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Dis-ease, Pain and Redemption in Early Modern Musicking

Thursday 3 April 2025, 6.00PM

Speaker(s): Bettina Varwig, University of Cambridge

This paper explores the physical-spiritual effects of J. S. Bach’s music on his early modern Lutheran congregants, as well as the affective affordances of this music for listeners today, in light of historically changing conceptions about bodies, wellbeing, health, illness and pain. I argue that, in Bach’s time, the musical experiences of his performers and listeners would have been shaped by a perennial state of dis-ease about humanity’s sinful condition.

Using Bach’s St. John Passion as a central example, I propose that his music could have acted as a catalyst for painful feelings of remorse as a necessary preparation for receiving grace. I then consider the piece’s capacity to engage with the dis-ease of the late capitalist condition of Western modernity today, by reflecting on a 2024 performance of the St. John Passion in Cambridge that creatively transformed the disembodied aesthetic of the classical concert hall tradition.

Bettina Varwig (BMus King's College London, PhD Harvard University) is Professor of Music History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College. She has published widely on early modern musical cultures, in particular in the German lands, on musical rhetoric, listening, the history of the body, the emotions and the senses, and the modern reception of J. S. Bach. She is editor of Rethinking Bach (Oxford, 2021) and author of Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge, 2011) and Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (Chicago, 2023), which won the 2024 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological.

Refreshments (tea and coffee) provided 15 minutes before the advertised start time. All welcome!

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Location: The Treehouse, Berrick Saul Building

Admission: In-person and online