September 3: Cantatas (Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir; Ton Koopman, conductor)

Bach and the Baumol effect

I spend my days at work maximizing money outcomes. This mindset too easily spills into my personal life, and here’s how screwed up it can get:

When there’s a prix fixe menu at a restaurant, I scan the à la carte prices of the items on the prix fixe and order the most expensive options for the fixed price. That way, I get the most value for my money.

“Why don’t you just order what you want?” my wife once asked.

“But that is what I want.”

Let’s not linger on the time I floated the tax benefits of getting ‘technically married at the courthouse’ a few months ahead of our wedding…

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But no fears: I have a Bach related spin on maladaptive economic behaviors. Let’s talk about the Baumol effect and why it’s surprising that any of us have ever heard live performances of Bach’s choral works.

Imagine Bach’s shoes: fashioned by a single Leipziger cobbler, taking days to fully construct and perhaps costing JSB a week of labor. Three centuries later, large factories churn out tens of thousands of shoes in a day, manned by just a few hundred workers. These can cost consumers as little as 40 minutes of minimum wage labor, and be shipped to your door in a day.

Not Bach’s kicks, but not bad.

Now imagine Bach’s musicians. These singers and instrumentalists developed their skills over a lifetime, along with many hours of preparation and group rehearsal for any particular concert. When it was showtime, a performance of St. Matthew’s Passion took about three hours.

Same as it ever was.

So while everything else in our economy has gotten more efficient, musical training and music making have not and cannot. (And should not!)

This presents an economic problem for the arts, as identified by William Baumol. Compared to Bach’s era, it costs our advanced technological society so much more in foregone output to create a professional musician—one whom we should assume would want to enjoy a 21st century standard of living.

Ticket costs would have to be astronomical to justify any of this. Or… the music itself could have to become prestigious and removed from everyday life, thus justifying subsidies from social climbing philanthropists and big-spending governments. Sort of akin to court or church composers back in Bach’s day. (Yes, we’ve come full circle.)

Given the astronomical absolute and relative costs of performing the cantatas, it’s a small miracle that any of these recordings have been made at all, and I’m lucky to have the opportunity to nitpick conductorial choices of the many Bach cycles here on substack.com.

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Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir recorded the cantatas from 1995-2005, only the second complete set of these works. These are much better than the first set by Harnoncourt and Leonhardt, and not just for the replacement of boy sopranos with women!

Ton is a warm and happy guy in his late 70s, addicted to coffee and in love with the music. These are life goals.

The performances are clear and bright and enjoyable, not dissimilar from Ton’s recordings of the Violin and Harpsichord sonatas. The Dutch seem to be quite good at all this — the YouTube channel of the Netherlands Bach Society is a treasure.

For this post, I listened to BWV 2, 3, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 22, 27, 28, 29, 33, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45, and 47, which are scattered over different volumes of the Koopman set. (This is nearly five hours of music — back in February, I was writing posts that covered just an hour. Bad planning!)

Here are some highlights:

Eagle-eared (?) listeners will hear in the sinfonia of BWV 29 the lute suite of BWV 1006a, one of my all time favorite pieces of anything. Without knowing the lute adaptation, I don’t think I’d have noticed the brilliance of the organ part here, as it’s partially concealed by the orchestra:

Later in BWV 29, Bach draws out the drama and heartache in the soprano aria with (arguably) four false endings (0:20, 0:27, 0:34; 0:37) in one long phrase, just exquisite:

I was especially taken by BWV 2. The opening movement’s chromatic lines somehow sound both 150 years behind and ahead of its time:

Beautiful harmony in BWV 2’s recitative for bass:

Casual beauty to open BWV 3:

Fun chromatics in the second movement of BWV 28:

A pretty song for alto in BWV 33:

The men’s duet BWV 33 has the singers singing in response to each other, and then together, plus an oboe, really nice:

Let’s end with the chorale from BWV 22, with its zippy strings and a staid chorus:

On deck: The Art of Fugue!