Uri Golomb
I was born in Israel in 1972. I did my Bachelor’s degree (in musicology and general interdisciplinary studies in humanities) at Tel Aviv University, and my Master’s degree (in Historical Musicology) at King’s College, London.
In 2004, I completed my doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University, under the supervision of the renowned Bach scholar and performer John Butt, on the performance history of Bach’s B-minor Mass (Expression and Meaning in Bach Performance and Reception: An Examination of the B minor Mass on Record).
Since then, I have lectured extensively on Bach performance in the 20th and early 21st centuries, published several articles on the subject, and was awarded a British Academy Visiting Fellowship to further study this fascinating topic. My ultimate aim in this field is to produce a book-length study: The Fifth Evangelist, the Impassioned Rhetorician and the Practical Musician: Re-Creating Bach’s Vocal Music in the Age of Recordings.
My other research interests include opera (especially Monteverdi and Mozart), with a focus on issue of character credibility and the creation of sympathetic villains; the reflection of polemics on music and aesthetics in musical works, especially in the baroque era; the nature and validity of historical performance; the relationship between performance and analysis; music and rhetoric; and, more generally, the relationship between text and music.
I am also studying contemporary Israeli music, with planned papers on the music of stylistic eclecticism in the music of Josef Bardanashvili, and musical-narrative strategies and the representation of the Holocaust in Ella Milch-Sheriff’s And the Rat Laughed.
In 2004, I completed my doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University, under the supervision of the renowned Bach scholar and performer John Butt, on the performance history of Bach’s B-minor Mass (Expression and Meaning in Bach Performance and Reception: An Examination of the B minor Mass on Record).
Since then, I have lectured extensively on Bach performance in the 20th and early 21st centuries, published several articles on the subject, and was awarded a British Academy Visiting Fellowship to further study this fascinating topic. My ultimate aim in this field is to produce a book-length study: The Fifth Evangelist, the Impassioned Rhetorician and the Practical Musician: Re-Creating Bach’s Vocal Music in the Age of Recordings.
My other research interests include opera (especially Monteverdi and Mozart), with a focus on issue of character credibility and the creation of sympathetic villains; the reflection of polemics on music and aesthetics in musical works, especially in the baroque era; the nature and validity of historical performance; the relationship between performance and analysis; music and rhetoric; and, more generally, the relationship between text and music.
I am also studying contemporary Israeli music, with planned papers on the music of stylistic eclecticism in the music of Josef Bardanashvili, and musical-narrative strategies and the representation of the Holocaust in Ella Milch-Sheriff’s And the Rat Laughed.
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Papers by Uri Golomb
The Crucifixus from the B-minor Mass has widely been judged as a pinnacle of emotional expressivity in Bach’s music, and has been the subject of extensive research, concerning composition and performance alike. Our analysis of this movement – including a detailed examination of its departures from its model (BWV 12/2) – adopts a perspective which has rarely been employed in existing literature: Bach’s exploitation of rules affecting human experience and emotional expression, as revealed in research on music cognition. The Crucifixus represents an exceptionally intensive use of cognitive rules associated with varied types of sadness – starting with maximal restraint, undergoing intensification, and culminating in resigned acceptance.
Our analysis also reveals a significant fusion of structural complexity – with definable sub-divisions at various levels – with a sense of inexorable continuity and unity; the movement contains only a single cadential resolution to the tonic which is delayed until just before the coda (bar 49). In all these respects, the Crucifixus is revealed as significantly more complex and intense than its model.
In seeking to examine the reflection of this complexity in performance, we selected 13 recordings, representing various styles and periods, and analysed them in light of the rules of musical organisation we discerned in the work. These performances demonstrate, in their contrasting characters, the complexity and diversity inherent in Bach’s music.
In this paper, I intend to examine the extent to which these larger interpretive questions can be linked to specific, measurable aspects in the recorded performances. I will therefore focus on pivotal transitions in tempo and dynamics, using data capture software that allows precise observation and documentation of the manner in which tempo interacts with other parameters. I will also investigate how such empirical analysis can provide useful and productive insights into broader musicological issues (including Bach reception, and the study of performance traditions and individual interpretations).
My focus in this paper is on recorded performances, where a similar diversity of interpretations can be discerned. Different approaches to “technical” features (e.g., scoring, phrasing, tempo, dynamics, articulation, timbre) ultimately affect listeners’ perception of the music’s expressive character. They can be used to highlight or downplay potentially significant features in the music (harmonic tension and resolution, musical-rhetorical figures), as well as contributing a creative element that could further tilt the musical expression in one direction or another.
In this paper, I will explore selected performances of the duets from Cantata 140, and examine whether the musicians portray human characters engaged in an expressive interaction, or tend more towards the joint presentation of a single authoritative message. I will also address the attendant methodological questions – how one might justify the characterisation of a performance in these terms, and what importance should be assigned in this context to different types of evidence (listening-based analysis, empirical methodology, the performers’ history and background).
A powerful illustration of this can be found in his Symphony No. 2 (The Way To…) (2001). This intense, driven work is woven around quotations from four different works (listed in the order of their appearance): Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 (third movement); Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 (first movement); Schoenberg’s Der Jakobleiter; and ‘Abschied’, the final song in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Bardanashvili combines these heterogeneous borrowed materials with his own original themes, forging them into a compelling single-movement work.