PMTNM Reader's Digest

Program Notes That Write Themselves

Recital season lives and dies on repertoire, and on whether a student can say something true about the piece they are about to play. The Bach Cantatas Website is a bottomless, free archive of Bach's music paired with texts, translations, and scholarly commentary, and it is where I send students to turn 'I'm playing a Bach piece' into a sentence a listener will remember. Even for pianists reaching well outside the cantatas, the context here, the church calendar, the poetry, the performer histories, is the kind of detail that makes a young musician sound like they belong to the music.