What is it about Baroque music thats so inspirational?
MM: It’s vast. If you listen to Bach’s Mass in B minor the profundity and the range is almost incomprehensible to me. It’s miraculous! You can approach it as math if you need to, or just as emotion and they’re both right; they both work. Neither one is the [sole] answer, but, like in a lot of Bach and Handel and Telemann through the codification in that period of what symbolizes what in [terms of] keys, in modes, in tempo, in rhythm, in just the melodic shape of up and down there’s so much revealed that you don’t even have to know about it. You know when you hear it. It wasn’t just hemorrhoids that made people stand up during the “Hallelujah” chorus in Messiah. It’s also like, How can you possibly respond to this? You stand up because you can’t ascend to heaven [on the spot]. If I’m not working on a piece of music that I’m choreographing, I listen to Bach and the cantatas, specifically. There are things in Bach where the motifs are so small or simple that it’s not even a tune or a melo
What is it about Baroque music thats so inspirational?