The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s 2025 Bach Festival and Symposium marked the tenth anniversary of this biennial event. This is a notable achievement for any conference, and particularly for one focused on a single, if canonic, composer. The symposium’s theme, ‘Why Bach?: Navigating 21st Century Scholarship, Performance, and Pedagogy’, was timely and necessary. Johann Sebastian Bach’s presence in twenty-first-century life is not in question; indeed, its absence would be more notable than its presence in locations from counterpoint exams to Halloween cartoons, wedding-procession playlists and lunchtime organ recitals. None the less, the need to justify and preserve Bach scholarship has never been so important as it is now.

Bach scholarship should be justified on its intrinsic merits. But practically speaking, to be relevant, publishable and hireable in the twenty-first-century academic environment, Bach scholars must think and write about both what Bach means in modern society, and how Bach might help us shape modern society differently. The Amherst Bach Symposium broached both questions.

Bach researchers are learning from the twenty-first century in both form and content. The symposium demonstrated this with a broad mixture of methodologies, representation from international scholars, relative gender parity amongst presenters and organizers, and a mixture of new and established voices. In 2025, broadening participation in an academic field is not a political pastime, but a practical necessity to sustain and enliven research and writing. Such changes also come at a cost, and these were not lost on attendees. The conference’s rich diversity of participants meant that scholars had to explain both their research and their methodologies in mere twenty-minute slots; those who chose to speak for longer sacrificed valuable discussion time. Listeners were also challenged to formulate questions and dialogue outside their own lines of research. Interdisciplinary conferences make the Q and A sections especially important for a sense of direction and coherence, even as they make everyone vulnerable in a professional environment that sometimes rewards knowledge over curiosity.

The symposium also demonstrated many places in which Bach scholars can influence twenty-first-century thought. Each paper modelled ways in which studying Bach intersects with modern intellectual issues and methods, and showed how doing so inherently supports the biographical, musical and historical core of Bach scholarship. These intersections were united by an undercurrent of globalism and its seeming discontents toward the Western canon and its accompanying historical narrative. These arose in each of the symposium’s three areas of interest: scholarship, performance and pedagogy.

In the two hundred-plus years since Nicolaus Forkel’s Bach biography – Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke: Für patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst (Leipzig: Hoffmeister und Kühnel, 1802) – scholarship has both thrived and struggled under the sheen of the composer’s universal appeal and cultural authority. Bach’s identity as pan-human genius is well earned but also has an intellectual life of its own. Ernest May (University of Massachusetts Amherst) pointed this out with his description of NASA’s 1977 Voyager Golden Record project. Despite a notable lack of professional musicians on the project’s advisory board, the Golden Record boasts twenty-seven musical tracks meant to represent global humanity. Amongst these, three are works by Bach. Bach certainly cannot be held responsible for what appears to be a vastly disproportionate representation of Germanic music traditions; equally, though, modern scholars do no harm to the man or his music by recognizing the heavy Austro-German bias in modern musicological definitions of both genius and universality.

Bach’s cultural authority underpinned several of the papers. The study by Edward Klorman (McGill University) of the cello suites in nineteenth-century performance practice gave colour to and context for Pablo Casals’ fabled ‘discovery’ of the suites in a Spanish music shop, an event that could only have happened because the suites had already been published and disseminated in the previous decades. My own paper (Ruth Eldredge Thomas, Durham University) explored the English gentleman’s adoption of Bach as a template for Victorian manliness by interpreting Bach through the fashionable cultures of evolutionary science and gendered domesticity. Stephen Crist (Emory University) reported productive discussions on the German origins of modern universalism in his new undergraduate seminar, which mixes a traditional Bach course with the study of his modern global reception.

Even with this close attention, however, the basic Teutonic ethnocentrism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century premises of musical universality remained an elephant in the room. Bach scholars will benefit from giving critical attention to the imperial roots of our philosophical biases, and how they live on in modern society. This is not an invitation to retreat from Western art music or to indulge in white guilt. Rather, taking a more thoughtful philosophical angle on constructions of musical universality invites us to consider the assumptions that underlie historical narratives, and the benefits offered by alternative structures. This often yields surprising results. Walter Frisch (Columbia University) observed a broad historical pattern of people seeking out Bach as solace, from Johannes Brahms to WNYC New York Public Radio’s broadcasting following the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan. Even in cases where Bach’s cultural authority has unequivocally benefited from imperial distribution networks, there can be positive results. Erinn Knyt (University of Massachusetts Amherst) and Bogumila Mika (Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach) provided sociological reports on Bach reception in Ghana and Lower Silesia respectively, demonstrating that Bach’s presence is not only welcome, but is also part and parcel of local culture.

Discussions of performance practice also addressed issues of globalism. Daniel Melamed (Indiana University) noted that most new Bach choral recordings are published on open-platform video-streaming services, rather than being curated by traditional recording labels. His delightful trawl through fifty years’ worth of recordings of Ach wie nichtig, Ach wie flutig (bwv26) suggested that Bach is performed more than ever. The diverse interpretations, choices of instrumentation and performers covered by Melamed all demonstrate that historically informed performance is alive and well, even if it would benefit from a reappraisal of its relationship with authenticity and dependence on war-horse repertoire. Melamed’s choice of a cantata, along with an exposition by Adrian So (Royal Holloway, University of London) on Johann Kuhnau’s choral music, reminded Passion-fatigued performers and listeners that they need not look far for new repertoire.

A reappraisal of performance practice is inextricably linked with Bach’s position in the Western musical canon. Wendy Heller (Princeton University) urged caution before simply relegating Bach to the pedagogical canon. Bach’s orchestral pieces and transcriptions of his music appeared regularly on North American symphony programmes from at least the 1930s until the 1980s. These performances, for many still in living memory, may not chime with the ‘early music’ aesthetic that overwhelms performance of the composer’s music today, but democratizing the Bach aesthetic is yet another way to broaden participation in Bach performance by engaging with its history.

Bach’s dominance of the pedagogical canon, indeed, is also ripe for investigation. His significance to Western music, and its place in musical culture writ large, is difficult to overestimate, but his influence is so broad that it readily masquerades as musical and political neutrality. The survey by Chiara Bertoglio (Conservatorio Ghedini Cuneo) of the required use of the Well-Tempered Clavier in Italian conservatories highlighted how easily Bach can be made to appear politically neutral, even within an Anglo-European conservatory system that was overtly tasked with the development of national identities. Meanwhile, the description by Melanie Lowe (Vanderbilt University) of Rudolf Serkin’s piano rolls and Yo Tomita’s (Queen’s University Belfast) introduction of an AI-powered Bach source-studies project reminded audiences that any technological device is only as unbiased as the information fed into it. Each of these points echoed into the practicalities of teaching Bach: how else do we teach counterpoint? If we spend time on Global Bach, when do our students hear chronological Bach or build a historical narrative on the basis of which they can reasonably understand music history? How do we respond when our students increasingly ask for the ‘life and works’ approach to a class after we’ve spent decades deconstructing, or at least nuancing, music history’s tenacious commitment to great men? What do we do with our own comfort with biography and chronology as guiding principles of our musical history-making and experience?

Perhaps wisely, the symposium attendees contemplated many of these questions rather than offering outright answers. These questions benefit from both philosophical and practical perspectives. We must, for example, answer the zero-sum challenges of syllabus time and research funding. But we must also question the conditions that have placed historical approaches in such unnatural competition with one another.

If the first quarter of the twenty-first century is an indicator of the three quarters to follow, then Bach scholarship is in good hands. Its tradition in biographical and analytical research will continue to be a necessary core, but these methods on their own will be insufficient to affirm the composer’s continued significance for a global society. That said, this symposium demonstrated that Bach’s musical creativity was motivated by the same foundational questions of humanity that motivate us today. Modern humanity is still preoccupied with issues such as the nature of knowledge and the recognition of beauty. We still struggle to differentiate between faith and delusion, and note how credulity can be weaponized in service of imperial greed. We recognize more than ever the potential and limitations of empiricism. We continue to grapple with aesthetics of complexity and simplicity, the mysteries of beauty and our own cultural conditioning towards them both. I look forward to Bach scholars providing leadership on these questions, challenging their own assumptions and actively including those with different presumptions and methodologies. In the end, the responsibilities of twenty-first Bach scholars may indeed be less to prove Bach’s modern relevance than to observe and celebrate it.