On Sunday, November 5, in the Wachsman Concert Hall, Deerfield music students performed in the third annual Bach Festival to celebrate the legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach. This was the festival’s biggest year with over 20 performers.
Piano Studio Director Yu-Mei Wei created the festival two years ago, first as a mini-festival consisting mostly of her piano students, as well as a couple of musicians and singers. Any student taking private music lessons is eligible to perform in the festival as long as they have a Bach piece ready.
When Ms. Wei explained her inspiration to create the Bach Festival, saying, “We study Bach throughout our career as musicians. But we don’t do enough. So I thought maybe we should do a little festival to encourage students to start to learn Bach.”
Pianist Robbie Hua ’24 added, “[Bach’s] such a classic … Bach has something for everyone.” Hua performed The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I BWV 866 Prelude and Fugue in B Flat Major at the Bach Festival as well as at school meeting.
Reflecting on Bach’s contemporary influence, Hua said, “Bach is such a statement at this point. I like saying that Bach is like the Old Testament … Because everything that you play comes from what he did with imitation, circle of fifths, sequences … What he did was very extraordinary. I don’t think anyone could do what he did nowadays at that level.”
Hua said that Bach is one of the hardest composers to learn because there are many different voices interacting with each other and Bach did not include any tempo or dynamic markings on his pieces. He explained that he worked for hours to learn and memorize his piece leading up to the big performance.
However, audience turnout for the performance was underwhelming. “That’s actually kind of crazy. I mean you know you play a piece for so long. For me I just want to play it well under pressure. But it’s still kind of sad,” Hua said.
In addition, Dasha Lukyanenko ’25 performed an original piece arranged specifically for the festival. Lukyanenko is currently taking Honors Music Composition & Analysis, and her music teacher encouraged her to arrange the piece, from Bach’s Magnificat, Suscepit Israel.
When explaining the arrangement process, Lukyanenko highlighted how she wanted to add a contemporary twist to the classical piece. Originally, Bach used two oboes playing in unison along with three treble singers; however, Lukyanenko’s arrangement featured three treble singers, four string players, and two percussionists.
Lukyanenko said that she was interested in using polyphony, a musical texture where multiple voices each have their own melody but create harmony by interacting with each other. “It’s [polyphony] used a lot in African and South American music,” said Lukyanenko. “It was an experiment for me to play around with classical music and adding more interesting rhythms.”
Ms. Wei added, “I always tell the musicians, being on stage playing through for the audience is part of learning. You don’t always need to have a hundred people cheering for you.”
Hua noted that many people today don’t appreciate classical music. “I think for them it sounds rigid and stiff in comparison to pop where it’s all basically voice,” he said. “They want a good beat, a catchy rhythm, but I think there is that in classical music as well. … Sitting down and having to listen to a pretty repetitive Bach piece is not the same as listening to ‘Hooked on a Feeling.’ It’s not the same kind of listening but I think if people understood the connection between classical music and how it influenced Western Pop culture people would be like, oh wait, that makes more sense.”
Lukyanenko hopes that more students will play short excerpts at School Meeting. She said, “A couple of times people did it and I was surprised to see the entire school sitting there mesmerized by the beauty of the music.”
The Bach festival is set to happen again next year continuing to celebrate the legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach at Deerfield Academy. As Hua said, “All music goes back to Bach, he was such a prolific composer he produced so many things, your bond to see so many things from that influential of a person”.