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Mercedes Bunz

On living together

Bach’s cantata “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” (I Call to You, Lord Jesus Christ), BWV 177, sounds as though it came from a more orderly world — yet both its text and its setting arose amid confessional unrest. My contribution reads the cantata as a document of its time: Agricola’s hymn text of around 1530 belongs to the early years of the Reformation, whose conflicts shook Europe and in 1597 also led to the division of the canton of Appenzell; Bach’s setting of 1732 dates from the year of the forced emigration of the Salzburg Protestants, whose refugee columns passed through Leipzig and were provided for in the city. From there, the contribution moves to a second variation on “living together” — not only with our neighbours and those of other faiths, but also with digital technology. Unlike a musical instrument, we assume that technology should work without practice. Read alongside Donna Haraway, Bach’s own journey from sceptic of the fortepiano to advocate of it serves as a model for an approach to AI that, socially speaking, is unfortunately still in what I call the “squeaking phase”. But, as the history of BWV 177 shows us, there is also reason for a glimmer of hope that harmony may occur not only in music.

The task of offering you a few words between the two performances of Bach’s cantata “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” is, as you can imagine, a challenge. Why say anything at all, interrupting the beauty of the music, the calm and order of this rule-governed structure? And what should one say? What can stand alongside music that seems to reach us from another, more harmonious world?

Unlike in our real world, outside this church, here we find ourselves in the midst of a composition in which the musical elements stand in a binding relationship to one another; supported by a stable foundation, sometimes contrapuntal, yet connected by closely related keys and a steady rhythmic drive. Unlike in the world outside, the music draws us into a family of forms in which vocal parts and choir combine harmoniously with the instrumental accompaniment. Almost as if the music wanted to tell us: “Living together? It can be done!”

Inspired by the cantata, I would like to make this sentence the theme of my brief interlude — with variations, of course, and in several movements, as befits a cantata. My aim is to take the cantata as the starting point for an excursion through Bach’s own time and, from Bach’s perspective, to look back at ourselves. And as an expert on digital technology, I naturally also want to bring a little of my own field into it.

How is that supposed to work, you are surely wondering now. Some of you may also be thinking: Is that really necessary? Not even in church or during a classical concert can one escape digitalisation or the nonsense of the world. Well, let us allow the music and its circumstances to help us a little in dealing better with the nonsense of our human world.

The text and music of the cantata and the unrest of their own time

That the human world has always been unsettled and shot through with tensions is, of course, nothing new. The text of the cantata itself emerged from this unrest. “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” was written by Johannes Agricola around 1530, a little more than a decade after the beginning of the Reformation, a few years before Agricola finally broke with Luther in 1537.

The unrest was not confined to the two of them; their entire age was one of turmoil. All of Europe was shaken by confessional wars between Protestant and Catholic powers. This is also what the text set to music is about, singing of the “true faith”. Here in Switzerland, too, people had fallen out over it: in 1597, the religious conflict led to the (peaceful) division of the canton of Appenzell. Innerrhoden remained Catholic, while Ausserrhoden became Protestant. This Protestant church here, of course, belonged to the latter. The text therefore reflects a period of unrest.

Interestingly, not only the genesis of the text but also the circumstances of the composition were marked by unrest — an unrest that speaks to us again today. Agricola’s text from 1530 was not obsolete when Bach set it for the second time in 1732; it remained valid. In two senses: first, it had become the appointed hymn of the week — it was the church, not Bach, that had chosen the text. Even so, we can assume that both the composer and the churchgoers heard, through this text, the contemporary events of their own time.

But let us take another step back. When Agricola wrote this text at the beginning of the Reformation, he addressed the true faith, its trials, doubts and despondency, the fear of becoming an object of ridicule, the plea to be able to forgive one’s enemy, and the hope of creating a new life. Two hundred years later, in Bach’s time, the text had acquired new relevance for similar reasons — a relevance that, unfortunately, is stirring among us again today.

Although the Peace of Westphalia had brought the wars of religion to an end, not everyone abided by it. When Bach set the hymn “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ”, adherents of the Protestant faith therefore experienced many things all over again: challenges to their faith, the fear of once more becoming an object of ridicule, and the compulsion to create a new life.

The reason was this: on 31 October 1731, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Leopold Anton von Firmian, had issued an edict that violated the provisions of the Peace of Westphalia; mockingly, the two-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation had deliberately been chosen for its proclamation. The edict ordered non-resident Protestants — servants, maids and day labourers — to leave the region within eight days; by decree, they had to leave children under the age of twelve behind. Property owners, that is, farmers with larger holdings, were given more time, between two and three months. Even so, being forced to sell farms under time pressure amounted in practice to expropriation.

In a way comparable to Trump’s deployment of militarised “ICE troops”, Firmian brought imperial troops into the territory to enforce the edict. Protestants pulled every possible political string in opposition, but the first deadline — eight days — was too short. Thousands of destitute Protestants were sent off in winter towards Protestant cities before Firmian was pressed to moderate his policy and allowed a longer time frame.

Bach’s serene music stands in contrast to the forced emigration from Salzburg in 1731/32, which can be described as the largest confessional expulsion in Central Europe after the Peace of Westphalia. It affected around 20,000 people, roughly one sixth of the population of the prince-archbishopric. After the winter, large columns of refugees set out in spring and summer 1732 — the year in which Bach composed the cantata — for Prussia, which had agreed to receive them. On their way north, they passed through the Protestant stronghold of Leipzig, where Bach lived and worked. There the “exiles” were given food, clothing and donations and honoured in special church services in which St Thomas’s Church also took part.

Bach therefore knew of this situation; his music speaks to it. And unfortunately this situation — wars on the horizon, migration, displacement — is once again ours today. For that reason, neither the music nor the text has lost any of its relevance.

Then as now, we live in a time in which we need to ask and pray for love of our neighbour, including our own capacity for it — most of us here in this church (myself included) probably find ourselves embedded in relatively comfortable lives. We can therefore hope that our own compassion for others in need will be sufficient and will neither falter nor run dry. And that we, who today are connected less by a shared faith than by jointly experienced climate disasters, global economies and worldwide travel, will manage to draw closer together on our planet into a better, more harmonious plurality and diversity, just like the individual instrumental and vocal parts in Bach’s music.

What we hear, then, is not a sound from another, more orderly age, but a sound that combines a deep harmonic bond with pleas, fears and problems and, through the music, brings out faith — or better still, the knowledge — that something better, more beautiful, calmer and more harmonious is possible. The music gives sound to the fact that harmony exists despite everything. And indeed, our own history gives us reason to hope.

The wars of religion were long; they seemed endless and dragged on for centuries, but we overcame them. Catholics and Protestants, once so hostile that harmony could be found only in music, have worked through their differences and learned to place what they have in common ahead of what divides them.

That was once unimaginable — and through the music we should remind ourselves today that it is possible to carry harmony from music into the real world. And more than that: Bach and Bach’s music also model other ways from which we might take inspiration.

On practice and living together with technology

With that I come to the second part of the theme that leapt out at me from Bach’s music and from my research into it: living together. Sitting here and listening to the musicians, we experience a slowing down that is missing from our everyday world, where emails, calls on our mobile phones and loud scrolling through social-media screens pursue us everywhere. Or could we perhaps do as Bach did? Carry harmony into the unrest? Instead of fleeing the digital, could we carry this slowing down into the digital realm?

We often understand technology as the opposite of culture because, unfortunately, we have allowed ourselves to be led into seeing technologies — especially digital technologies — exclusively as economic constructs. There are few ideas about wanting something else from digital technologies, and hardly any approaches that ask how these technologies might be used to bring about social improvements or cultural, societal, perhaps even Christian values. In our post-neoliberal age, all of this is far too rarely at the forefront.

How can we live better with contemporary technology? Far too often we demand that technologies simply work, instead of understanding them as instruments whose use, like that of musical instruments, has to be practised — by us as users and by society as a whole. Yet digital technology, including AI, cannot simply be used like a musical instrument.

Music is one of the fields from which we can learn a great deal about living better with technologies. At its centre, after all, is a technology: the instrument that produces sound. Whether violin, bass, oboe, bassoon or indeed the singing voice, as our excellent soloists and the wonderful choir demonstrate, successful sound production requires practice.

Not only our musicians here but also the parents, children and neighbours among you have had this experience: learning to play the piano, violin or trumpet always begins with the first pitiful attempts.

You have to practise, practise, practise; you have to repeat things in order to hit the right note. Once you can do that, you have to practise playing together so that we as listeners hear exactly this: the music as a virtuoso violin concerto above which the choir floats, as the sounding discourse of an older, deep trust in God. Yet with digital technology we imagine that practice is unnecessary. Why, actually?

And that is precisely what we can learn from this other technology, music: at the beginning, living together rarely works, and never perfectly, but practice makes perfect. An instrument has a whole spectrum of sounds in store, from squeaking to a well-tempered tone. Digital technology is no different in this respect.

We know that one cannot “master” an instrument without effort. We have understood that an instrument can be adjusted, tuned and improved — Bach understood this too. It is well known that Bach was initially sceptical of the fortepiano. When he first tried the hammer-action piano, invented in Italy and replicated by Gottfried Silbermann in 1732 (incidentally, the year in which our cantata was composed), tradition tells us that he was not very impressed.

He criticised the weak sound in the treble and the action for being too heavy. Later, after his visit to Potsdam in 1747 to Frederick the Great, he changed his mind. By then, the improved Silbermann fortepiano evidently convinced him. He even supported Silbermann in selling the new instruments, which were embraced with open arms — or rather, open fingers — by the next generation, including his son Carl Philipp Emanuel; the younger generation still lets its fingers roam new platforms more enthusiastically than the older one today.

Once again, music shows us that living together with technology can work. It can even work very well. Or, to put it in the words of the American philosopher and feminist Donna Haraway (1991:258):

The intense pleasure in skill — in machine skill — is not a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an “it” to be animated, worshipped or dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can take responsibility for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us.

Living together, then: with our neighbour, with those of another faith, with the fortepiano and with digital technologies. We can take a small cue from Bach here — first scepticism, then practice, then acceptance. That gives us reason to hope, even if our society is still in the “squeaking phase” when it comes to the digital technology of AI. For the next half hour, and for the Bach Festival as a whole, we can practise living together in its simplest form by listening together.

For that, we need just one technical skill that we as a society are still working on at the moment — the mute switch on our mobile phones. It worked very well at today’s concert already. Unlike a violin concerto, this skill can be mastered in about two seconds, and I would suggest that we all continue practising it together throughout the Bach Festival. And after that, Bach takes over. Thank you for listening.

Bibliography

Florey, Gerhard 1986. Geschichte der Salzburger Protestanten und ihrer Emigration 1731/32. Böhlau.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity, in: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women by Donna Haraway, 249–259. Routledge.
Kjeldgaard-Pedersen, Steffen 1983. Gesetz, Evangelium und Buße. Theologiegeschichtliche Studien zum Verhältnis zwischen dem jungen Johann Agricola (Eisleben) und Martin Luther. Brill.
Walker, Mack 1997. Der Salzburger Handel: Vertreibung und Errettung der Salzburger Protestanten im 18. Jahrhundert. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Weishaupt, Achilles 2001. «Appenzell (Kanton)», Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/articles/007389/2019-10-25/#HVonderReformationzurLandteilung281597