Music, Ritual, and Bach: Thinking Beyond the Divide between Sacred and Secular
Professor Rathey studied musicology, Protestant theology, and German in Bethel and Münster. He taught at the University of Mainz and the University of Leipzig and was a research fellow at the Bach-Archiv, Leipzig, before joining the Yale faculty in 2003. His research interests are music of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, Johann Sebastian Bach, and the relationship among music, religion, and politics during the Enlightenment. Recent publications include the books Johann Rudolph Ahle (1625–1673): Lebensweg und Schaffen (Eisenach, 1999), an edition of Johann Georg Ahle’s Music Theoretical Writings (Hildesheim, 2007, 2nd edition 2008), and Kommunikation und Diskurs: Die Bürgerkapitänsmusiken Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs(Hildesheim, 2009). His most recent books are a study of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (Oxford University Press 2016) and a book on Bach’s Major Vocal Works (Yale University Press 2016).
He has contributed articles to Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the Laaber Lexikon der Kirchenmusik, and the handbook for the new German Hymnal (Liederkunde zum Evangelischen Gesangbuch). He has published numerous articles on music by Bach and his contemporaries in scholarly journals such as Eighteenth-Century Music, Early Music History, Bach-Jahrbuch, and Schütz-Jahrbuch. Professor Rathey is president of the American Bach Society and past president of the Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship (2009–2011); currently he serves on the editorial boards for BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute and the Yale Journal for Music and Religion.