I did not burst into tears. Well, not until I found this performance by Seraphic Fire, excerpted from one of Bach's two known original settings, this one from Cantata 147. Then I wept without reservation. I can't help it: with my background, I see that music as best heard in its original setting, using historical instruments, and at a tempo quick enough to render the text of the original Lutheran chorale as understandable as if it were being spoken to you face to face. Now that is music that moves me.
Aside: when I looked for the other Bach setting, one of the six Chorale Preludes for solo organ, I went to YouTube, started typing and ended up using someone's leftover search string:
jesu joy of mans desiring organ
Considering how many organists today are gay men, I think we know what that one is...
ellroon, think back to 1980-1985. I don't know how big your community is, but I remember, in Houston, attending memorial services for organists not less often than once a year, sometimes twice. Many organists at some of the choicest churches in town passed away while Reagan refused to speak the term "AIDS" from his bully pulpit, let alone advocate funding for research.
If you're a member of the music community, the chances are pretty good (though not 100 percent) that you're free of anti-gay bigotry. If you're an instrumentalist, and you're straight, you get used to working with gay guys and no small number of lesbian women. That is reality; for people who don't like it, well, that's tough. I've always been straight... people are not kidding when they say you're born the way you are sexually... and I still grieve for all the friends, mostly gay friends, whom I lost at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
If there is an afterlife (and I'm agnostic on whether there is or isn't, but if there is), and if there's any justice there, those people who engaged in active or passive opposition to the early research on AIDS should have a lot to answer for. We have treatments but still no cure, and it's an awful way to go, even if those treatments have allowed people to live longer. Perhaps if Reagan had taken up the cause in the early days, we wouldn't face these tragedies now. I cannot find it in myself to forgive him and others like him.
Omg, Steve. You are right. One gay music director at our local college went off the deep end and had his choral group singing only dirges and funereal music. I had assumed it was just because of his own individual grief... but it was about the entire community.
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I did not burst into tears. Well, not until I found this performance by Seraphic Fire, excerpted from one of Bach's two known original settings, this one from Cantata 147. Then I wept without reservation. I can't help it: with my background, I see that music as best heard in its original setting, using historical instruments, and at a tempo quick enough to render the text of the original Lutheran chorale as understandable as if it were being spoken to you face to face. Now that is music that moves me.
Aside: when I looked for the other Bach setting, one of the six Chorale Preludes for solo organ, I went to YouTube, started typing and ended up using someone's leftover search string:
jesu joy of mans desiring organ
Considering how many organists today are gay men, I think we know what that one is...
Lol, Steve....
ellroon, think back to 1980-1985. I don't know how big your community is, but I remember, in Houston, attending memorial services for organists not less often than once a year, sometimes twice. Many organists at some of the choicest churches in town passed away while Reagan refused to speak the term "AIDS" from his bully pulpit, let alone advocate funding for research.
If you're a member of the music community, the chances are pretty good (though not 100 percent) that you're free of anti-gay bigotry. If you're an instrumentalist, and you're straight, you get used to working with gay guys and no small number of lesbian women. That is reality; for people who don't like it, well, that's tough. I've always been straight... people are not kidding when they say you're born the way you are sexually... and I still grieve for all the friends, mostly gay friends, whom I lost at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
If there is an afterlife (and I'm agnostic on whether there is or isn't, but if there is), and if there's any justice there, those people who engaged in active or passive opposition to the early research on AIDS should have a lot to answer for. We have treatments but still no cure, and it's an awful way to go, even if those treatments have allowed people to live longer. Perhaps if Reagan had taken up the cause in the early days, we wouldn't face these tragedies now. I cannot find it in myself to forgive him and others like him.
Omg, Steve. You are right. One gay music director at our local college went off the deep end and had his choral group singing only dirges and funereal music. I had assumed it was just because of his own individual grief... but it was about the entire community.
I never put it all together....
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