J.S. Bach: Cantatas for Trinity I through VII: The Bach Cantatas, #1

By Hendrik Slegtenhorst

The cantata music of Johann Sebastian Bach delves deeply into the workings of the heart and into the understanding of our wandering soul. 

There is a profound interrelationship among all art, an interrelationship that is parallel to the natural one our bodies dwell in. 

Determining, and thus causing, one’s own thoughts creates one’s own experience of reality; and the more this is so, the more one is free. 

This is not the Western freedom of choice—where to live, what to read, what to select—but a freedom dependent upon awareness of one’s desires and aspirations. 

In pursuing art and its relationship to the persistence of freedom, the author—musician become musicologist, writer, government and heritage executive—continues, even after twenty years with them, to take counsel, more and more, from these cantatas.

It is often difficult for a non-religious thinker in today’s world to penetrate feelingly and with conviction and psychological trust into the works of the religious; and it is equally difficult for the religious to put in abeyance their current beliefs in order to let another’s religious experience, perhaps even one that is antithetical or contrary to their own, enhance and expand their understanding of how the spiritual and the mystical can work in ways that are valid, even if not, to them, theologically supportable or acceptable.

Through these works of Bach, I offer the reader, in a series of eight books, this the first, that discuss all of Bach’s cantatas, a private perspective of reconciliation and resolve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Enlora Press
• Release date: Nov 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781973135609

Hendrik Slegtenhorst

Hendrik Slegtenhorst has published Caravaggio's Dagger (Iguana, Toronto, 2013, 105 pp.), on the pursuit of right action, and over 140 works in established media. He is a professional member of the Canadian Authors’ Association, a full member of the League of Canadian poets, a member and past president of the Federation of British Columbia Writers, a past co-chair of the Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton, a past director of the Alberta Branch of the Canadian Authors' Association, and former registrar of The Banff Centre. A Canadian and Dutch citizen, he lives in Vancouver.