Photo by Jason Smith.
Music graduate student Jacob Reed was recently featured in UChicago News for his "Bach at Bond" concert series, a series of 30 recitals that Reed performed on Bond Chapel's Reneker Organ over the course of eight months. Each concert was accompanied by extensive program notes on Reed's blog, Left on Reed, and the concert series quickly attracted a loyal following of UChicago community members and music lovers each week to the chapel.
Read an excerpt of the article below, and click here to read the full article by Tori Lee.
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Some people cook elaborate meals in their spare time; others make pottery or grow tomatoes. University of Chicago graduate student Jacob Reed plays the complete organ works of composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
For the past year, if you walked by the University of Chicago’s historic Bond Chapel on Monday afternoons, you likely heard the piping of the Reneker Organ, an instrument Reed likens to a wild, untamable beast.
“The Bond Chapel organ, I don’t think can be domesticated,” said Reed, an organ scholar at UChicago pursuing a Ph.D. in music theory and history. “It's so live and shows so much of what you’re doing. It’s still kind of a high-wire act every time I’m playing it.”
Reed curated the Bach at Bond series, which invited Bach lovers and the organ-curious alike to the chapel for a free weekly concert. From October 2023 to this past May, he performed a total of 30 recitals (about 19 hours)—from Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor to arrangements of cuts from obscure cantatas.
“Many accomplished musicians would find it daunting to perform one tenth of what Jacob played, with performances week after week,” said Lawrence Zbikowski, the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Department of Music and Reed’s dissertation advisor. “Some of these pieces are mind-numbingly difficult.”
The series attracted a loyal following of UChicago community members and music lovers each week to the chapel.
Pat Fuller, MBA’84, attended almost every recital, commuting to Hyde Park from her Evanston home. “His enthusiasm is amazing,” Fuller said. “He's playing the music just for his own pleasure and our pleasure. That, for me, is infectious.”
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