07-17-2020, 06:21 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-18-2020, 12:59 PM by Eric the Green.)
This same ebullient and reasonable mood is expressed in the very-typical, concise, rational, uplifting Toccata and Fugue in F #157 by the leader of North German organ music, Dietrich Buxtehude of Hamburg, whom a youthful J.S. Bach escaped from his job as an organist to hear and learn from. Clark used this Toccata in F by Buxtehude to illustrate Dutch and German organs and sculpture in the baroque era, and follows this up with Bach's Christmas Oratorio to illustrate German rococo architecture and sculpture, all during his episode of "Civilization" called "The Pursuit of Happiness."
Buxtehude was born in the year that Descartes wrote his Discourse on Method, 1637. The pictures of him as a young man that I put into my video below were from the period when he became prominent in his profession in the peak of middle baroque in the 1660s, perhaps the time that he composed this Fugue in F #157. Ironically, since I recorded it (but without its shorter Toccata heard in the Clark documentary), a few people say that, being recorded on my home organ during the coronavirus pandemic, it lacks the "reverberations" that it would have in a cathedral! I made the video somewhat impulsively, so I wasn't dressed for the ages, and I didn't clean the keyboard. But this is not really brown as it appears in the video, as I show myself playing the wonderful pedal solo from the piece near the end. So, its best to focus on the music!
Here is a link to a complete performance of Toccata and Fugue in F #157 by Buxtehude, and some readers might like it better. It's a good performance, but perhaps because it's recorded on a romantic 19th century organ, I think the sound is a bit muddy for my taste, and I like a slower tempo.
https://youtu.be/BSL7uh0Evw4
The second "Toccata in F" is of course by Bach, BWV 540, which I have posted here several times already. It was composed a few years after Uranus-Pluto came together in the early 1710s, when Bach was hired as organist at Weimar. But as Clark said, Bach was universal. In the two canons over the held om-like pedal note and two pedal solos that begin the piece, Bach captures the entire spirit of awakening that has created all the civilizations and liberating movements that reverberate to us from the past and in the present all over the world. This rococo organic-like growth, "wandering in a double curve" as Clark puts it, expands into majestic columns like the rising of a baroque or medieval cathedral, and climaxes in an ecstatic blissful moment of revealing divine light. The piece also reflects Bach's awareness of esoteric alchemical as well as sacred mathematical traditions that underlie our civilization and which swirled around him in his time, but which are often hidden from us-- as I describe it here in this link below. Even the extraordinary coincidence of its work number, and the relation of this Toccata to Bach's own personal seal, reveal these divine universal designs. The work makes an appropriate climactic expression to the baroque and rococo eras which sought to create structures which reveal the light of truth.
http://philosopherswheel.com/toccata.htm
I don't know a better performance of this difficult piece than this one.
Buxtehude was born in the year that Descartes wrote his Discourse on Method, 1637. The pictures of him as a young man that I put into my video below were from the period when he became prominent in his profession in the peak of middle baroque in the 1660s, perhaps the time that he composed this Fugue in F #157. Ironically, since I recorded it (but without its shorter Toccata heard in the Clark documentary), a few people say that, being recorded on my home organ during the coronavirus pandemic, it lacks the "reverberations" that it would have in a cathedral! I made the video somewhat impulsively, so I wasn't dressed for the ages, and I didn't clean the keyboard. But this is not really brown as it appears in the video, as I show myself playing the wonderful pedal solo from the piece near the end. So, its best to focus on the music!
Here is a link to a complete performance of Toccata and Fugue in F #157 by Buxtehude, and some readers might like it better. It's a good performance, but perhaps because it's recorded on a romantic 19th century organ, I think the sound is a bit muddy for my taste, and I like a slower tempo.
https://youtu.be/BSL7uh0Evw4
The second "Toccata in F" is of course by Bach, BWV 540, which I have posted here several times already. It was composed a few years after Uranus-Pluto came together in the early 1710s, when Bach was hired as organist at Weimar. But as Clark said, Bach was universal. In the two canons over the held om-like pedal note and two pedal solos that begin the piece, Bach captures the entire spirit of awakening that has created all the civilizations and liberating movements that reverberate to us from the past and in the present all over the world. This rococo organic-like growth, "wandering in a double curve" as Clark puts it, expands into majestic columns like the rising of a baroque or medieval cathedral, and climaxes in an ecstatic blissful moment of revealing divine light. The piece also reflects Bach's awareness of esoteric alchemical as well as sacred mathematical traditions that underlie our civilization and which swirled around him in his time, but which are often hidden from us-- as I describe it here in this link below. Even the extraordinary coincidence of its work number, and the relation of this Toccata to Bach's own personal seal, reveal these divine universal designs. The work makes an appropriate climactic expression to the baroque and rococo eras which sought to create structures which reveal the light of truth.
http://philosopherswheel.com/toccata.htm
I don't know a better performance of this difficult piece than this one.