Texts and Historically-Informed Translations for the Music of Johann Sebastian Bach
Michael Marissen and Daniel R. Melamed

About the authors

Michael Marissen is the Daniel Underhill Professor Emeritus of Music at Swarthmore College, and holds a B.A. from Calvin College and Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He joined the Swarthmore faculty in 1989 and has also been a visiting professor on the graduate faculties at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.

 

His research has been supported by fellowships from agencies in Canada (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), England (Woolf Institute), Germany (D.A.A.D., and Humboldt Foundation), and the USA (National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Council of Learned Societies).

 

He has written several books on Bach and on Handel: Bach against Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2023), Bach & God (Oxford University Press, 2016), Tainted Glory in Handel's Messiah (Yale University Press, 2014), Bach's Oratorios - The Parallel German-English Texts, with Annotations (Oxford University Press, 2008), Creative Responses to Bach from Mozart to Hindemith (University of Nebraska Press, 1998) [editor], Lutheranism, anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion (Oxford University Press, 1998), An Introduction to Bach Studies (Oxford University Press, 1998) [with Daniel R. Melamed], and The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton University Press, 1995).

 

Other publications include articles in Early Music, Harvard Theological Review, Lutheran Quarterly, Music & Letters, Musical Quarterly, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times.

 

 

Daniel R. Melamed is professor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and has taught at Yale University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Columbia University. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard University, an M.A. in choral music and early music performance from Stanford University, and an A.B. from Harvard.

 

He is the author of Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio (Oxford University Press, 2018), Hearing Bach's Passions (updated paperback Oxford University Press, 2016), and J. S. Bach and the German Motet (Cambridge University Press, 1995). He is co-author (with Michael Marissen) of An Introduction to Bach Studies (Oxford University Press, 1998) and editor of the essay collections Bach Studies 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and J. S. Bach and the Oratorio Tradition (University of Illinois Press, 2011).

 

He has published articles on J. S. Bach, the Bach family, and Mozart opera, has edited musical works from the early seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries, and was an editor of the Journal of Musicology. He is the director of the Bloomington Bach Cantata Project and serves as president of the American Bach Society.