On Rosalyn Tureck’s Legacy for Bach Performance in the 21st century

J.S. Bach’s musical legacy is astonishingly rich. We have been responding to his music for more than 300-years.

The American keyboardist Rosalyn Tureck (1913-2003) devoted more than six decades to performing, researching, teaching, and writing about Bach’s works, as well as music and arts in general.

She has left an abundant heritage on performance practice and scholarship for those who seek to understand, perform, and communicate Bach’s music. This heritage remains mostly unrevealed.

Bringing together efforts from music performance, musicology, aesthetic, social studies, new music technologies, and composition, the TureckBachXXI project aims at gathering, exploring, and questioning Tureck’s ideas for Bach performance in the aesthetic, cultural, social, and technological mindset of the 21st century.

The main outcome of this project will be a commented edition of Rosalyn Tureck’s ideas and findings on concepts, performance practices and techniques, and stylistic prospects involved in the realization of Bach’s music, and its connections with the music of today.

This will be useful not only to artist performers, but also to musicologists, composers, and all enthusiasts interested in Bach’s legacy, as well as for the evolution of music and the arts.

In addition, this project investigates musicological/performance questions opened by Rosalyn Tureck that will bring new perspectives to performers as well as to researchers and Bach enthusiasts.

Finally, the project questions the vitality and the longevity of a music of a past era in the technological, cultural, aesthetic, and social environment of a new music era.

This will result in particular in a series of interviews with composers of today nourished with questions raised by Rosalyn Tureck. Testimonies about Rosalyn Tureck from the remaining people who worked with her will also be collected. This interdisciplinary project opens new perspectives in the fields of Bach studies and music performance.