Mark Ehlert wrote:
>Jeremey McMillan wrote in part:
>
>>I'm sure if Bach and Handel came out of their grave today, everything
>>would sound sharp to them. If they heard Bb, they would hear it as an A.
>>They would have to recalibrate their ear and give the pitches in their
>>heads new names!
>
>They'd probably tear their hair out too when they discover all the scalar
>intervals and chords in all the keys are so "equal". Where'd all the
>temperaments and various tonal colors go?
"I shall always be sorry that we did not find out what Johann
Sebastian Bach thought of our method of preserving music as if it
had been pickles or strawberries. But just when we were on the point
of showing him the mechanical end of our concert, one of those things
happened which none of us could possibly have foreseen and against
which we could not in any way have protected ourselves....
"....a dear old lady....from our beloved republic....had slip[ped]
past our front door, and unobserved by anyone, she had gone directly
into the kitchen, where the gramophone had been installed for that
afternoon. Jo Verlinde, who had volunteered to keep the instrument
going (Veere did not boast of electricity), was under the impression
that this stranger was one of the regular guests and, polite and
obliging as always, she had offered no objections when the creature
had put a record of her own choosing on the disk. As for us, we knew
nothing about her presence until suddenly we heard Bach's Fugue in
G minor, originally written for the organ but now arranged for full
orchestra by one of our most popular American conductors. Once this
fugue had been started, we had no other choice but to listen to it
in silence until it should have come to an end, which it did with a
terrific crash of brass and with a dozen bombardons going full blast.
"Bach, we noticed, had listened with grave interest. When it was
finished, he said, 'That really was most interesting. But what was
it? Perhaps something by Vivaldi? In that case, he must have written
it when he was quite young and still had a great deal to learn.'"
Taken from the chapter describing a visit by the Bachs and the Breughels to
the home in Veere of either the author or his friend Frits Philips in Van
Loon's *Lives*, pp.159-160 (1942).
Walter Meyer
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