A good time to play Bach
A personal report on house concert near Hobart by Gotthard Killian on cello for a Bach cello suite and Danae Killian for Bach’s Goldberg Variations:
I was buoyed up by joy in many places, finding the complexities like tiny hallways down which I wandered – by force of the music and, of course, choosing to follow that force. So many notes and phrases were unexpected, taking me into new places that I had not forseen. This live music was most exhilarating. What remains with me are not notes or tones – there were too many of them – but rather intervals, no, more accurately the feeling of intervals, and of certain places along the route where I knew that I was being led not to the obvious but to the new. Afterwards, Danae mentioned to me that Bach cannot be seen as a child of his time, being even more modern than today, and I could see in this music why she would say this. I found out also that she plays the Goldberg variations every morning upon waking! When at the very end of the Goldberg variations, Gotthard joined with his cello, it gave a most touching picture of conversation, and it helped to pull me back from the hallways in the cosmos – it must have been the Saturn sphere – indeed, the Saturn of the concert lay exactly square to the Neptune at Bach’s death, and the Saturn at Bach’s death lay exactly square to the Neptune of the concert, showing a similarity of outer planets reaching into the Saturn sphere. Bach’s Death-Mercury was exactly opposite to the place of Mercury in the heavens at the concert, indicating a line of communication open to portray what Bach intended in his life. Overseeing all was the location of Jupiter at Bach’s death, in the middle of the Ram, exactly overhead, at the same location as the Sun at the Resurrection. From this we note themes, and opportunities, for a transmission through composer and through musician of spiritual realities.