The Friday Fillip: My Big Bach Theory

Bach is the best.

Better than all the other big B’s — Buxtehude, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Bizet, Berlioz. . . . Better even than the M’s — Mozart, Mendelssohn, Mahler . . .

Foolish thing to say, though: that one composer at that level of excellence is “better” than another. Surely “different” is the right word. But for me, Johann Sebastian is the bees knees, il miglior fabbro, Napoleon brandy, the MVP.

Now I know that baroque music is not to everyone’s taste: it’s been called “sewing-machine music” because of the underlying ricky-ticky, rum-tum-tum lines that keep the music propelling forward. But not all baroque music is akin to clockwork — and certainly not the 1,100 works of the master, which spanned a wide variety of forms from chorales and Lutheran hymns, through canons, fugues, partitas and on to motets. The British Library has this to say by way of overview:

[His] is also ‘absolute music’ – in other words, it often seems to exist apart from any particular instrument, as a constructional idea by itself; consequently the same piece can work as effectively on a piano as a guitar, as a choral work or an orchestral arrangement.

And that is high praise indeed in my book.

Astonishingly, he was not popular in his day, considered “old fashioned,” second best as a court composer to his friend Telemann; he was, however, a virtuoso organist and harpsichordist, which, as with piano virtuosi Mozart and Beethoven, got him jobs that he might not otherwise have had.

All that aside, let’s listen to some Bach, which is the whole point — and counterpoint. And to do that we’re luck enough to have a new website from Netherlands styled All of Bach. They post a free recording each Friday of one of Bach’s works, as they work their way through (by their count) all 1,080 works. So if you’ve got an app that lets you record from your computer system, you can build a wonderful library here. More, you can listen to casual but intelligent discussions of the works and aspects of the performance. At the moment there are six works-cum-discussion available, and it seems likely that they’ll maintain that size of a floating backlog as they play on.

There’s variety here already: one of the Well-Tempered Clavier pieces, an organ concerto, a toccata and fugue, and more. And should you get into it at all, you might like to go on over to the BBC’s Bach site, where you’ll find 20 videos about the man, his life and his music.

Bach’s a river that you can dip into or immerse yourself in as you choose: refreshing either way.