What is that absolute truth, though? Bach was an ultra-conservative Lutheran, so he would have understood himself to be pursuing a different set of truths than people are mostly seeking now. The music academy understands Bach to have been pursuing the truth of the Western tonal system, which he himself helped to codify as it evolved from the church modes. Bach did not write any music theory treatises, but he certainly understood theory, and his student Johann Kirnberger based Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik on Bach’s teaching.
The question of how devout or conservative J. S. Bach actually was or wasn't has been a surprisingly lively debate. It depends on who you ask in relationship to which parts of his overall body of work and what their reasons for saying so are. I'm still working through Pauline Fairclough's Classics for the Masses but she amusingly draws out a history of Soviet attempts to argue in the 1925-1930 period that Bach wasn't religiously observant at all; that he wrote music to order for church and court because that was his job; and there was no evidence he was religiously sincere and therefore it was acceptable to perform Bach provided you never made the mistake of performing a Bach piece in a way that corresponded to a liturgical calendar (i.e. a feast day of some kind).
The Soviet-era claims that Johann Sebastian Bach was not religiously observant at all could not withstand scrutiny but as Jaroslav Pelikan pointed out in his short but informative Bach Among the Theologians, the plaster saint of the early 19th century Bach revival doesn't withstand scrutiny, either. Pelikan noted that Bach's output in cantatas revealed a man who was obsessed with death and human suffering. If you've read Paul Hindemith's dry observation about how Bach lost his first wife and how only four of his nineteen children survived into adulthood and mental health then, well, it makes sense that a flesh and blood husband and father would consider mortality.
Yet if the Bach who was canonized in the 19th century was canonized as much or more for his instrumental music than his church music then "timeless" and "universal" Bach is the Bach that gets presented. That's not the Bach that Manfred Bukofzer described as a transitional figure who had mastered the old church styles and the nascent galant styles spanning English, German, French, Italian and Polish styles so as to synthesize them.
But let me come back to what kind of Lutheran Bach may have been because Pelikan did a good job briefly sketching out Bach's antagonist relationship to Johann August Ernesti. There was a relationship of mutual loathing, it seems, and Ernesti gets described as a rationalist of the sort who wanted "useful knowledge" promoted in education and music, well, not so much one of those realms of "useful knowledge". Bach, in Pelikan's short summary, comes across as a brilliant musician but someone Ernesti regarded as a grand-standing musical snob and Bach regarded Ernesti as a foe of music. If we dared to try to translate such a battle of wills into anything like a contemporary point of comparison what could we come up with? I had best leave it to actual academics to play with that.
Pelikan also, of course, discussed Erdmann Neumeister and the influence Pietism had on Bach. This is really where the question of how "ultra-conservative Lutheran " Bach was becomes murky and controversial. Scholars seem to agree that Bach's Lutheranism was orthodox enough as far as can be discerned but he was comfortable drawing upon tropes in Pietist hymnody, something a really hard-core conservative Lutheran would not have dreamed of doing. Then there's the Mass in B minor, which is cast in the most conventionally Catholic format possible as liturgy goes. But pivoting briefly from Pelikan to Percy Scholes on The Puritans And Music In England And New England, if the Calvinist tradition in general was, as many historians have alleged, so intrinsically opposed to music and arts of all kinds why did J. S. Bach seem to be happiest writing instrumental music in the court of a Calvinist prince? Jaroslav Pelikan's explanation was that Bach had what he called an "evangelical Catholicity".
Jaroslav Pelikan had an interesting observation about a contrast between the Matthew and John Passions, the former holds to the Anselmian satisfaction theory of the atonement (penal substitutionary atonement for those in the know) whereas the latter embraces the older Christus Victor understanding of the atonement. What the Passions convey are dramas that reveal individual as well as corporate senses of guilt and that is an element that I may find John Butt deals with in his book about Bach's dialogue with modernity. Or maybe not, I'm only starting into the book yet. But Pelikan's observation of how Bach's musical settings of the Passion narratives revealed his capacity to understand and articulate older medieval and more contemporary (for him) doctrines of the atonement can be read as Bach engaging with concepts of personal and corporate guilt that, if we go by the debates about things like cultural appropriation and association in musicology now, are not only not outdated but relevant, even if the concepts of personal and collective guilt are broached in dramatically different ways in contemporary musicological debate than they are in Bach's Passions.
As Ethan Hein so elegantly put it, "The problem here is that you can only claim Bach is universal if the universe consists of European Christians. " Well, yeah, that's a potentially negative way to put it as a rebuttal to Bach's alleged universality but a positive way to put it is that Bach was not, by that measure, "ultra-conservative Lutheran" according to the time and place of his life. He wasn't so stringently Lutheran as to refuse to compose a Latin rather than a vernacular Mass (though Pelikan regretted Bach didn't live long enough to compose a German Mass); yet Bach also had a good time writing music for Calvinists. For people who are not Christians and don't have any background on what the doctrinal differences are between Catholics, Calvinists, orthodox Lutherans and Pietists ... I don't have the time or energy at the moment to unpack that stuff. That's stuff scholars have already tackled.
But then if "universal" is "catholic" (which it is if you know what "catholic" means) then perhaps a different way to describe Bach's achievement would be to say he was, despite his provincial life, a cosmopolitan composer who mastered the old and new styles of his era across cultural boundaries between Germanic, Italian, French, English, Polish and other groups. He managed to write both secular and sacred music and he did so during a period in which the old modal system of pitch organization had been slowly supplanted by diatonic major and minor scales but with plenty of room for chromatic embellishments. Bach mastered the old polyphonic styles and the new dance styles.
What I don't see discussed so much in Bach scholarship is whether or not the unity we perceive in his music is some kind of post hoc post-canonization bias. There are, in fact, scholars who have written at some length about Bach's penchant for stylistic juxtaposition and Daniel Melamed has written some great stuff about how Bach juxtaposed old style church chants with then-current dance styles. Part of what made Bach's music opaque and even unappealing in his day was his willingness to have the oldest of old school juxtaposed against newer styles and forms, or to synthesize them.
The thing I've been thinking about with highbrow art religion and more secular approaches to contemporary music that deal with the African diaspora is, well, William T. Dargan has proposed that what happened in African American church music was that the customs and norms of African music were preserved in the low church Calvinist/Methodist liturgical traditions that Christianized African customs of corporate music-making as a process inviting corporate spirit-possession states.
In other words, getting into the spirit or letting the Spirit move so that a whole group feels possessed by a divine experience shows up in both African and European musical traditions. It's a contemporary market economy with disestablishment that opened up the option (vastly preferable for many) that music have no connection to the spiritual as such. But over the course of human history we would have a tough time discussing either European or African musics without considering spirituality as an element. Dargan's Lining Out the Word doesn't explain much about what kinds of African spirit-possession states were or are sought in African traditions because he's written a book about lining hymns among conservative Baptists. The paradoxical case Dargan made is that it was in the lowest of low liturgical Christian customs that African musical norms flourished and were adapted into the embryonic United States by churches that had lining hymns and ring shouts and that, along the way, the black clergy who sought upward mobility and social respectability tended to quell and discourage the lining hymn customs and the ring shouts--in a phrase, there were social and economic reasons that customs thrived in low-liturgical churches that were openly scorned in more "highbrow" higher liturgical customs.
In Anglo-American histories of the arts there can be a propensity to write and speak as though the Christian traditions associated with Calvin, Zwingli and Bullinger were "anti arts". This is not the time or place where I want to tackle those canards. Instead I want to propose that for even contemporary secular scholarship on classical music vs. popular music we can't altogether avoid the issue of "high" and "low" liturgical traditions as indicators of class as well as race. I grew up Pentecostal and eventually gravitated to Presbyterian and Anglican settings but I didn't lose my affection for the musics I picked up when I was Pentecostal.
That's my way of trying to say that sometimes I sense a good deal of music scholarship has been done by people who are so eager to forget any religious elements to music (if they ever had experiences with that) that it can be easy to forget (or even not realize) that if a person wanted to contend with the post-Wagnerian highbrow art-religion of the Romantic ideologies part of contending with those variations of Eurocentric art-religion can eventually entail revealing that it wasn't even usually the case for much of Western European history. As Percy Scholes put it, the Puritans didn't love music less, they loved religion more. One of the strongest cases against a Eurocentric highbrow art-religion of the Romanticist sort is to point out that: 1) it's not even an honest or accurate history of Western European religion and 2) leaning on canards about low liturgical Christian traditions as just being "anti art" rather than openly and explicitly rejecting the implicit or explicit claim that music in and of itself has some sacramental power is just that, leaning on canards. I could put things this way, treating music like it's music and not something that is some stand in for divinity isn't the same thing as hating all music.
The Christian theological way of putting it is to say that refusing to make music a god or an idol is not the same thing as hating all music ... but for musicologists ... and music historians ... and professional musicians ... the idea that there could be people out there who not only don't live and breathe music but who might not even bother to seek it out is their form of heresy. But obviously such people exist who are not "music lovers". The imaginary "hater of music" was invented in the 1470s through about 1530 in polemics on behalf of mensural polyphony and Rob C. Wegman charts that line of argument against imaginary "haters of music" in The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe 1470-1530. The notion that "good" music confers a contact with divinity beyond normal experience wasn't really invented in the Romantic era, the Romantic era just tried to come up with a version of that idea decoupled from Christendom. For Christians who are not fans of Christendom it's a distinction without a difference, and that's a point I trust that non-religious people can appreciate! Rob Wegman's book charted how there have been critics of complex polyphonic music as music normal people can't understand bankrolled by corrupt fundraising systems and, when push came to shove, you could see someone like Erasmus ranting that if people in England complained about the music they could get dubbed "Lollards" (heretics) and punished for complaining about what was at the time state-sanctioned and church-sanctioned music.
I.e. Ethan Hein's got plenty of reason to worry that a top-down divine mandate about music could and would lead to harsh treatment. The irony in Wegman's account was that it was the pro-music people who could be the real thugs and cretins and that there's a case to be made that the real people against mensural polyphonic music (as opposed to the imagined boogeyman of the "music hater") were angry at the graft and abuse of the system of indulgences that funded Catholic choral music. Luther's legacy may have been to split the difference between preserving the arts and lambasting the corruption of the funding system and in that sense Bach's life and legacy can be seen as a kind of "middle" path between revanchist Catholicism and the slash and burn ban-all-music-from-church-services approach Zwingli took. Yet as Jeremy Begbie has put it in his books, one of the crowning humorous ironies is that the theologian who banned music in churches altogether was indisputably the most talented musician of the Reformers, as Zwingli was a multi-instrumentalist with a reported good singing voice who made music happily in his home but decided to ban it just in church services. That is the part that people generally never mention about the Reformed traditions, a point that some scholars like Scholes and Butt (John) have tackled over the generations.
Why mention that? Because if there's a battle taken up against highbrow Romantic art-religion it seems increasingly likely that secular writers and religious writers familiar with the not-highbrow arts may have some common cause. I just finished William T. Dargan's Lining Out the Word and it was striking that he didn't quote the Westminster standard for public worship about lining out metrical psalms but he name-checked the doc. If the Calvinist wing was so inherently "anti-music" then the biggest irony in the Western musical world might be that it was in the Calvinist liturgical legacies that African musical traditions were translated into American contexts and thrived as church music that was eventually, after a century and a half, secularized into what some people call rock `n roll.
I've been making this point at this blog for years but despite what music polemicists and historians and theorists so often like to say, if you dig through actual music you can find that many of the supposedly impermeable boundaries between musical forms and styles are far more permeable in practice (and theory) than are usually conceded by people who teach stuff. I don't think Ethan Hein is one of those sorts of academics, which I hope has been obvious by now. But then we're both guitarists and it may be that guitarists think about these issues in ways that pianists and keyboardists don't? Maybe ... .
What sticks with me is that the Bach who was the German of Germans to Germans who wanted him to be that can also be the cosmopolitan synthesist to contemporary North Americans who admire that element in his music. Or as the late Richard Taruskin once put it, there's a Bach for the right and a Bach for the left. The paucity of biographical information about Bach has made him a predictably useful blank slate for communists and capitalists in the last century. For the time being it seems that all of us who enjoy his music can have Bach and it seems the sheer scope and complexity of his music is capacious enough for reach of us to appreciate the man's music in wildly different ways and yet ... it might be useful to remember that a composer like Berlioz could villify Bach and that Bach had his critics in his day.
One of Ethan Hein's comments was about how a certain version of Bach appeals to conservatives but, at the risk of pointing out trends in contributions to The Imaginative Conservative, it skews more conservative Catholic than conservative Protestant in the arts and it skews more Anglican (Roger Scruton) than Baptist, Methodist, or Pentecostal. I know of some Lutherans who think Heinrich Schutz was the better composer of church music and it's hard to argue that someone who set every last verse of Psalm 119 to music for double chorus hadn't achieved something even J. S. Bach never got around to so far as we know. But ...
In other words, this former Pentecostal couldn't help but notice that highbrow advocates of highbrow art who are religious tend to forget, as a matter of course (and perhaps scholarly discipline), the kinds of church traditions with storefront churches and hymnals with simple tunes in block chord harmonies in their pages. The problem with that is, of course, that Bach wasn't unfamiliar with the lowbrow tunes of his day and the posthumously art-religion sainthood assigned to Bach obscures that aspect about his life and work that actual church music specialists do not necessarily forget and which partisans of art-religion either forget on purpose or explain away. Not all conservatives, even among Christian conservatives, are really interested in preserving "Western culture" if by that what a person really means is Romanticist art-religion from the long 19th century. Bach didn't need those art-religion dogmas to write his music and if he didn't need them then why would any of us alive in 2022 need them now?
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