Does Bach Suck?

It's not often that you see a classical music-related comment that makes you spit out your coffee:

"Bach sucks because he was not a true composer. A true composer hears the music before he writes it. Bach composed using a mathematical system of numbers which he tought[sic] his students. After his death one of his students published a book “How to write a menuet[sic] with little or no musical knowledge”. Frankly, the result of his work is not musical, the opening bars always sound musical because he copied someone else’s melody, broke it down into numbers and wrote counterpoint from it. Handel did not even like Bach, because Handel wrote music. Anyone who does like Bach does so because they are told to. For a comparison, listen to music by Frescobaldi, Rameau, or Couperin, then listen to Bach. The difference? Something that is musical throughout the entire piece, and something that is musical for 10 seconds and quickly loses interest."

Once I'd finished mopping the coffee off of my laptop, I had to admit I found myself agreeing.

Not with the claim that Bach sucks per se, but that Bach is one of the conundrums of classical music. How can a man who wrote such an impressive mountain of stunning music, who revolutionized Western music's entire conception of music theory, harmony and counterpoint (even to the point of revolutionizing how we tune our intruments), at the same time write music that all sounds the same?

Here's an example. Listen to the twenty-four Preludes and Fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier and try to come up with a single hummable melody or a single memorable motif. And, while you're enduring this exercise, tell me, do these works arouse any emotion in you, other than perhaps a sense of aesthetic beauty at the symmetry and mathematical perfection of the music?

Depending on your memory for music, you might find all twenty-four works interchangeable, even nearly identical. I think I understand now what Glenn Gould was trying to say in the liner notes to his ham-handed recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Yes, they are all beautiful. But it's a robotic beauty, a mathematical beauty. Not one of them has a climactic moment. There are no lulls, no surges, no sweeping emotion. Nothing. The music is hypnotic, but there is not a single component part that stands out as memorable or notable.

Perhaps this is why Bach's music collected dust for centuries, until Mendelssohn and others rescued it from obscurity.

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