On Feb 28, 2007, at 12:31 AM, Chuck Grimes wrote:
> Not completely true. 95% of Bach's work -- which sets a good part
> of the
> foundation of western music is religious. joanna
>
> ----------
>
> True. But who was paying him?
I'm not sure about the 95% total; there's nothing religious about any of the keyboard music or the concertos. The choral music, yes, and I'd much rather listen to the B Minor Mass (residual Catholicism?) or "Jesu, Meine Freude" than the Coffee Cantata.
But, as Lou Reed once put it in another context, those were different times. Western music became a lot less religious in ensuing years. Yes, Beethoven wrote a couple of masses, and the Missa Solemnis is stupendous, but the bulk of his work was very much part of early bourgeois rationality. Not much religion in Shostakovich, either.
Doug