Bach's Sacred Music in the Post-Secular Age (Jeroen Van Gessel)

Despite ongoing secularization Bach's sacred music is more popular than ever before. How do we negotiate the tension between enjoying this music and struggling to connect with its Christian doctrinal content? Using Habermas's concept of the post-secular as a translation of religious content that can enrich secular society, Jeroen van Gessel takes a closer look at complete recordings of Bach's cantatas, staged and filmed versions of the Passions and efforts to reenact performances from Bach's time. Based on these case studies he argues that contemporary performances of Bach's sacred music move ever further away from the original Christian context of this repertoire, but simultaneously try to hold on to it.

Jeroen van Gessel teaches musicology at State University Groningen and has published about various aspects of musical life in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.