I recently designed a graduate seminar centered on a single historical composition and focused on the ways that composition has been received. This approach foregrounds performers, arrangers, and audience members from diverse backgrounds. It thus shifts attention away from historic composers and toward people from all walks of life who have performed, adapted, and listened to the music. It also explores ways the piece connects to other arts and to the broader world through interdisciplinary inquiry. I chose this approach to help students grasp the continued relevance of historic music through the richness of its reception and to bring voices into the discussion from a range of cultures and backgrounds.
Rather than organizing the course around a comprehensive study of a composer’s life and works, I use a single composition as a touchstone for case studies and topical discussions involving musicological and interdisciplinary concerns, including ontology, performance practice, organology, adaptation, dance, film, literature, architecture, and visual art. For my course, I chose the “Goldberg Variations,” BWV 988, a work that I have studied extensively as both a performer and researcher. The model, however, could readily be adapted to another composition or composer, depending on the instructor’s interests and expertise. Although the “Goldberg Variations” serves as the central focus, the course also introduces students to Bach’s broader repertoire, including works inspired by or based on Bach’s music, with particular attention to contributions by underrepresented composers. My book, Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” Reimagined, serves as the foundation for the course, supplemented by readings from a range of disciplines. A focused volume from a series such as the Cambridge Companions or Oxford Companions could provide a similar foundation for a course centered on another composer or composition.
This approach not only examines notions of the authoritative text but also encourages students to engage in multivalent dialogues about the many ways that people—including (re)composers, performers, directors, choreographers, artists, and audience members—have entered inter- and intratextual conversations with Bach’s music. In the process, the course opens discussions about musical authorship and changing conceptions of Bach and the musical work in the twenty-first century while teaching students to engage critically with a variety of musicological methods. The course thus seeks to bridge the gap between historical music and the ways Bach has been revered, performed, constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed across disciplines. Ultimately, it invites students to practice the process of “doing” musicology.
Scholarship
Scholars have already written extensively about creative course design, alternative assignments, and innovative ways to approach teaching Baroque music. I have drawn upon some of those ideas in developing my course. Of particular importance is Melanie Lowe’s scholarship about making connections between historical music and the present day with creative assignments. Daniel Barolsky’s work in The Norton Guide to Teaching Music History on integrating performers and performance in the music history classroom has also informed my approach, as has Sara Haefeli’s recent book on using case studies to teach music history. I have additionally been inspired by authors proposing unique seminar style courses, including Mary Natvig’s and Susan Cook’s essays in Teaching Music History. Finally, scholarship on praxis-based teaching has provided an important foundation for my emphasis on experiential and applied learning.
Organization
I designed the course for graduate students from a range of concentrations, including composition, theory, music history, music education, and performance. Some students may have extensive knowledge of Bach, while others may have relatively little familiarity with his music or limited interest in it. The organization of the course also considers both historicist and presentist perspectives.
Each week centers on a particular musicological or interdisciplinary topic while spanning historical periods from Bach’s lifetime to the present. Information about Bach’s life and works is interwoven throughout these discussions rather than treated as a separate chronological unit:
| Week Number | Weekly Topics |
|---|---|
| Week I | Introduction to Course/Introduction to the “Goldberg Variations” |
| Week II | Early Reception History of the “Goldberg Variations” (Instruments, Scores, Performances) |
| Week III | Arrangements, Transcriptions, and Evolving Notions of the Work Concept/Textual Fidelity |
| Week IV | Re-Compositions, Multi-Author Re-Compositions, and Evolving Notions of Authorship (Poststructuralism and the Open Work Concept) |
| Week V | Bach and Dance (Abstract Visualizations of Music Through Gesture)/ Introduction to Bach’s Suites and Partitas |
| Week VI | Dancing to the “Goldberg Variations” (Postmodern Choreographies) |
| Week VII | Bach in Film |
| Week VIII | Bach in Film (continued) |
| Week IX | Bach in Musical Theater and Opera/Bach’s Vocal Works |
| Week X | Bach and Twenty-First-Century Performance Practices (Plus Video Games and Multi-Media Versions) |
| Week XI | Bach and Literature |
| Week XII | Bach in Visual Art and Architecture |
| Week XIII | Student Presentations |
In weeks two through four, for example, we examine the reception history of the “Goldberg Variations” from Bach’s time to the present. Students learn about organology, editing, and changing approaches to performance practice. We initially trace the near disappearance of the piece during the nineteenth century, when its technical difficulty and the declining prominence of the harpsichord contributed to its limited circulation. We then examine the emergence of numerous arrangements for one or two pianos around the turn of the twentieth century, which helped address what was perceived as an “instrument problem.”
We subsequently consider how the “Goldberg Variations” was canonized and returned to regular performance in the mid-twentieth century, including through historically informed approaches on both harpsichord and piano. Beginning particularly in the late 1980s, transcriptions, arrangements, and re-compositions proliferated once again, this time encompassing a much wider diversity of instruments. Although historically informed performances on harpsichord and piano remain central to the piece’s performance history, contemporary approaches tend to allow greater space for subjective interpretation than did many performances associated with the mid-twentieth-century authenticity movement. By documenting these changes, students consider evolving attitudes toward textual fidelity, the authority of the score, and the role of the interpreter.
Classes are highly hands-on. In small groups, students compare early performance editions—from Carl Czerny’s piano transcription and early two-piano versions to Ferruccio Busoni’s truncated adaptation—with current Urtext editions. These comparisons allow students to investigate how performance practices evolved during the period before recordings provided a means of preserving and circulating performances. We then trace changing performance approaches from the early twentieth century through the historically informed performance movement and question current trends by listening to and comparing recordings.
Students connect these developments to Bach’s other works. As preparation, they read several scholarly articles and choose three variations to compare across recordings by performers from three different decades of the twentieth century. I also ask students to locate historical reviews of the “Goldberg Variations” in historical newspaper databases. Through these activities, and through sustained attention to a single composition, students learn to analyze editorial approaches, reception history, and evolving performance practices while developing research skills that can be applied to Bach’s broader repertoire.
While some topics focus primarily on the music itself, others are explicitly interdisciplinary. Weeks five and six, for instance, explore the theme of Bach and dance. We discuss historical uses and types of dances and consider how Bach incorporated dance throughout his compositions. This material allows us to connect the “Goldberg Variations” to other works, including the suites, partitas, cantatas, and Brandenburg Concertos. Students examine both explicit and implicit allusions to dance in Bach’s music.
We then investigate how the dance-like qualities of Bach’s music have inspired more than nineteen choreographies, ranging from traditional and contemporary ballet to contact improvisation and contemporary dance incorporating narratives and subplots. Thus, students study not only a broad range of dance literature related to Bach’s repertoire but also the ways choreographic interpretations have evolved over time, from the musical-architectural approaches of choreographers such as William Dollar and Jerome Robbins to the narrative interpolations of contemporary choreographers such as Pam Tanowitz.
Although the semester focuses primarily on instrumental music, the course includes one unit devoted to vocal music and theatrical adaptations. Week nine focuses on theatrical and operatic adaptations of the “Goldberg Variations.” We first discuss the scope and stylistic characteristics of Bach’s vocal works and consider the texts associated with them and their complicated relevance to contemporary audiences. The primary focus, however, is on four adaptations of the “Goldberg Variations” for Hörspiel, musical theater, theater, and opera. In class, we listen to excerpts and analyze the layers of intertextual meaning produced when Bach’s music is placed in new theatrical contexts. In particular, we consider how the composition becomes embedded in more recent historical events through the addition of sociological and political contexts. These include protests against poor working conditions in Dieter Kühn’s Hörspiel and critical commentary on the suffering produced by the Holocaust in theatrical and musical works by Tabori and Walden. Walden’s opera, by contrast, presents a twenty-first-century perspective on Bach’s life and works.
These adaptations also project new meanings back onto Bach’s original composition. For example, connections between poor working conditions in twentieth-century Germany and the theatrical representations of Bach’s music can prompt students to reconsider the working conditions experienced by musicians of Bach’s own generation. We discuss these circular relationships as a way of raising broader questions about the musical work concept, absolute music versus music created within a particular society and historical moment, and the role of adaptation, quotation, and allusion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In preparation, students choose among assignments designed to develop skills in intertextual analysis or approaches associated with new musicology. They may investigate the political or social implications of a Bach adaptation. Vocal students interested in more traditional approaches to Bach’s repertoire can investigate music-text relationships in a composition of their choice and consider their connections to theatrical practices in the Baroque era. Other students may locate another Bach composition that has been placed in a theatrical or operatic setting or compare two adaptations of the “Goldberg Variations.” Both historicist and presentist approaches are welcomed.
Conclusion
By moving away from a conventional survey of Bach’s life and works, this course shifts the focus from the composer toward the interpreters, adapters, artists, performers, and students who continually recreate his music. In doing so, it reveals the remarkable variety of ways that composers, performers, artists, authors, choreographers, directors, and audiences have understood and reimagined Bach. The trade-off is that students do not leave the course with comprehensive exposure to Bach’s complete works or exhaustive knowledge of his biography. While this approach was well received by most students, especially composers, pianists, and string players, for instance, it was disappointing to a few students—especially vocalists who were hoping for more historic approach with more emphasis on Bach’s choral music. Much of that material is still covered, but it is interwoven into a topical exploration of the many ways people have performed, interpreted, adapted, and studied one of Bach’s compositions across nearly three centuries.
One of the largest challenges in designing such a course is the broad range of knowledge required across disciplines. What students gain, however, is an in-depth understanding of the profound and continuing influence of a single work. They encounter the “Goldberg Variations” not as a static object from three hundred years ago but as a composition that has generated an ongoing series of conversations across disciplines, media, historical periods, and cultures. This approach demonstrates the continued relevance of Bach’s music while recentering the conversation on the people who have engaged with it. In doing so, it encourages curiosity and engagement among students who might otherwise regard historical music as an outdated or irrelevant relic of the past.
