Bach to the Basics

Johann Sebastian Bach

If you think you’ve heard the works of the great classical composers as they were written, you might be surprised to learn you haven’t. MPB’s arts reporter Ron Brown tells us about how some Mississippi musicians are trying to change that.

John Paul is a man who truly enjoys his work. He has a lot of hands on experience. Every week since 1965 he has gone to the same place and done the same thing; Play the organ during services at St. Andrews Episcopal Cathedral in Jackson.

“I came here straight from the Royal Academy of Music in London and I’ve never had another job. This is my 43rd year.”

Playing the organ and acting as choirmaster at St. Andrews is John Paul’s full time job. But it’s not his only job. And it’s his side job that has him in demand throughout the country as a kind of keyboardist in a time capsule.

“I’ve completed over 500 tours throughout the United States. I’ve played from Boston to Miami. And I play at least fifty to sixty concerts out of town, a year.”

This is how the rest of the country hears John Paul. It’s the music of Johan Sebastian Bach as he wrote it, played on the harpsichord, an instrument for which he meant it to be played. Most people hear Bach’s music translated on the piano.
And that’s not historically correct. That instrument wasn’t invented and perfected until much later. This is John Paul bringing Bach back to the basics. It’s his passion, but he also feels as a classically trained musician it’s his obligation.

“I can’t think of anything that I think is any more important than taking the responsibility of bringing to life the work of the great masters as they would have wanted to bring it to life.”

For more than two hundred years Paul says we’ve been hearing Bach masterpieces played on the wrong instruments.
There is group dedicated to the idea that music of the great classical composers is best heard on original instruments.
They call themselves the Mississippi Academy of Ancient Music. Richard McGinnis is their president.

“What’s interesting is, you think, this is kind of a weird thing. Why would somebody be doing this. Well, it turns out has really become a major issue, all over Europe, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, you will find now there are more recordings of say Bach and Handle performed on original instruments as they’re called, than are performed on modern instruments.”

Original instruments like the forte piano. Much smaller and much more quiet than the modern version, this type of Viennese piano is the only kind that Beethoven and Mozart and Hayden used. Because it employs leather hammers hitting the strings, instead of felt, the sound is crisper and the notes aren’t held as long.

It is not a small difference.

Rachel Heard has perhaps the only playable forte piano in all of Mississippi. She uses it to recreate the masters as they were meant to be heard. Trained at Julliard, she’s an accomplished pianist, but she also sees herself as a kind of audio archeologist.

“In a way. But I also see myself more as a historian, or as much of an historian as an artist.”

As with any historian she’s dedicated to transcribing the past as accurately as possible.

“With any work of art, you want to experience it and/or recreate it as an artist tries to do, in the way it was intended to be heard.”

Sometimes that means recreating the instruments history has discarded, like the launtenwerck. It’s a keyboard instrument that looks like an early piano, but sounds like a lute, because the strings are plucked. Many keyboardists will play Bach’s launtenwerk music on piano. And John Paul says that’s okay, but it’s not accurate. And accuracy is what it’s all about for Paul, whose passion for historically accurate music has led him to feel like a man out of time.

“It it weren’t for penicillin I would have been delighted to have lived in the 18th Century.”

If he can’t live there, at least he can be transported through music and he can take others along for the journey. For MPB News, I’m Ron Brown