These complex virtual acoustic models calibrate for the different reflective qualities of stone and wooden choral galleries, the absence or addition of drapes and tapestries, the depth of the church, and the relative distances between the instrumentalists, Thomaskirche choir, and audience. These data were used to build computer simulations that would recreate the acoustic conditions of Thomaskirche, both as it would have sounded during Bach’s time and in the pre-Reformation era. Omnidirectional speakers allowed them to project sounds onto all surfaces equally in order to record the reverberation, clarity, and the amount of time it takes for sound to decay within the vast Gothic church. To test these theories Boren and his team traveled to Leipzig to gather physical and acoustic measurements of the current Thomaskirche, which has been altered many times since the Baroque period. The Thomaskirche that Bach encountered two centuries later would have had a much greater acoustic clarity, Bagenal believed, creating an ideal stage to showcase Bach’s polyphonic virtuosity. Lutheran Reformers opened sightlines from the congregation to the preacher, changed most of the service from Latin to the vernacular, and added sound-absorbing galleries and drapes, all of which, posited Bagenal, would have reduced reverberation within the church, improving clarity at a time when the intelligibility of the spoken word took on new importance. In 1539, Martin Luther preached religious reform from the Thomaskirche pulpit. The project was inspired in part by theories set forth in 1930 by Hope Bagenal, a pioneer of “architectural acoustics,” who argued that the Protestant Reformation, and the changes it wrought on the interior of the Thomaskirche, played an essential role in shaping Bach’s compositional approach. “If you thought of it in terms of a sound, and you were able to experience it in the way that people in that time experienced it, it would probably be as exciting to you as it was to them.” It was the cutting-edge new music of its day,” argues Boren. Modern students and audiences may relate more to the immediacy and drama of the latest streaming sensation, and Bach’s church music “was not so different, in the way it was heard, and the way there was a market for it. There are only different recordings of this piece of which there is no original recording.” As a result, music scholarship and performance have, of necessity, focused primarily on Bach’s scores. “Bach we don’t think of as a cover version. Most of us associate the music of, say, Elvis or Simon & Garfunkel with single canonical recordings, says Boren. Supported by an NEH grant and state-of-the-art computational methods, an interdisciplinary team led by Boren is digitally reconstructing the soundscape of the eighteenth-century Thomaskirche to determine just how Bach’s music would have sounded to the composer when it was first performed. He was known, for example, to have preferred composing for the Thomaskirche over Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche because he deemed it superior for choral music. As a composer, Bach would have been highly attuned to the effects of a church’s acoustics on the performance of music.

Matthew Passion, and Mass in B Minor, making Thomaskirche arguably one of the most significant performance spaces in the history of Western music.īach, admired in his day as a gifted organist, also freelanced as an organ installation consultant, notes Braxton Boren, an assistant professor of audio technology at American University.

Thomas Church choir, including 265 cantatas, the St. Thomas Church), the late Gothic church where composer Johann Sebastian Bach spent the last 27 years of his life as Thomaskantor and director of church music? It was there that Bach wrote some of his most famous choral pieces for the august St. What then might have been the sounds conjured by the vaults and crevices of Leipzig’s Thomaskirche (or St.

Popular bach compositions