From the ambitious Mass in E-flat, op. 5 (1890) through Pax nobiscum (1944), choral music played an ongoing role in Amy Beach’s creative life. The works are stylistically varied, ranging from typical Victorian harmonies and textures in the early works, through sacred anthems and services inspired by Anglican choral traditions during her middle period, and finally to spare, harmonically experimental late works. Her most important secular choral works were written during the years of her marriage, when she was also composing her major instrumental works. After the death of her husband in 1910, she turned increasingly to religion for solace and inspiration, finding a spiritual home in the Episcopal Church. Her association with St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York and its music director, David McKay Williams, proved crucial in shaping the music of her later years. The Canticle of the Sun, op. 123 (1924) was exemplary of the sacred choral works that were her most performed compositions in later years.

As is well known, Telemann was godfather to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who eventually succeeded Telemann in his position at Hamburg. Telemann may have been equally significant for Emanuel’s father Johann Sebastian, serving as a professional role model and providing models for composition. In particular, Telemann’s “Eisenach” cantata Jahrgang of 1710–11 could have been a crucial spur toward Bach’s first essays in the new type of church cantata which he began composing at Weimar circa 1714. Telemann’s later nomination as allgemeiner Capellmeister for the Ernestine Saxon duchies formalized his position as the dominant musical figure in the region while Bach was at Weimar. Musical sources as well as stylistic parallels suggest that, during this formative period, Bach composed vocal as well as instrumental works in emulation of examples by Telemann.

John Butt raises questions about J. S. Bach and his relationship to dance. As Butt describes it, the standard musicological way of thinking about Bach and his music turns on ideas of compositional authority and control, aesthetic abstraction and religiosity, and a music-stylistic complexity that betrays the composer engaged in intricate motivic working-out. Butt steers away from the mental or cerebral sphere towards the physical, the material and the bodily. Drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, he ponders the applicability of the notion of embodiment to Bach’s music, not only to pieces labelled ‘bourée’ or ‘gigue’, but also to music with more oblique dance associations. His chapter suggests that there is no mental sphere without the physical, no music without dance.