Earthquakes, Trumpets, and the End of the World: G. Ph. Telemann’s Day of Judgment
Preconcert lecture for Schola Cantorum’s performance of Telemann’s Der Tag des Gerichts with Masaaki Suzuki, condctor.
Markus Rathey is the Robert S. Tangeman Professor in the Practice of Music History. His research interests are music of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, Johann Sebastian Bach, and the relationship between music, religion, and politics during the Enlightenment. His most recent books are Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio: Music, Theology, Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Bach’s Major Vocal Works: Music, Drama, Liturgy (Yale University Press, 2016). Previous 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).
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). He currently serves on the editorial boards of BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute and the Yale Journal for Music and Religion.
He 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.