A MEETING WITH J S BACH

Don’t dismiss this article as “romantic speculation”! How do you describe the sunset over the Summer Isles, the view on a clear day from Ben Lomond, the birth of a new baby?....... All are magical and defy words.

There are three of us in this marriage called music - the composer, the performer and the listener. When all three are in tune with one another, the experience is unforgettable.

The composer catches the instant, the mood, the vision, and creates a tonal and rhythmic picture, using musical language and imagination, containing the formula from which that fleeting moment can be recreated. The performers take this material, filter it through their own experience and present their understanding of what the composer visualised. The listener absorbs and translates it, using his or her own set of references, into an individualised interpretation of the composer’s message.

Just occasionally the original creative energy and intention survives this process of birth and rebirth, resulting in a feeling of certainty that the composer in person is present.

When the Dunedin Consort with Susan Hamilton and Matthew Brook performed two Bach cantatas under John Butt’s direction in Greyfriars’ Kirk on 21^st August, 2009, one could only marvel at the sense of timelessness, the feeling of space, the sensation of silence as being as vital to the music as the sounds of voice, violin and orchestra. It was, in truth, not so much a performance, but a con-celebration by all who heard it – singers, players, and audience – of Bach’s insight into the mysteries of creation and of the human spirit. And because Bach himself when writing this music was, to a degree, the instrument through which a higher power expressed this vision, all three of us – composer, performers and listeners – were held in thrall by the result.

There was a feeling of fragility born out of the sense that such pure perfection, such intensity of emotion, cannot survive under reality’s demand for compromise. But the memory stays with us, and just knowing that it can happen again, makes us all so much the richer.

Christopher Davies