On my last drive home from St. Louis to Columbia, in the midst of a sweaty car with broken A/C and a purple sunset in the distance, I caught a special on the St. Louis NPR station about the Bach Cello Suites. It was truly fascinating to hear about!
If you aren't familiar with them, the Bach Cello suites are 6 different works for solo cello written by Johann Sebastian Bach and are probably the most famous and recognizable pieces for the cello. You may be familiar with the opening prelude to his first suite:
Such beautiful music! I love the minimalism and simplicity, yet how intricately crafted each note and phrase sounds. Okay, I'll stop nerding out.
The cool thing about these pieces are that they are shrouded in mystery. Nobody knows for sure why they were written, who they were written for, when exactly they were written, or even what they are really supposed to sound like! Imagine, one of the most famous pieces out there in the classical realm, and we don't even know for sure if we're playing it right!
The pieces were uncovered in a thrift store/archive of sorts by a 13 year-old cellist in Spain, Pablo Casals, in the late 19th century, long after Bach's death. At the time they were hardly known, thought of as practice etudes, and they were more like manuscripts with ideas rather than a legitimate piece of sheet music. Casals took to studying Bach and the pieces and transcribing them (to the best of anyone's ability) into the form we know them as today.
Each suite is about 20 minutes long, so if you are feeling gutsy enough to give some 18th century solo music a shot, listen to one and see what you think! Some people fall in love with them right off the bat. For some, it takes some work to appreciate. And some of you will probably think it's boring. Hard to know for sure unless you give it a try! And hey, you can brag to your friends later about expanding the horizons of your musical palate. They'll think you're smart. Maybe.
love this music!
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