From: Music As Prayer When I was a teenager, I studied the flute with one of the instrument’s great teachers, John Oberbrunner. I learned all the Handel sonatas and then all the Bach sonatas. I played most of them in church services, and later in recitals during my college years. But when I began to study theology, I put the instrument away for many years. Now I am playing again, and I have been revisiting some of those sonatas. They are the same collections that I used forty years ago, but it seems the music has changed. I play and I find in the music things I never knew were there before. I begin to think Handel and Bach must have sneaked out of the cloud of witnesses and fiddled with their compositions in the intervening years. Handel seems to have put more lament in the A-minor Sonata with the great arching triplet lines in the largo, and Bach seems to have poured more sorrow into the opening motif of the B-minor Sonata’s first movement. It seems the faster movements, which I used to play at breakneck speed to show off my virtuosity, have slowed a little. It appears that [...]
↧