Today's Stories

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

February 12, 2009

P. Sainath
Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History

Jean Bricmont
French Echoes of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Michael Hudson
Trying to Revive the Bubble Economy: Obama's Awful Financial Recovery Plan

Peter Lee
Pakistan, Not Afghanistan, is the Main Event

Dave Lindorff
Judges Nabbed, Jailing Kids for Kickbacks

February 11, 2009

Neve Gordon
Few Peacemakers in the New Israeli Knesset

Peter Morici
Anatomy of a Hemorrhage

Andy Worthington
Who's Running Guantánamo?

Marjorie Cohn
A Call to End All Renditions

Fred Gardner
Change We Can Smoke?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The G & O (Geithner and Obama) Bank

Zoe Blunt
Vancouver Island Hippies: Top Security Threat for 2010?

Belén Fernández
Politics on the Panamericana

Martha Rosenberg
Don't Breathe the Meat

Website of the Day
George Dyson on Project Orion

Blues of the Day
David Vest on the CBC

February 10, 2009

Kathy Kelly
How Do People Keep Going?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Stimulus Imbroglio

Uri Avnery
Dirty Socks

Michael J. Berg
Will South Carolina be the Center of the Nuclear Revival?

Russell Mokhiber
Et Tu, Atul?

Joe Bageant
A Commodity Called Misery

Gareth Porter
Petraeus' Subterfuge

Dave Lindorff
Seek Truth, But Prosecute Liars

Rannie Amiri
The Implications of Recognizing Israel's "Right to Exist"

Harvey Wasserman
Nukes and the Stimulus

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What We Didn't Learn at Obama's Press Conference

Website of the Day
RIAA Takes Over DoJ Under Obama

February 9, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Why Sanjay Gupta is the Wrong Man for Top US Health Job

Paul Craig Roberts
Driving Over the Cliff

Julio Sanchez /
Feliz de Bedout
The Threat of Peace in Colombia: an Interview with Hollman Morris

National Lawyers Guild
Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes

Jonathan Cook
Israeli University Welcomes "War Crimes" Colonel

Alana Smith
The Nightmarish Case of Fahad Hashmi

Binoy Kampmark
Taking the Bong

Sam Bahour
End the Occupation First

Nicole Colson
Can You Afford College?

Ron Jacobs
Remembering the Second Intifada

Website of the Day
The Legacy of Ed Grothus and the Black Hole

Norman Solomon
Why are We Still at War?

David Macaray
The Late, Great UAW

Website of the Day
The Bloody Cove

Weekend Edition
February 27 - March 1, 2009

The Musical Patriot

Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

By DAVID YEARSLEY

How did Bach accumulate his staggering wealth of musical knowledge and daunting skill as a performer and composer? His supposed answer, related in 1802 by his first biographer J. N. Forkel, was proudly modest and deceptively straightforward: “I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.” The surviving accounts of Bach’s life, especially the Obituary published in 1754, are full of references to Bach’s unflagging labor. He was a poster boy for the Protestant ethic. An “extraordinary eagerness” motivated his forbidden midnight copying of a manuscript while living in his brother’s house after the young Bach was orphaned at the age of ten. Again near the end of the Obituary we learn that the causes of Bach’s blindness in late lift lay in his unquenchable thirst for musical models, to learn from be inspired by, and, ultimately, to surpass: “His naturally somewhat weak eye sight, further weakened by his unheard-of-zeal in studying, which made him, particularly in his youth, sit at work the whole night through, led, in his last years, to an eye disease.”

There was no reason to doubt that Bach’s achievement involved not just immense native talent but unprecedented motivation and perseverance. Yet we had no direct proof of it, no residue of the desire to learn that kept him up nights squinting at musical leaves wreathed in moonlight and an aura of infinite possibility.

The mythical and anecdotal contours of this image were suddenly brought into sharp focus in 2006 with the discovery of what are now the earliest known Bach autographs, stemming from his teenage years. Indefatigable Bach researchers Michael Maul and Peter Wollny of the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig unearthed the autographs through their own dedication, expertise and more than a little good fortune. These fascinating pages have now been made available in sumptuous facsimile by the venerable Bärenreiter publishing house.

It was Maul, who discovered an unknown Bach aria in 2005 in the holdings of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar. This lovely piece for the birthday of Bach’s princely employer turned up in material that had been fortuitously removed from Amalia’s wonderful 18th-century library in advance of the fire of September 2004 that laid waste to its holdings. Spurred by that discovery, Maul and Wollny began a search of the Duchess’s theological collection which were housed in the Weimar Palace, not her library. A box containing the Bach autographs had mistakenly been assigned to these non-musical items and was therefore similarly spared .In the box, amongst lesser works by Johann Pachelbel, were Bach’s copies of two of the greatest keyboard pieces from 17th-century northern Europe by two of its greatest musicians: a complete version of Johann Adam Reinken’s An Wasserflüssen Babylon (By the Rivers of Babylon) and a single page of Nun freut auch lieben Christen g’mein (Dear Christians, one and all, rejoice) of Dieterich Buxtehude. Both are monumental chorale fantasias, a genre in which the phrases of well-known hymn tunes are treated in diverse and ingenious ways meant both to uplift and to impress.  In his copies Bach adopted the tablature notation used by Reinken and Buxtehude in which the pitch letters are written out in script rather than converted to notes on a staff.

The two autographs Maul and Wollny found are so moving not only for the graceful, if sometimes unsure, ductus of the young Bach’s calligraphy, but for the “extroardinary eagerness” and “the unheard-of-zeal” that these pages reflect. At more than 300 measures Reinken’s most famous piece is also one of the longest in the north German repertory. In Jean-Claude Zehnder’s 2007 recording of all five pieces found in that Weimar box (the Reinken and Buxtehude chorale fantasias, and three pieces by Pachelbel not transmitted in Bach’s hand) offers a rather deliberate reading of the Reinken that comes in at just over nineteen minutes. By any reckoning it’s a huge single movement piece.

Bach’s copy of this sprawling fantasia may be one of the last times a teenager, or indeed anyone, wrote out work of this scope in tablature. Not only is the manuscript a monument to teenage dedication, but also to a tradition that could have had few devotees in 1700, and none as enthusiastic and talented as Bach.

The Obituary tells us that Bach now and again made the trip from Lüneburg to nearby Hamburg to hear Reinken play on the famous organ in St. Catherine’s Church. We now know that Bach was not only listening to the master improvise, but was studying his style in a way only painstaking copying can provide.  The discovery of Bach’s youthful copy of Reinken’s  An Wasserflüssen Babylon also adds profoundly to the significance of one of the set-pieces of Bach biography. In 1720 Bach applied for an organist position in Hamburg. During his stay there Bach played a two-hour-long concert at Reinken’s church “before the Magistrate and many other distinguished person of the town, to their general astonishment.” The ninety-nine-year-old Reinken was perhaps the most distinguished of them all. The crowning glory of that concert was Bach’s extemporaneous treatment of Reinken’s trademark chorale, An Wassflüssen Babylon. Like Reinken’s fantasia on this melody, Bach’s extended to “almost half an hour.”  As if in apostolic succession, Reinken annointed Bach the successor of the tradition he had represented: “I thought that this art was,” said the ancient man to the much younger one, “But I see that in you it still lives.”   That the thirty-five-year-old Bach had copied Reinken’s towering chorale fantasia two decades earlier, shows how hard Bach had worked to master this complex and glorious style.  Bach’s historic half-hour chorale fantasia heard in Hamburg was not the product of pure inspiration: the upward climbing path to his apotheosis was paved by long hours and years of labor.

In their excellent preface to the facsimile edition (which includes the editors’ transcription of the autographs into modern notation), Maul and Wollny provide Bach scholarship with a number of new findings and illuminating suggestions. These manuscripts are rich not only in music but in their implications for Bach biography—the artistic imperatives that drove him, the educational and career options that he decided to pursue at this critical juncture in his life.

Long after his teenage years, Bach kept these and presumably many of other now lost (or still lost?) tablature copies with him, providing his own family and students access to them. Maul and Wollny suggest these earliest autographs remained in Weimar when he moved on to take up his next musical post in nearby Cöthen. Often rather conservative in their theorizing, the editors offer an uncharacteristically whimsical hypothesis as to how these autographs actually left Bach’s possession. When  Bach was discharged from his Weimar position “with all due disgrace” in December of 1717 after his arrest and incarceration the previous month, he would not have been allowed to return to the organ in the Weimar palace church he had played on for nearly a decade. Maul and Wollny claim that “any sheet music lying on the organ’s music stand at this point thus would have been beyond his reach.”  The Buxtehude and Reinken manuscripts copied years earlier stand silent at the organ console as Bach scuttles out of town. The manuscripts themselves then embark on nearly three-hundred journey through obscurity and around flames, before emerging again into the light!

What did Bach with this knowledge born of all this assiduous copying and studying? In March of 2008 his previously unknown chorale fantasia on Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält (Where the Lord God does not stand with us) turned up in a Leipzig auction. It is a youthful piece, likely composed not so many years after Bach made the recently unearthed copies. A modern edition and recent recording based on it expand the Bach catalog number 1128.

Not as ambitious as the chorale fantasias of Buxtehude and Reinken that Bach copied, Wo Gott der Herr is nonetheless a piece inspired by them.  Bach’s fantasia is less adventurous in textural and metrical variety, but it is nonetheless full of ambition and experiment. The piece’s brooding exaggerations might be best described as mannerist: angular, often insistent elaborations of the chorale melody; a rhetorical approach that alternates fragmentary utterance with rhapsodic outpourings, some of which traverse the entire compass of the keyboard; unexpected eruptions of pedal virtuosity; interlocking echoes that exploit the architectural expanse of northern organs; and a final cadence of high pathos, its keening swoop of descending scales followed by craggy upward leaps grasping to recover lost heights. The tense drama of what seems to be a closing gesture spawns a serpentine peroration before the arrival on the home key motivates another northern flourish of antic triplets, the first in the entire piece. The restive quality of the piece’s last moments suggest that the ending’s ultimate repose is itself fleeting: the last chord marks only a temporary cessation of Bach’s explorations.

What this most recent addition to Bach’s oeuvre works also shows is that hard work is not an end itself but provided the springboard for the boundless trajectories of a singular imagination, nourished by the past but constantly pushing towards the future.

The facsimile of the earliest Bach autographs.

For Jean-Claude Zehnder’s recording of the autographs:

For the only commercially available recording of the newly discovered Bach chorale fantasia

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu   

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