A Year of Bach

Evan Goldfine
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  • MUSIC

Bach is the greatest, and we still don’t talk about him enough. A Year of Bach extends my year-long listening project into conversation. I sit down with writers, philosophers, economists, and entrepreneurs to ask how this 300-year-old music continually rewrites us. Subscribe here: https://yearofbach.substack.com/ yearofbach.substack.com

Episodes

  1. JAN 4

    Violist and author Edward Klorman on Bach's Cello Suites

    Violist and Author Edward Klorman discusses his new book, Bach: The Cello Suites, and adds commentary at the keyboard. Edward's website: http://Edwardklorman.com/ A Year of Bach Substack: https://yearofbach.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yearofbach.substack.com

    44 min

  2. 09/22/2025

    Historian Richard Tedlow on Bach's Charisma, and Trump's

    Historian Richard Tedlow joins me to ask what made Bach charismatic in his own time and ours. He also argues that no matter the political situation, “Bach’s music is going to exist as long as the human race exists and can’t be taken away.” Along the way we consider the charisma of Bernstein, Gould, Clinton, Hitler, and Trump. Here’s Richard’s Substack. Playlists of works referenced in this episode, including those by Shostakovich, Bach, Brahms, and Strauss. Apple Music and Spotify below. Transcript: Evan Goldfine: Hello, and welcome to the fifth episode of A Year of Bach. I'm Evan Goldfine. Today my guest is Richard Tedlow, one of our leading historians of business. He was a longtime professor at Harvard Business School and later an instructor at Apple where he taught executives in their internal Apple University. Richard studies how leaders persuade, connect and make decisions how they deceive themselves and others. And he's put a special focus on the elusive force of charisma in leaders. Today we'll speculate a bit on Bach's charisma and what it might have been, and we can see how charismatic conductors act in the world today. We'll also touch on our president's charisma and Richard's deep connection to Bach's music. Richard, welcome. Richard Tedlow: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Evan Goldfine: Before charisma, let's talk about Bach and your connection to the music itself. Richard Tedlow: I didn't start music with Bach. One of the characteristics of Bach is that one finds [00:01:00] oneself listening to his music without realizing that he composed it. The Air on the G-string the Jesu, Joy of Man's desiring, this is part of normal sort of living in this world, and you hear it without necessarily connecting it to the name Bach. I've been listening to music seriously since I was a kid. My parents introduced me to it. The first opera I went to was Carmen with Risë Stevens at the Miami Opera Company in Miami, Florida. And so I've been interested in this kind of music my whole life. I went to Bayreuth three times to hear Wagner's music there. And Bach I began to seriously listen to when I was in college. I graduated from Yale in 1969. And there I first heard the Cantata 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, and other music by Bach, and you realized that this was an [00:02:00] extraordinary creative human being. So here's a question. How much do you have to know? How much do you have to sort of work, if you will to how much does music have the right, if you will, to ask you to invest in it, in order to get the most out of it? Versus to what extent does music hear itself? So you're not involved at all, basically. So move, moving from noise. To really find complex music, how much do you need yourself to invest? And I think the older the music is, and Bach was from 1685 to 1750 the more you have to invest for the most part with the exception of some pieces. The Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor would be a classic example. Everybody's heard that and they don't necessarily [00:03:00] associate it with Bach. On the other hand, at least to me, the Goldberg Variations. You have to concentrate, at least I have to concentrate. And the difference between Glenn Gould's first recording of that set of pieces and the last one is really dramatic. And I saw when I was at Apple, I saw a remarkable presentation about this, and that presentation greatly increased my own ability to enjoy and appreciate it. So that's a question. How much do you have to know, or how much do you have to invest in order to get the most out of the music as opposed to the music just hearing itself? Evan Goldfine: What a beautiful question. I think that you can be a passive listener and enjoy it. You can be an active listener and enjoy, and you can be a player and enjoy. And then you can be a scholar to learn about the historical importance and where each of these composers, Bach included, fit on the great timeline of the composers of Western music. I think you get back what you invest. [00:04:00] And even then some. And just like with anything else, you could glance at a book of poetry. You can read Shakespeare Sonnets on the first glance, and there's some nice stuff and you might not get it, but if you really take your time with it, you're going to unearth more and more things. And, what's great about Bach in particular is that often in some of the pieces, not all of them, but it's a pleasant first listen. And as you listen again, something happens inside as you are processing the multiple moving lines. Often you're hearing different musicians emphasize different parts of the music. So there's the performance side that you're enjoying, and also the core of the music itself. So if you're playing it yourself on a piano or on a guitar, you see the architecture of how things are moving in order to create this thing that just sounds pleasant or moving even. There's really no way to explain why Cantata 140 might move you to [00:05:00] tears. That's not explicable, and that's the beauty of why we're talking about this today, 300 years after Bach's time. Something about that music has really moved us for centuries and many millions of people. And I've described this as a backwards explanation for something divine. I've heard one of my favorite musicians, a bassist named Victor Wooten says that music needs us as much as we need the music. Music can be abstract, but if it's not resonating through a person doesn't exist. It's one of the great mysteries and pleasures of life and Bach is one of the greatest exemplars of how to create it with deep meaning and with deep emotion. Because without the emotional connection, it's just a curiosity. Richard Tedlow: I think that's very well put. I think that there has to be this emotional connection and going through life as you and [00:06:00] I are doing, and just encountering curiosities to use your word as opposed to deep emotional connections is not a very fulfilling way to go through life. So that's one thing that draws one to Bach. What is it about Bach that is magnetic and charismatic, if you will? What is it about it that's so utterly appealing? And I think that once again, to use your phrase, if the first listen is not an invitation, you are not likely to have a second listen or to go to Wagner. If all you hear is the noise, and there is a lot of it in Wagner. You're not gonna go to the next, listen. So there's gotta be something that resonates with you, some, something that is harmonic with you in this music and Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, is just that's that piece. It works. So why? If Bach could've said it another way, he would've said it another way and he would've been a novelist or a poet or you name it, he said it through his music and by almost by [00:07:00] definition tho, those aren't words, even though he is setting words to music. I think that with the words of music, there is a matching of sound and sense that is very powerful with Bach. Can I play a little one snippet of music Richard Tedlow: From the B minor mass. Okay. It's the Gratias Agimus Tibi. In other words, we give thanks for your great glory. Thinking about the B minor mass, the most accessible part of it is the Gloria. You can't miss it, and I only got to this later, but you listen to it and you listen to it and you realize this is really this, this is glorious, if you will. In addition to the fact that the music is simply beautiful to listen to there is an authenticity about Bach music, which is very hard to capture in words. You have to capture it in music, you have to listen to it. But there's an authenticity, a sense that you are touching the ground truth of a human being and that human being's relationship to [00:09:00] the everlasting the divine. Bach to state the obvious was a profoundly religious Lutheran. And that comes through. I mean the genuine, I mean, in a world where there's so much that's phony, frankly, that to touch something genuine is a large part of the inspiration of Bach and a large part of, if you will, the charisma of him. So I think that it's the first listen has got to work. Authenticity. The more you discover, the more you listen to it. And with Bach especially, the more you discover as you age and you listen to it, I started listening to this music, to Bach music when I was about 18. I'm gonna be 78 years old tomorrow. That's a long time. And it's, it sounds different and it moves you in a different way now that I'm elderly than it did when I was a kid. Evan Goldfine: Could you dig into that a little bit more? Richard Tedlow: I think [00:10:00] that without sounding cliche ridden, which is not something that I want to sound, but Bach touches something fundamental in the human experience. And the more human experience that one has, the more one can go back to that. And be enriched by his own, if you will. Insights. It's a cheap word. This is music we're talking about, not words. The more you can be touched, which is the real thing. Bach himself as a religious person was profoundly in search of communion. For him, it was communion with God through Jesus Christ. That's in all his music. And for us, it's communion with him. It's true contact, genuine human contact, which I think we all crave in order to be fully alive. I think there are a couple of other things that I'll just mention, which are quite remarkable to me anyway, about Bach. One is that this guy, this man, this [00:11:00] genius lived basically his whole life. In a 90 mile by 70 mile area of Thuringia and Saxony. There was no Germany at the time of his life. But, he could have gone to Paris, he could have gone to London, like Handel did, or Milan or Venice or, there are a lot of other places that he didn't go. The man was a provincial. And for someone for this genius to emerge from that soil is very intriguing. And there's something else, which is that the 30 years war took place from 1618 to 1648. And in certain parts of what i

    51 min

  3. 08/19/2025

    FCC Commissioner Reed Hundt on the early Internet, Bach, and "ER"

    As Commissioner of the FCC during the Clinton administration, Reed Hundt helped shape the modern internet. We speak about his attending the first Beatles concert in the USA (with his friend Al Gore), and the democratization of publishing and broadcasting wrought by the internet. Reed had many questions for me about Bach and my listening, so this is an episode to hear me talk more than I typically do. Here’s the video on YouTube. Transcript below. [00:00:00] Evan Goldfine: Welcome to the fourth episode of the podcast, A Year of Bach. My name is Evan Goldfine. Today we'll explore how policy helps shape who among us gets to hear Bach in the first place. My guest is Reed Hundt, who was the chair of the FCC from 1993 to 1997 in the Clinton administration. Highlights from his tenure include the earliest days of digital television and satellite radio, the launch of spectrum auctions, a massive wiring of schools and libraries for internet access, and the opening of the five gigahertz band that became our modern Wi-Fi. He's a longtime public interest lawyer, an early champion of carbon taxation, and a great fan of Bach. And we'll talk about some of those things today. Reed, welcome. Reed Hundt: Thank you, Evan. Thank you for that very nice introduction. Evan Goldfine: My pleasure. So, over the past 30 years, the landscape of media reflects one of the biggest changes I think in American life, probably even bigger than the changes from the sixties through the start of your tenure in the [00:01:00] nineties. Even this setup that we're doing right now seems unimaginable. We're on real time, high-definition video with automated captioning. My production budget is zero and the distribution is effectively free to everyone in the world. So  I'd like you to reflect on the scale of those changes and maybe some of the things that surprised you about how we got to today. Reed Hundt: That's a great question. Almost everything that we imagined in the early nineties has come true. And then a lot of other things have also happened that we did not imagine. The things that we imagined were all good things. And the good things have mostly come true. And the things that we did not foresee that were not so good; they’ve happened also. So those are my two big sets. So, with respect to the first, you've just mentioned a number of really important attributes. All through the first year of the Clinton [00:02:00] administration we had weekly meetings hosted by my ninth grade classmate Al Gore, to discuss the vision. At the beginning of 1994,  in January , he gave the first speech ever given by elected official in an international forum about the internet of the future. If you go back and look at those artifacts, you'll see the things that came true. What, specifically, we wanted to have is that creators like Bach or like you -- I see two guitars behind you on the Zoom screen. Evan Goldfine: Humbly. Reed Hundt: -- anyone of any talent, any capability anywhere in the world, at almost no cost could get a chance to see if anyone liked their product. That came true. We envisioned that for a video. We envisioned it for, for auditory, for music. We envisioned it for typing and writing. and you see all of this everywhere now. We also [00:03:00] envisioned that it would be possible to gather an audience for output anywhere in the world, which you're doing right now. You have very low cost. You still have to figure out how to market, but you have a chance. You don't have to go through a gatekeeper. We didn't sit there thinking we have these ideas, no one else does. The opposite. We had all kinds of people coming and telling us this is what's possible. And then we adopted. We adopted these ideas as the vision for public policy. You might say, what were the public policies? Number one, we negotiated by the beginning of 1997 a treaty in which 69 countries said they would let the internet come in without taxation. That's a big deal. Secondly, the spectrum auctions that you were kind enough to mention. Not only did we start the digital cellular industry in the United States, we started it worldwide [00:04:00] because in a variety of ways that I won't go into right now because of the shortness of human life, we had it those auctions and the rollout of the same digital technologies for wireless occurring  in every country in the world. And that did actually happen. That is why when Jobs in 2007 got around to inventing the iPhone, there already was an infrastructure there to utilize the iPhone on a global basis, right? It is a chicken and egg story, and you needed to have both the chicken and the egg. so that was the infrastructure part of the story. Aside from the foreign policy part, we had to make sure that all this connectivity would reach everybody in America at the same time. It wouldn't be, you have a lot of money and then your innovation would trickle down, which is the iPhone business model. It was the opposite. We wanted to establish the lowest conceivable cost for the new access technologies. To [00:05:00] make a very complicated story, I will just summarize in one thing. At one point there were 6,000 internet access providers in the United States. Now you think of just the mega companies, and you're right, there are mega companies. But that's what happened over a 30-year story. The start was an absolute cauldron of entrepreneurship, which is what we wanted to create. So here you are , you're the avatar, you're the manifestation of all these dreams come true.  There are a lot of horrible things in this new world as well. It turns out you can lie easily. You can lie like a dog on the internet, and everybody believes that you are a human and not a dog. You can lie at the highest levels of power and authority and get the lies heard all around the world. These things are also possible. We didn't think those things were impossible, but we trusted that ultimately public opinion, if it could be mobilized, would create a better world. We, I guess we still have to see if that's true [00:06:00] Evan Goldfine: To that end do the major TV and radio broadcasters still matter in this environment? Reed Hundt: Somewhat, not that much. You asked about public broadcasting. This particular Congress wants to kill anything that has the word public in it. Killing public good as a concept seems to be very, very important to them. We now are told we don't want the public good of messenger RNA. We don't want the public good of research. Apparently, the government does not want those things anymore. I don't think that's the opinion of most people in America or most people all around the world, but I think it is the animating spirit of this particular administration. So, what is the case with public broadcasting? Public broadcasting goes back to the 1960s. My great predecessor, Newton Minow, is one of the fathers of the whole concept. The [00:07:00]  original mission was to have entertainment content that would be in some way enshrining family values, and wouldn't be subject to the constraints of advertising. That does not actually make very much sense anymore. It's not all that powerful an idea now because again, the internet makes almost everything available to anybody. You can find that kind of content on the Net. Evan Goldfine: Yes. Reed Hundt: But what's needed in more volume is non-commercial news. News that isn't dependent on advertisers or beholden to major corporations as for-profit owners, because those corporations can be cowed, intimidated, arm-twisted by the government. Well, that's been happening. So, there's more need than ever before, in my opinion, for nonprofit news. And I'm not alone in believing [00:08:00] that what's publicly broadcast should be reflected in every media. Publicly broadcast news is inquisitive news, investigation and reporting. It’s honesty and reality being presented, not contingent on the business goals of for-profit companies.So, where's that going to come from? This administration doesn't want that to exist. I mean, they've said that. I'm not accusing them of something they haven't admitted. They don't want that to exist. That's going to have to come from a redirection of philanthropic money. And if what we know as public broadcasting is no longer dependent on the government, that's good. Meaning, now that the government's not a reliable partner, don't deal with them. Evan Goldfine: Is the audience an issue to capture also in that kind of environment? I mean, you've got to cut through. Reed Hundt: We do have a public broadcasting TV network that is intrinsically extremely valuable [00:09:00] and has stations all across the country. They're now going to be cash starved. This is a job for philanthropy to do. There's a lot of people in philanthropy that have the wherewithal to step up. It's part of the battle for presenting reality. That's what's necessary. Don't go thinking, oh, we need to get the House of Representatives on our side to cut some deals. That's not going to happen. And then introduce a modicum of advertising in order to have sustenance. What's important is that the ownership does not have a for-profit motive. Evan Goldfine: So, you could argue that in a way YouTube's recommendation engine is the single biggest arts promoter in the world now. Reed Hundt: It's a big deal. Yeah. It's a big deal. Among the many people that I met early on and somehow failed to have them adopt me were the creators of YouTube. And, I was like, what you guys are doing is totally great. It turned out to be really, really, [00:10:00] really true. Evan Goldfine: Do you think that the ranking algorithms are like editorial or what, which would be First Amendment protected, or would they be subject to neutrality? Reed Hundt: The First Amendment bedevils people in government, because it stops them from affecting the content. Until it doesn't anymore. Meaning, once you have an administration that uses other levers, like regulatory approvals t

    47 min

  4. 08/07/2025

    Tyler Cowen on Bach, Beethoven, John, and Paul

    I’ve listened to Tyler Cowen talk for hundreds of hours about economics, music, history, art, travel, and regional cuisine, so meeting him on Zoom felt a little like stepping through The Purple Rose of Cairo. My composure mostly held, and it was a pleasure to trade favorite recordings, speculate on Bach’s motivations, and wrestle with uneasy feelings while enjoying recordings from wartime Germany. Full transcript follows. Here we are on YouTube. Artists discussed: Leo Kottke The Beatles John Eliot Gardiner Philippe Herreweghe Otto Klemperer Martha Argerich Karl Richter Sviatoslav Richter Glenn Gould Alisa Weilerstein Pablo Casals Peter Schreier Jason Vieaux Eduardo Fernandez Mogens Wöldike Hans-Christoph Rademann Carlos Klieber Keith Jarrett Benjamin Alard Angela Hewitt Samuel Feinberg Pierre Hantai Berlioz Artur Rubenstein Andres Segovia Julian Bream Wilhelm Furtwangler Fabio Biondi Frank Peter Zimmerman Nathan Milstein David Robinson Pierre Boulez Masaaki Suzuki Wilhelm Backhaus Leonard Bernstein Msistislav Rostropovich Yo-Yo Ma Jean-Guihen Queyras Janos Starker Heinrich Schiff Kim Kashkashian Edgar Meyer Sergei Rachmaninoff Yuja Wang Transcript: Evan Goldfine: Welcome to episode three of the podcast of A Year of Bach. My name's Evan Goldfine and today I'm delighted to be talking to Tyler Cowen. Tyler's one of our foremost public intellectuals. He's an economist at Virginia's George Mason University and one of the original internet bloggers whose work continues into its third decade at Marginal Revolution. I think about money a lot, and Tyler has reshaped my thinking about economics, especially around how economic growth leads to human flourishing, the importance of incentives and how every economic decision has trade-offs. Tyler and I share a deep love of Bach and the Beatles, and we're both products of Bergen County, New Jersey, so maybe there was something in the water there. Tyler, welcome. Tyler Cowen: Happy to be here. Thank you, Evan. Evan Goldfine: Your earliest exposure to the music was seeing a Bach performance on public television. Could you talk about that? Tyler Cowen: Well, it wasn't exactly a performance, but I was watching William F. Buckley's Firing Line and uh, on public tv, and they play [00:01:00] the parts of the Brandenburg Concerto number two as the show starts. And it just so happened that we had at home, I think three classical records. And Brandenburg number two was one of the three. So I had it on the record and then I heard it on Buckley and it's like, oh, I know what this is. And so it was one of the two or three first classical pieces that I knew. Maybe the first one, and I liked it. Right. That's important. Evan Goldfine: And how did you start digging more? Tyler Cowen: Uh, it took a little bit longer. So we had a copy of Rimsky Korsakov Scheherazade. And Tchaikovsky, the Pathetique sixth Symphony. But I was so into classic rock, and that was such an incredible time to have that interest. It wasn't until I was 18 or so that I started really becoming interested in classical music. I moved down to be an undergraduate at George Mason, so I started going to the Kennedy Center, and my first love really was Beethoven. I just kept on going to hear all the Beethoven and all the Brahms I could, [00:02:00] Evan Goldfine: but somehow it flipped over to Bach. Tyler Cowen: Well, I don't know. I don't know if I would say it flipped. May, maybe they're on a par. Sure. Uh, Bach, A true love for Bach was two or three years later, but I would say until I was 40, I definitely was more interested in Beethoven than Bach. Right now. It would arguably be the opposite. Evan Goldfine: I'd say the same. Uh, although I probably got the Bach bug a little bit earlier, just by playing classical guitar. Some of those Bach pieces are the cornerstones of that repertoire, and I think especially Tyler Cowen: I did that too. I played the prelude, uh, the transcribed cello, sonatas, some, you know, parts of the violin, sonatas and partitas, uh, different short bits from Cantatas for guitar. It works pretty well, doesn't it? Evan Goldfine: It works great, and Beethoven does not, so no, Tyler Cowen: nothing, none of it. Evan Goldfine: So there's a. There's a pleasure in being able to get deeper and deeper into it. And I've found, as I've gotten older and listening to these things, you know, of course the Breamadth in which I listened to it last year, but [00:03:00] also going deeper and deeper into it, I find it's, uh, sort of an infinite Well, Tyler Cowen: that's right. Oh, another early exposure I had around the time of Buckley. I had a Leo Kottke album called Mudlark. And he was mostly, you could say, a folk guitarist, and he did Bouree on that album for guitar. And I just thought, well, I wanna play this. And in, you know, in due time I did. It's not that hard to play that piece at all. Evan Goldfine: Correct. And I love Leo Kottke. I've seen him many times in concert in Tyler Cowen: Same here. Evan Goldfine: And, um, what a, what an incredible American, uh, weirdo character, but also he performed the, uh, Jesu Joy of Man's desiring on the Six and 12 string guitar album. Tyler Cowen: That's right. Yeah. Evan Goldfine: Which is just a beautiful, beautiful arrangement for steel string, not usually done on the steel string guitar. And I recommend everyone take a listen to that. Tyler Cowen: It's better than most classical guitarists, how he has some sort of feel for Bach, even though it would not count as traditional in any way. Evan Goldfine: Yeah, he, uh, Bach can translate into folk music, uh, if, if it's in the right hands. [00:04:00] You've called Bach the greatest achiever of all time. How did he do it? Tyler Cowen: We don't know. So there's plenty of records about Johann Sebastian Bach. But what he really was like to me is quite a cipher. And I've read the major books on him by Gardiner, Wolff. Others, uh, you can read about the records, different places he worked, tax records. But at the end of the day, he's the least easily graspable major composer. I feel Beethoven in Mozart. If I met them, they wouldn't fundamentally surprise me. Oh, you're Beethoven, you know, Bach. I don't know. It's, uh, that's part of the mystery and challenge, isn't it? Evan Goldfine: It's maddening. And, and also I, I've been left flat by a lot of the biographies also. I just find, I don't, I'm not getting enough out of them to, Tyler Cowen: they're well done, Evan Goldfine: especially for. Tyler Cowen: Yeah, I'm not blaming the authors. They just have nothing to work with and he's so consistent. You don't learn much about the variation. You [00:05:00] said this yourself in your 37 propositions about Bach over time and styles. He's. More or less always the same. And that too makes it harder. Evan Goldfine: Yes, there's the Tyler Cowen: opposite of the Beatles, right? Evan Goldfine: The opposite of the Beatles. But you know, I'd say that there is an extra little bit of depth, I think that Bach gets to towards the end of his life. I'm thinking of the Art of Fugue in particular, but you know, I'd say this, his output from his teenage years up until that point, it just remarkably consistent and uh, you know, it doesn't really feel like very much of an early and late style as compared to others. Tyler Cowen: I agree with your general point, but sometimes I wonder if Art of the Fugue and Musical Offering are his greatest depth. Evan Goldfine: Hmm. Tyler Cowen: I'm not convinced that's true. So something like the first partita are parts of Well-Tempered, clavier, uh, they sound less complex, but in a way they're more compelling and the fact that there are so few good recordings of Art of the Fugue or Musical Offering, [00:06:00] it could just mean they're so deep. No human can do them. Uh, but maybe in a sense they're too far out there and in that regard, less deep. I think about this pretty often. Evan Goldfine: I don't listen to them as much as the other pieces that you mentioned. Tyler Cowen: Exactly. Or even the brandenburgs, maybe those are his deepest works and his most accessible works. Evan Goldfine: He was a tune, he was a tunesmith as well. And he gets short of, he gets short shrift for his melodic mastery because the harmony and the, and the counterpoint are so intricate. Tyler Cowen: What's also interesting to me, I mean B minor mass, which of course, you know, it might be considered by many his greatest work, but just how much he threw it together. It's a bit like a Paul McCartney song like Uncle Albert, Admiral Halsey, where there are all these pieces and somehow it works. And you just wonder like what really went on with the other works where you don't know how it was built. Evan Goldfine: Right. And we, we'll never know. And we just have it looks that way. Tyler Cowen: Yeah. I don't think there's much more about Bach to be [00:07:00] discovered. Evan Goldfine: Yeah. Tyler Cowen: AI or not. Evan Goldfine: Um, to that end, when you think about the B minor bass, can we hear today Bach in the way that he intended it? And I'm not talking about period instruments. I'm thinking the people who are listening to the B minor mass, you know, they're sitting in a church in, uh, the Lutherans, in in Leipzig. They're shivering. Life is much more precarious. They're hearing the loudest sounds that they've heard all year. Is the gap between us and them too large? What do we miss and what do we gain? Tyler Cowen: The gap is quite large. Now what we gain, obviously, is that we're comfortable. We can put the music on pause. If we're in a concert hall, that's different, but that's so stagey. The people there, maybe they're old or they're Asian, few of them really believe in God. There's just so many differences, but I think the biggest difference is all the music we've heard in the meantime, and you cannot erase that from your mind. So yeah, it's a completely different [00:08:00] experience in my opinion. Evan Goldfine: Everyone is d

    45 min

  5. 07/10/2025

    ‘Everything is melody’: Classical Guitarist Jason Vieaux on Bach

    Episode 2 of A Year of Bach Podcast features my conversation with the great classical guitarist Jason Vieaux. We talked about the pleasures and sorrows of adapting Bach for guitar, how not to play too big in a recording studio, and the pleasures of live performance. Jason is hosting a guitar retreat for students of all levels in Benicia, California from October 10 - 12, 2025 — learn more about it here. My podcast editing AI got a little aggressive on jump cuts! I’m working on getting better at this. As with everything, it’s all harder than it seems to do it right… Links & references Jason’s Grammy award winning album Play: His album Images of Metheny, a desert island disc for me: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kt99hh3nx2Rc2xK1GryK-YLzYu0qiltu4 Jason and Clancy Newman, Live in Philadelphia during COVID: Fernando Sor’s tricky Etude #1 Ponce’s Sonata Mexicana And we name-checked a bunch of brilliant guitarists: David Russell Julian Bream Andres Segovia Christopher Parkening Zoran Dukic Lorenzo Micheli Aniello Desiderio Kazuhito Yamashita Marcin Dylla Colin David Support & subscribe * Get the full transcript and future episodes straight to your inbox. * Subscribe on Apple Music or Spotify Chapter markers: 02:43 Techniques and Approaches to Playing Bach 12:48 Teaching and Developing Musical Skills 19:25 The Influence of Julian Bream 23:27 The Essence of Musical Intention 25:08 The Challenge of Recording for Commercial Labels 26:33 Recording Techniques and Spaces 32:18 The Pandemic and Performance 34:50 Pop and Jazz Influences 38:46 Upcoming Projects Intro music: Adagio of BWV 974, performed by your host on his home piano. Transcript: [00:00:00] Evan Goldfine: Hello everyone and welcome to the second episode of the year of Bach Podcast where I talk with people whose lives have been touched by the great master. Today I'm very grateful to host one of my musical heroes, Jason Vieaux. That's V-I-E-A-U-X, for everyone who should start typing his name into Spotify or Apple Music right now. Jason's widely recognized as one of the world's finest classical guitarists. I've spent hundreds of hours with his recordings. I recommend them all, but my special favorites are his Grammy award-winning album Play, and of course, Images of Metheny where, Jason adapted the tunes of Pat Metheny for classical guitar. I've also, of course, enjoyed his two albums of Bach, and today we'll be talking about the special thrills and challenges of adapting Bach for guitar. So Jason, thank you so much for joining us here. Jason Vieaux: it's my pleasure. Thank you, Evan, for having me. Evan Goldfine: Yeah. So [00:01:00] Bach never wrote specifically for the classical guitar, but his works are touchstones for all of us who have picked up a classical guitar. I was hoping you could speak to the particular pleasures and sorrows about Bach has adapted for the guitar as we play it today. Jason Vieaux: There Are definitely challenges of transferring the music to the guitar, not only just in playing the notes themselves, the pitches themselves, but making decisions I try to make it sound as if Bach did have a guitarist next to him, a modern guitarist with this more modern instrument, and how he might have made things sound better. In other words, change either octave displacement or, or even fill in, or in the case of cello works make something that sounded more germane to the classical guitar. And I think that's a good approach because then you don't get too stuffy or analytical about, well, this isn't what he would do. I jokingly say to my students at Cleveland Institute of Music or Curtis, it's like, well, we can't ask [00:02:00] him 'cause he's dead, so if we could ask him, that'd be great, but we gotta just, you know, have a little faith and press on, Evan Goldfine: Where do you get stuck when you're trying to do the adaptations and what are those decisions that you have to make? Jason Vieaux: It's more like, it's more like baseline kind of things usually. Right, or where you have to decide on an octave displacement, a lot of times you get stuck and then you've gotta work backwards, you gotta go to your destination point where that phrase or that section would finish and then kind of work back. It's like checking your work and, and, I don't know, trigonometry or something like that, you know, math kind of thing. But that's all right. I mean, that's a fun process because it's satisfying when you come to something that you've figured out that sounds good and you feel like it sounds good and that it's something that you can, perform. It's always hard, it's always difficult to play. The most difficult thing about playing Bach well on the guitar, in my view is making the polyphony sound effortless. Because that's a [00:03:00] big, that's a big thing for me. Like I've refingered Prelude and Fugue and Allegro 998, since I've. When I first learned it at age 20 in 95 I would've been 21. Just short of when I did my first recital of it, my graduation recital, I was 21. From there on, I probably changed fingerings on that piece. Over 30 years, about four or five times, four or five go rounds. 'cause I, I tend to rotate them in and out of the solo program. I'll play 'em for three years, then I put 'em away for five or seven or something. Then I bring 'em back mainly because I'm learning other ones and then I want those, or if it's for a record. It's those, periods when you're away that are nice because you're learning new. Things from the stuff that you're adapting from violin or cello or whatever it might be. I've not really attempted a keyboard one to date. But then you come back to say Prelude and Fugue Allegro or. The third Lute suite [00:04:00] and you have fresher ears, more experience, and that part is very satisfying. Evan Goldfine: Have you found some of those interpretations to have changed when you came back? Yeah. Three or five years later. What happens? Jason Vieaux: Sometimes the tempos get faster, sometimes they get slower. Sometimes they, to some, if they get a little slower, it's again to accommodate more up stem, down stem kind of things. Like things in the, in, you know, that are in the top line that are you start to hear more as, two line type of, things. And then I want to refinger some of that stuff across two strings to bring that out. You know, just things like that I would've missed when I was in my early twenties, Evan Goldfine: that's interesting 'cause I find you're playing to be especially orchestral, you know, Segovia describes the guitar as an orchestral instrument. I think part of that is being able to foreground and background the melodies with the accompaniment. 'cause you're trying to do a number of things with Bach especially are, do you have tricks to keep the contrapuntal lines [00:05:00] clear given the mechanical limitations of the instrument? Jason Vieaux: Well, one of the things I do more often, this is really an oversimplification of it, is I don't do the thing that I think my best colleagues at the time, say 30 years ago, or where you push, you push your fugue subject line way out in front. Mm-hmm. Like an almost like an 80 20 ratio to the other voices. I like doing now more of a 60 40 if you have the touch to do it because. It's like everything, everything is melody. So even though maybe a tenor line is not as interesting as, not as the now alto line that is now getting a spotlight for two measures, I don't, I'm not a big fan of subjugating the other lines for the purpose of really pushing this one line out way out in front. So I might give a spotlight to something that I think is particularly melodic, but generally I, I think. When you, when you do listen to, you know, good performances [00:06:00] of, of Bach or like the orchestral the actual orchestral pieces, Brandenburg concertos and this kind of thing, there's more of like an even mix generally, uh, to the various instruments, the ensemble and that. And so I've always had a, I've always had a kind of a orchestrally minded or group, group of musicians minded type of approach to it. So I guess that's one of the things I think that, that have maybe changed a little bit, or deepened. Evan Goldfine: I know you, you've been thinking about guitar for pretty much your entire life, but for most of us who are amateurs or less, the idea of moving from 80 20 with, certain melody lines to 60 40 seems like a superhuman achievement because for people who don't play guitar, that could mean, different fingers at different sort of plucking ratios. Yes. And also some left-handed techniques also about how you're gonna be articulating in the left hand. Jason Vieaux: That's right. Could you talk Evan Goldfine: a little bit about get, get real nerdy about this? Yeah. Do you even think about it or is it [00:07:00] natural? How does that work? Jason Vieaux: I don't have to think about it as much because I mean, uh, to be I, this, I mean I've performed probably somewhere between, at this point, after 32 years professionally, I. Probably 50 to 70 hours of different music. So after a while you're not, it's all that kind of stuff becomes much more instinctive. But I will say that over the past 15 years, I definitely employ a lot more left hand damping or articulation. Or articulation if I wanna articulate. Say a fugue subject. I'll do a lot more of that with my left hand now than I did with my right hand, say 25 years ago. Because my left hand is just more developed and a lot of why it's more developed is specific challenges in those, dozens of hours of, of music, whether it be avant garde stuff where a composer's asking you to do something that you basically have [00:08:00] never really done before on the instrument or the various textures and things that are in romantic era pieces. Classical era, especially Fernando, but in particular Fernando Sor. Left hand is super, super important in, in Fernando Sors music in general because it's so highly detailed in, i

    40 min

  6. 06/02/2025

    The Expectation of Astonishment: Henry Oliver on Bach and the Hunger for Seriousness

    Episode 1 of the Year of Bach Podcast features Henry Oliver, author of the Substack The Common Reader, and the excellent book Second Act, a study of late bloomers in business and the arts. Our open-ended conversation touches on Bach, Shakespeare, late blooming, and the pleasures and problems of Glenn Gould. Henry describes the “expectation of astonishment” in music and literature, and names his favorite recordings. Links & references * Henry’s Substack – The Common Reader * Henry’s post on his favorite Bach pieces. * The Second Act (Amazon) * Selected recordings, with YouTube links: * Henry’s favorite: Gould playing the Sinfonias live in Moscow * My cantata gateway album: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing “Ich Habe Genug” * My ‘dark horse’ record: Peter Schreier (tenor) and Karl Richter (organ) perform BWV 487 - “Mein Jesu, was für Seelenweh” Support & subscribe * Get the full transcript and future episodes straight to your inbox: * Please share the show and rate it! Intro music: Adagio of BWV 974, performed by your host on his home piano. Transcript: The Expectation of Astonishment: Henry Oliver on Bach and the Hunger for Seriousness Evan Goldfine: Welcome everyone to the premiere episode of the Year of Bach podcast. This series features a set of conversations with artists and writers who have a deep and personal connection to the music of J.S. Bach and how this music inspires and moves them throughout their lifetimes. Today my guest is Henry Oliver. I. Author of the recent bestseller, the Second Act, a Study of Late Bloomers in Business and the Arts. He also writes the excellent Substack, the Common Reader, where he advocates for people to read the great classics of literature with a special emphasis on the works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. He's also a great fan of Bach and a supporter of my substack from its earliest days, and I'm glad to have a readership that overlaps so strongly with his. So, Henry, thank you for being my first guest, and I'm excited to talk to you about Bach today. Henry Oliver: Oh, I'm delighted. This is, this is gonna be one of my favorite podcasts. Evan Goldfine: You're setting me up. Okay. So Henry, why do you keep returning to Bach [00:01:00] throughout your lifetime? Henry Oliver: Oh, because the best, the human, the human spirit loves what is best. We love beauty, we love excellence. We love virtue. Bach embodies all of these things. You can hum him. You can have raptures about him. He can be fun, he can be serious. He’s the Shakespeare of music, right. Evan Goldfine: Clearly. Do you, do you find it to be a more intellectual or emotional experience or both? Henry Oliver: , more emotional. I think maybe that's because I don't understand music to, to a great degree, but I feel that Bach is able to find deep expressions of human feeling. I prefer the word feeling than emotion, deep expressions of human feeling and very subtle expressions of those things. So I think one reason why the cello suites are so, so universally popular is because they give [00:02:00] voice to a set of moods that have not really been expressed quite in that level of finery before or maybe since. Evan Goldfine: Is there something there also about it being solo pieces along with the violin sonatas also That particularly triggers that emotional core for you. Henry Oliver: I suppose so. I love the cello. I think that's probably the heart of it. And I think, again, they are some of his best works and, we respond, we do respond to excellence. I believe that very strongly. Evan Goldfine: Do you like the cello and piano sonatas? Henry Oliver: I don't love them as much. I must confess. Martha Argerich is good at those, right? Evan Goldfine: I, I have that album. That's the one I know. You just pick her over everybody. That's easy. She's threatening to come to New York in a couple years, but we'll see. Henry Oliver: Every time I listen to it, I'm not left feeling I want to go back. Evan Goldfine: Wow. Yeah. Henry Oliver: Yeah. That's the, Evan Goldfine: [00:03:00] yeah, that's, it's disappointing because you want it to be also the best, but we can't have the best of everything. Henry Oliver: No. Evan Goldfine: Bach is clearly enriching your life and, and you've spent your career talking about literature mostly. So in what ways does music enrich your life? That, that literature cannot. Henry Oliver: I've had a very strong response to music since I was young. And I have just had always a great hunger to listen to a lot of music. I listen to much less than I used to because I prefer now to read in silence, and usually to write in silence as well. But what I said about Bach, giving an expression of feeling, I feel music can do that in a way that language can't. And people often talk about the limits of language. The struggle to make words mean what you really want them to mean. The fact that when you are conceiving of something [00:04:00] to write, it has this big feeling inside you of what you're doing, and then when you get it onto the page, it always just seems a bit reduced and not quite what you were trying to capture. Music, I think, gets you a lot closer to the thing you were trying to capture or express, but at the cost of language really means something that you and I can agree what it means. Music is a much less precise form of communicative exchange, I guess. So I think those are the trade offs, but I come back to it because nothing else can express, his range of moods and feelings. if you want to know, this is a, this is a great question. At the moment, I'm reading this book by Lamorna Ash. "Don't forget, we're here forever." And it's all about how people are turning back to religion. And she interviewed 60 young people who became Christians. And what she's interested in is how does that happen? How does it come about that someone else becomes a [00:05:00] Christian? And this is a very difficult thing to get your head around if you're not a Christian. Right? Not just, what are all, what's all this theological talk? What are all these denominations? You believe this, someone else believes that. Just what does that feel ? I just need to get into the vibes of this whole thing. Well, put some Bach on and you will very quickly be given the feelings of what it is to be devout, what it is to, to love God, what it is to feel the glory of God. Something that in your ordinary life may be incomprehensible to you, Bach can deliver up in a way that language, I think would struggle to break through those barriers. Evan Goldfine: I often thought when I was listening to this music for my project, especially with the Passions and the Mass and B minor, the idea about sitting several centuries ago in a big cathedral or even a small church, and this was probably also the [00:06:00] loudest thing you ever heard. Henry Oliver: Yeah. Evan Goldfine: And the power of the voices and the orchestra together reverberating in the halls. You're also in community with the people who are around you listening to this, I can't imagine the power of something that in a, in a great performance and, and to think about. Bach there. Also, I, I don't know if he was considered this, this great among, he was just the guy in town who was the composer who happened to have been pretty superlative relative to his peers. But that was your local guy. And I should say that also that there's no evidence that Bach ever heard the Mass and B minor perform in his lifetime, which is crazy. Henry Oliver: Absolutely crazy. People talk about Beethoven composing deaf, which obviously is, is fascinating, but I find this more fascinating how, how he managed to do that and, and leave it in such a state of completion and never hear it. I mean, the power of the inner life must have [00:07:00] been much, much stronger than we are currently aware of. I think. Evan Goldfine: Do you think we can have a good sense of Bach inner life? I mean, there's very limited extant writings of his that are not about pursuing a job here or there or writing and to try to placate a nobleman. But that what can we know of, of Bach in ways that would be easier to understand some of the other greats internal lives, or maybe there's just that Romantic movement that is between us today and Bach's time. Henry Oliver: I'm cautious about this. Someone Kingsley Amis once said, , you don't need to write a biography of a novelist. He's told you everything about himself, and he's put it into a series of books called novels, but other novelists would deny that and say that it's just an exercise in the use of language. Now we don't believe them and we find all sorts of resonances between their actual lives and their [00:08:00] fictional lives. I am very cautious of this, and I don't, I don't feel I have a good sense of Bach’s inner life. It's hard to believe that you can write the St. Matthew Passion and not have a very, very intense inner life. But I also know that he was busy. He had a job. He had kids, he was churning out music at a phenomenal rate. And I don't know, I, I always just wonder, how much time did he have for inner life? Was there some way in which the way he was operating on the manuscript page was a substitute for the inner life and it happened, the inner and the outer were just happening together for him. I really don't know. Evan Goldfine: A pure sublimation Henry Oliver: Something. Yeah. It's startling when when you look into how much time he actually had to do everything that he did, it becomes more of a mystery really. Evan Goldfine: It must have just in the physical writing of the music. [00:09:00] Just before, not composing, but the physical writing is, is years and years of, of, of time limited by paper and ink. Henry Oliver: Really. And, and all the other huge demands on his time. Right, right. So, I don't know, you could look at that and say, he must have had an extraordinary inner life and it must have just come pouring out of him. Or you might

    41 min
  • 6 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
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About

Bach is the greatest, and we still don’t talk about him enough. A Year of Bach extends my year-long listening project into conversation. I sit down with writers, philosophers, economists, and entrepreneurs to ask how this 300-year-old music continually rewrites us. Subscribe here: https://yearofbach.substack.com/ yearofbach.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Evan Goldfine
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    6
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Evan Goldfine
  • Show Website
    A Year of Bach

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