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A Beat for Young Bachniks
Church or concert, Christmas or midsummer, there is one striking thing about the new audience for Bach. It is young. At the weekly Bach cantata performances at Manhattan's Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, the congregation sports more beards than button-downs, appears to be almost entirely under 35. "Students will brave rainstorms to wait in line for standing room at a Bach recital," marvels German Organist Helmut Walcha. Record stores report a marked increase in the number of teen-agers thronging around the classical counters, buying up Bach without so much as a glance at the new Beatles album.
The prevalence of youthful Bachniks, says Music Critic Bernard Jacobson of the Chicago Daily News, explains why "the rise in Bach's popularity has not brought about an increase in the amount of Bach at symphony concerts, where all the subscribers are 90 years old. Bach is a revolutionary figure, allied with the liberals, while Beethoven, the archrevolutionary, has become the bulwark of the conservative establishment."
What attracts the young to Bach is what attracts them to almost any other music: the beat. Artists of the past sometimes judged Bach to be nothing more than jigging monotony—"a sublime sewing machine," Colette called him—but the young know better. "There is a bridge between Bach's ideas of rhythm and those of the mid-20th century," says Pianist Glenn Gould, "and it has been created by popular music and jazz." The Swingle Singers, an eight-member Paris-based group led by American Ward Swingle, popularized Bach scores by performing them to the accompaniment of a jazz rhythm section, singing the themes in wordless scat syllables (ba ba da ba dee). As for jazz itself, its linear bass line, contrapuntal melodies and free improvisation all suggest parallels to Bach—parallels that have been explored notably by such performers as the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck and Lalo Schifrin.
Even rock musicians have struck a bond with Bach—and why not? The very improbability of it appeals to their fanciful eclecticism; besides, they like the way his music is melodic but not meandering, emotional but not sentimental. Blues-Rock Singer Paul Butterfield, 27, names Bach his favorite music along with the blues and Ravi Shankar. "I don't always know what Bach is doing," says Butterfield, "but we seem to be friends." One of last year's hit records, A Whiter Shade of Pale, by England's Procol Harum, was arranged around an organ theme inspired by Bach's organ setting of the chorale Wachetauf. Beatle George Harrison admits that the soaring trumpet obbligato in Penny Lane was inspired by the Second Brandenburg Concerto. Three of the five members of the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble are Juilliard products who double on oboe, organ and cello in order to alternate, and sometimes combine, Bach's structure with rock's fluidity.