May 21, 2021
Hello again! After so long a time away from posting, I'm happy to be back, now living my dream in New York City! Also excited to say I recently started using Spotify and have been curating a playlist over the past few weeks with ~20 of my favorite Bach Chorale Fantasias (~1 hr 15 min runtime).
I figured it would be useful to go over some details on the chorale fantasia form and why it is so special to me. The chorale fantasia combines two disparate forms of music:
1) A simple chorale tune, which is a single line of music, a lone melody setting poetry about some evangelical topic, characterized by step-wise motion, irregular rhythms/phrases and ancient church modes. In a chorale fantasia, the chorale tune enters in slow notes in a single voice, usually soprano, and is otherwise known as the cantus firmus.
2) The complex, various, analytical music of the Baroque and Renaissance eras which Bach inherited and transformed via his vast forest of eclectic works. In a chorale fantasia, this music is found in the counterpoint of the lower voices and the instruments, which grow like branches and vines' tendrils from the purity of the chorale hymn - that mighty tree out of which everything else grows, everything given life.
What emerges from this combination of polar opposites is, I here assert, an ideal melding of folk and high art, where medieval piety combines with Baroque invention and sophistication into something greater than the sum of its parts.
This playlist was designed to be heard in order and aims to show how various the chorale fantasia form can be. May it lift you, with me, to the heavenly heights!
Click this link below to see the Spotify playlist!: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4MrWXxSzpPOwpBAwrpj8CL
Photo credit: me visiting the Louvre in Paris when I was 21 studying abroad in London :)
Comments