DALLAS BACH SOCIETY
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Mission Statement
The Dallas Bach Society is the Southwest’s primary resource for Baroque music on original instruments. The Dallas Bach Society unites the finest vocalists and instrumentalists in lively and informed performances of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Purcell, Monteverdi, Couperin, and Schütz: all the great music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both masterpieces familiar to music lovers, and those awaiting their discovery.
About This Cause
The Dallas Bach Society mostly performs on “Period Instruments”, which means either original instruments of the period or copies based on these models. In addition to instruments like the viol, lute, and harpsichord, which are only rarely used in today’s orchestras, the usual orchestral instruments have evolved a great deal since the Baroque and Classical periods, so as to produce a much bigger and quite different sound. This is obvious in the case of instruments like the flute, which went from a one-keyed wooden instrument (capable obviously of playing all the Bach compositions!) to a metal instrument with a quite complicated key system designed to produce an even sound throughout the registers. While this might seem to be a great improvement, it loses the many and varied effects used by composers faced with the more “primitive” versions of these instruments. For instance, Beethoven’s Sonata for (French) Horn, Opus 10, contains a very sad second movement in F Minor with several notes not “officially” available on the natural horn, which have to be produced by “stopping” the instrument by placing the fist into the bell of the horn. This produces a fainter and more strained sound than the usual “available” notes. But Beethoven exploits this for artistic purposes – at the height of pathos in this movement, there is a high, stopped, A flat, which is of necessity a cry of anguish, when played on the horn Beethoven knew. This was clearly intentional. With a modern keyed horn, all the notes are available in a pure, perfect form, and if the player simply executes the note normally producing a full and beautiful A flat, Beethoven’s artistic point is totally lost. The violins, violas and cellos of the orchestra are also quite different today from when they were made by Stradivari, Amati, and the other great builders. They have all been taken apart, the necks reset, the insides changed and metal strings added, all with the idea of producing much more sound, to fill up larger concert halls. One might compare this to the difference between candlelight and an electric bulb. So-called “Early Music” simply tries to reestablish the norms of sound and expression which would have been those the composers heard and wrote for, as well as bringing back instruments like the gamba and harpsichord and restoring to them their music, which is otherwise transcribed for the cello and piano, for instance. The complete idea, combined with period singing and dance, is to restore the experience of the music at it was originally conceived: no modern performance, regardless of how splendid, ever really provides this insight. The Dallas Bach Society is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization under the Internal Revenue Code and gratefully accepts contributions, which are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. The Society has committed itself to keeping ticket prices as low as possible, including producing several outreach concerts every season that are free to the public, in an effort to make great music accessible to everyone. Thus, ticket revenues cover only a portion of our production and promotion costs and we rely solely on contributions to make up the difference. Your tax-deductible gift truly makes a difference by ensuring that the Society can continue to present captivating early-instrument performances of the highest artistic quality. Making a contribution also provides for membership in the Society, which is available at different levels, with cumulative benefits commensurate with contribution level.