My Life and Thoughts

Truly New York is the city of constant drama.   I had been in this magical city for scarcely 12 hours (8 of which I had spent asleep), when my mother’s iPhone was stolen while she was on the elliptical trainer; then we somehow both ended up getting haircuts. 

So, this will not be a long post—but I did want to share with you a piece of wonderful news for Bach impersonators (brought to my attention by the promising young Germanist, Na’ama Rokem).  Finally, twenty-first-century computer modeling techniques have been put to the task of producing a historically accurate three-dimensional reconstruction of the head of Johann Sebastian Bach.  Not a moment too soon, gentlemen!

It is thanks to anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson, from the University of Dundee in Scotland, that we, along with the Bach-impersonating community, now know the Master of Fugue to have been “a strong-jawed man with a slight underbite, his large head topped with short, silver hair”: 

Rather than use Bach’s actual bones, which are buried at the St. John’s Church [sic.] in Leipzig, Wilkinson worked from a copper replica of Bach’s skull made for a previous reconstruction in 1894… Nonetheless, Wilkinson sees her work as the most realistic rendering of Bach’s appearance to date.

“The science has improved over the last 100 years,” she said. “We have a better understanding of the relation between hard and soft tissue.”

The project was commissioned by the Bach House museum in the central German city of Eisenach…

“Of course, we have a large collection of [Bach's] music,” [museum director Joerg] Hansen said, “but people also want to know what he looked like.”

Am I the only one who hopes that this is just the first in a series of ever-more-accurate reconstructions of the Well-Tempered Klavierist?  To what end has Leipzig’s St. John’s Church (actually I think he is in the Leipzig Thomaskirche)preserved those bones for the past 250 years, if not to assist, in precisely this fashion, the cause of universal human progress? 

That’s how I’m going to put it, at any rate, if I run into any of their representatives next week at the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei.

Tags: academic life, Bach impersonators, Elif's mom, Germany, music

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.