minor. I am not even going to … Continue reading Credo in unum Deum
A Gertus History of Music 