Soli Deo Gloria: Was Bach a Composer?
by Antoine Hennion

J.S. Bach provides an interesting case study in questions of authorship. Among ethnomusicologists, references to classical music generally serve as a counterpoint to oral music, where ideas of an “oeuvre” and of “authorship” are seen as problematic (in contrast to continuous variation or collective creation). Yet Bach can be seen as working much in this way. Soli Deo Gloria implies that there is no creator but God: this greatest of composers constructed himself as a theologian. He was constantly copying others as well as himself, and published none but pedagogical works.

Though Bach worked prior to the modern regime of authorship, this has not stopped the “father of music” from being evaluated in terms provided by this very regime, of which he has become a central cog. This essay interrogates this ambivalence, which has led to serious misunderstandings, giving in the process a sense of the intense work of “musicalisation” that separates us from Bach. It then hypothetically reinterprets Bach’s elevation to a position of “pure” composer in the last twenty years of his life (after the St. Matthew Passion) not as a victory of the artist, but rather as a believer’s retreat in response to his fear of having gone too far in transforming liturgy into music.