Simon Hewitt Jones - The Violin Blog

Mar

2

What’s In A Face?

Filed Under Mysterious Music, World Culture | 

Bach’s face has apparently been reconstructed digitally by experts with access to his bones. The result was nothing like the well-known portraits of old:

How does that affect your preconception of Bach? So famous are the painted images of the composer, that many of us think of an austere man in a wig just as soon as we think of the word ‘Bach’.

Which isn’t necessarily how Bach really was.

Until Pablo Casals came along, many of those who played and listened to Bach were still tied to the mistaken idea that he was ‘not an emotional composer’; he was seen to represent a ’sacrosact’ musical perfection, and any reading that was free-spirited, unpredictable, or infused with interpretative vitality, would be a disgraceful defacement.

What makes an image iconic? What are the dangers when things become iconic in a misrepresentative way?

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080228/ten-uk-germany-bach-6ea0823.html

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