Here's a poem someone asked me to write, some years ago now. She thought it 
was fine, but I wasn't too happy with it and feared I'd responded too 
simplistically, even sentimentally, to the subject. I'd be interested to 
hear what any of you might think.

ODE ON THE MUSIC OF JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

*Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit* -- Cantata 106

For you
there could never be enough of it --
composing timeless music in the gaps between
taking choir practice and teaching hated Latin,
your wife called from washtub or cooking or children
to make fair copies from your rough
so often that her writing
was in the end almost the twin of yours.
In that ordinary room
such extraordinary music; every week a new
cantata as the church year spun.
Not enough time, not enough
music, not enough time
for music. The unstoppable metronome
of weekdays, Sundays, seasons, years.

Still at your death The Art of Fugue unfinished.
And you, like those perpetual canons, never come
to a full perfect close --
but poised upon an arbitrary pause,
the end of earthly life: your voice transposed
to an immortal key, unheard by human ears
but singing still: God's time is best time.

Behind the times, they said.
Even your sons, once you were safely dead,
the old man, out of fashion. Almost as if
your music, hidden in the coffin with you, slept.
Yet the continuum
of Music kept
you as its favoured godson safe
as if it knew your time would come.

Now sing me how
God's time is best time. Tell me what you know.


joanna

Oh hell, reading this over now, I realise there's so much more I ought to 
have said! Subject is too huge for me.  j

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2007 8:29 PM
Subject: Bach


> Yesterday the Bach Edition--Complete Works, which I had ordered from 
> Amazon for $125 (86 euros on French Amazon), arrived. It's 155 CDs. I 
> immediately went to pieces I know well--the Toccatta and Fuge in D Minor 
> for organ (very fine), Wachet Auf (superb interpretation, soloists 
> adequate), the Goldberg Variations excellent), the 6th  Cello Suite 
> (respectable and a bit more), the first solo violin partita (likewise), 
> the B Minor Mass. I also dipped my toe into the Saint Matthew's 
> Passion--difficult to turn that one off, but not enough time. It seemed 
> very good indeed. Most of the work is on period instruments, but there's 
> no preciosity. The Goldbergs on harpsichord produce nuances that the piano 
> can't. Interesting mistake--the B Minor is listed on the sleeve as by a 
> small, unknown to me ensemble, but it's in fact Klemoperer and the 
> Philharmonia with Baker and Gedda, and I'm not complaining.
>
> All of these I alreasdy own performances off, sometimes several. The real 
> fun is going to be all those pieces I've never heard. Of the cantatas, for 
> instance, I know maybe 20.
>
> The first citizen reviewer at the Amazon site is Kamau Brathwaite, by the 
> way.
>
> There's a CD at the end of bio, notes, and the libretti (vo, french and 
> english) of all the vocal works.
>
> I can't think of a better way to spend $125. Bach's was one of the great 
> minds --up there with Shakespeare, Michelangelo,Newton, and maybe 
> Montaigne and not a whole lot of others. What the hell could the burgers 
> of Leipzig do with the rest of Sunday after leaving church? Art, sex or 
> ice cream it had to be. Me, after  those hours of listening I hiked 
> through my forest on one of the summer's loveliest days.
>
> Mark
>