What they share as well is a premodern interpretive approach called “typology,” whereby events and principles in the era of ancient Israel act as “types” or “shadows” for their correlated “antitypes” or “substances” in the era of Christianity. In truth, all of them straightforwardly reflect conservative Lutheran thinking. Leading writers have striven to explain these marginalia as progressive. Only a handful of Bach’s entries in Calov concern music, and these have received the most extensive - indeed, typically the only - attention from biographers. Sundry administrative records indicate that Bach often fell into trouble over philosophical differences with his employers about the place of music in worship and in education. BACH COMPOSITIONS HOW TOAn annotation in Latin that the Crocker Laboratory physicists have filed under “definite Bach entries” makes for especially poignant reading, as it takes note of manifold passages in the Bible’s Solomonic literature speaking of how to find godly solace in a world that is hostile to people faithfully pursuing their divine callings. BACH COMPOSITIONS PROFESSIONALThe Calov volumes also provide insight into Bach’s professional and personal concerns, showing that he understood himself less as a modern artist than as a preacher who was following his religious vocation. At Isaiah 16:8, Luther’s text reads: “its vine-branches are scattered, and over the sea.” Bach caught sight of Calov’s obvious typographical error “Fesser,” but he evidently misheard a lector’s utterance of the correct wording, and thus emended Luther’s intended “Feser” (vine-branches) to the biblically unattested “Fäßer” (wine-casks). Tellingly, in something akin to what linguists call a mondegreen, Bach at several passages apparently misconstrued what the children - in this reconstruction of the scene - had said, and emended a scriptural verse’s legitimate Lutheran rendering to a similar-sounding but unattested wording. The patriarch follows along in his magnificent Study Bible, in part to make sure there’s no passage-skipping from the lectors, and in part to allow him to reach for his inkwell whenever he spots, compared with what he’s just heard, an error in Calov’s scriptural verses. The children take turns reciting from a family Bible for practice in reading and elocution, not to mention spiritual edification. BACH COMPOSITIONS FREEPicture the people of Bach’s household on free evenings, gathered in their living room for the activity of reading aloud. But there’s a simpler and more likely scenario, fully grounded in conservative 18th-century social and religious practices. Some biblical scholars have concluded from this that Bach acted like an astute textual critic, poring over Calov’s volumes and painstakingly comparing them, line by line, with other Lutheran Bibles. None of these corrections stem from the list of errors printed in Calov’s appendix. Yet time and again Bach has restored text that was far from clearly missing, or has changed perfectly plausible sounding, but in fact unattested, wording to the standard Lutheran rendering. Within Calov’s scripture verses, there are many small printing errors that would doubtless go undetected by even the most biblically literate reader. Where does all this science get us? Bach’s notations bear witness to a life of conservative Lutheran observance. Although these are harder to evaluate, physicists at the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory have concluded through ink analysis that “with high probability, Bach was also responsible for the underlinings and marginal marks.” Bach handwriting experts have identified the vast majority of these verbal entries as “definitely Bach” or “probably Bach.” Hundreds of passages are further scrawled with marginal dashes and other nonverbal markings. All three volumes are inscribed “JSBach.1733” and contain a host of handwritten corrections and comments.
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