Recording Bach: from the sublime to synth-porn

An odd collision came about recently between two strands of my musical life that normally don't intersect at all.

I'm a member of a couple of amateur choirs, and sometimes take part in "scratch" performances and workshops. On such a workshop I heard about the opportunity to be on a CD of a reconstruction of Bach's "St John Passion", as it would have been performed in Bach's day. The recording, to take place in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, was by Dunedin Consort, one of the professional groups my wife has sung and recorded with a lot in the past.

How the re-enactment of a Good Friday service in the Leipzig of 1724 was to collide with my preoccupation with electronic music, will become clear in a bit.

Traditional music? "from today, everything is different"

While deploring all stereotypes, as we should, let's entertain a couple of fairly harmless ones for a minute.

First: the lover of traditional music - celtic folk or Dixie jazz, Chicago blues, calypso etc; and Second: the devotee of new music - urban pop, electronica, indie rock, prog-metal and so on. Obviously to separate them rigidly is artificial; many of us listen to (or even play) music from both categories.

I suspect that, if asked, many people would put lovers of classical music into the first camp. This is understandable: most well-known composers are dead after all. Some have been for centuries. Their music is far from "new", and it smacks of The Establishment more than just about any other art form. Its (professional at least) practitioners come through conservatoires and ivied halls of academe - very foreign planets to most people. How "traditional" can it get?

Well, here's my point: it ain't traditional at all.

Synth evolution: 40 years "in search of space"

Most musicians look back on a particular moment that set the ensuing decades onto a new path for them.

Perhaps a song played on the radio, a new LP in a friend's collection, a live performance - out of the blue and always life-changing in more or less subtle ways. With me it came in a record shop in Bath when I was 15 or 16, quite young enough for new enthusiasms to arrive like steam locomotives.