[lbo-talk] Another thing about Vivaldi....

[Chuck Grimes]

I've listened toVivaldi and Bach, and the other associated
baroque composers Corelli, Manfredini, Torelli, Locatelli, Telemann,
etc. Their extremes of constrast, light and dark, shadows, and brilliant 
highlights reminds me of some of my favorite painting of the same era. It 
one time I had all the Bach concertos, all the sonatas, all the suite and 
orchestral arrangements, most of the solo instruments... and all the Well 
Tempered Clavier. Use to listen for hours and hours and hours, days, weeks, 
months. Bach is a kind of total emersion sport. At one time I had most of 
Beethoven, except the quartets, most of Mozarts late symphonies and 
concertos. Then a lot of Chopin, then it thinned out until the 
impressionists and early moderns, like Satie.

What did these others add to Bach? A richer palette, a looser sense of 
variation, more color, strange instruments, like the mandolin, lute, the 
guitar from Spain from I can't remember who. Bach is not what you call music 
to dance to, and yet the sense of motion in the Italians was very great. 
They added something like a little swing to that Bach thing.da, dot da da, 
da dot da da... Getting into Bach is like getting into Coltrane. Can't 
explain it. The real philosopher beside Monk, was McCoy Tyner who is still 
at it:

http://mccoytyner.com/

Click on the New CD/DVD for a ten minute update. McCoy was Trane that you 
thought you heard....(A personal observation, not shared by all)

A lot of people have a hard time getting into the baroque period, but once 
you do, you get great returns for the effort.

As for the Bach revival. From Andre Gide's journals you discover there was 
an on going revival of the baroque masters in the first couple of decades of 
the the 20thC that went along with the early modern masters in France and 
Germany.