Two Young Men With Large Organs

dargelos said:

The popular, sociable student learns an instrument that you play in a group or band with your mates. If you are the kind of student that dosent feel at home in a group, you may prefer an instrument that you can play alone. To reach a high standard requires hours of regular practice, which is more of a nerd thing, the jocks prefer football and beer. This is just one possible explaination, there will be others.

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dargelos said:

The above piece shows how much is lost in the Youtube mp3 encoding. All the music is there, it's the acoustic that gets lost. That's not crucial for studio productions but here the reaction of the room is a part of the performance, it's more than just the sound coming out of the pipes. Can't complain since I'm not paying anything for all this free music, just dreaming of how gorgeous it would be to hear it on vinyl.

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dargelos said:

I'm still digesting the Leipziger. The effect is synesthetic, those tone colours are so intense I can taste them. Divine, as the composer intended.
I was going to watch a little porn but listened to this again instead. Bach would have been pleased that he had saved me from the sin of Onan.

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Once upon a time, at a local restaurant, sitting across from me at a banquet table was a fairly well-known composer who had become head of the composition department at a major American university. He was also an organist, as was everyone else at the table. In his younger days, he had studied with Messiaen. So I asked him, “Do you believe in synesthesia?”

“No, but I do believe in sinecure and serendipity,” he quipped. LOL

But then he quickly retracted his snarkiness and admitted it was a serious question that deserved a serious answer. So he followed with a “serious” answer, but I can’t remember it at all---probably because it was mostly very forgettable.

To my mind, synesthesia is definitely an interesting phenomenon. But it is not a sensibility that I possess. Or perhaps I do but simply have no awareness it.

What I relate to more intimately is the concept of affekt, a quality that was very important to Bach. He believed in word painting and usually tried to convey texts accordingly. I believe Bach’s music can be appreciated in this regard whether you're an absolute Christian literalist, like a theist, or more like a deist, agnostic, or atheist who considers religion to be typical cultural mythology with sometimes edifying and other times not-so-edifying psychological meaning.

In “O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig” (“O Lamb of God, unguilty”), Bach seems to have painted the text very masterfully. The first couple of sections, for manuals alone, are very comforting and seem to convey serene gentleness and innocence. With the entrance of the augmented cantus firmus in the pedal, the next section becomes quite a bit more dramatic, as it is about wrongful accusation and victimization, actions that comprise one of this particular religion’s major themes.

YouTube has a video of Garrison Keillor giving a funny lecture at Harvard in which he mentions the legions of people in this world who feel “they haven't received their due.” The world is full of victims. Sometimes they are wrongfully accused, other times they simply never receive much credit for their sincere efforts to help make the world a better place.

Likewise, whether they’re overachievers or not, gays often do not receive their due for the good or impressive things they do. We all suspect why that is. Prejudice and hatred---two unnecessary things that, mercifully, seem to be diminishing, at least a little, in some places around the world. But I think most everyone has a pretty strong sense of victimhood in this world. We aim so high, try so hard, and sometimes achieve quite a lot---and for what? To be mocked, hated, or even harmed by “the confederacy of dunces” (Jonathan Swift’s words). Even John Lennon had a premonition he was going to be “crucified,” as he doented in one of his many brilliant lyrics.

The feeling of “not receiving one’s due” had to have been intense for a towering genius like Bach himself. The greatest composer the world has probably ever known was forced to teach Latin and math. That would be like Princeton forcing Einstein to teach P.E. classes. Moronic.

Then, just before the chromatic section, which represents the pain of suffering and death (of either the body or of ignorance), come the repeated-note triplets that sound almost like the mockers (soldiers) pounding nails through flesh on the cross. Yet that very nail-pounding occurs in the brightest sunshine of A major. It is so ecstatic that it foretells triumph, not defeat.

Like I said, whether you take the story literally or figuratively (mythologically), it is very thought-provoking. After the difficult transfiguration of the chromaticism comes an exultation celebrating the power of mercy and the ultimate glory of triumph.

On a personal level, the last section says to me that, if you're a creative artist, which many gays are, even if you never receive any accolade or remuneration for your work, at the very least you will have the ultimate spiritual reward that creativity brings in and of itself. You will have that satisfaction.

In the meantime, you can give credit where credit is due, rather than giving in to bitterness, disdain and mockery. You, too, can be merciful---and perhaps do your part to make the world a better place, rather than the shithole it often is.

From the way he plays this amazing piece of music, I believe Chapuis shares this view---or at least a fac simile thereof.

So this is just one for instance, one interp. There can be many more.