AMS-NE: New England Chapter of the AMS

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, October 1, 2011 Capital Community College Max DeCurtins, "Changing Contexts for Bach Reception in Israel" In February 1927, an all-Bach concert at Terra Santa College appeared in the performance series of the Jerusalem Musical Society. The program notes began: “Bach occupies in the musical world the same position as Moses in the religious. He established its Torah on which everything else was subsequently built.” This venerating prose, read by attendees at one of the earliest documented Bach performances in the future State of Israel, offers a glimpse into the beginnings of the reception of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music there. The language is nothing if not charged—with religious ideas as well as ideas of musical heritage. The conflation of the musical and the religious stems from the nineteenth-century German context from which many Zionist movements began. The program notes almost seem to proclaim the secure position...