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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 co...
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How to Start Your Own Classical Music Collection

I'm often asked by people who are new to classical music for a list of CDs or key symphonies that I think are the best choices to start off a new classical music collection. What are ideal symphonies or works that can help you get started getting to know classical music? Today I'm going to attempt to answer this question, and I'll provide you with a brief list of works that can form the foundation of a great collection of important classical music. Keep in mind that whenever one reviews any type of list like this, invariably one can complain that a given work was left off the list ("where's Chopin? or Mahler?"), or even that some work was left on the list ("ugh, Beethoven's 5th again?"). This list is in no way meant to be exhaustive. It is merely a starting point for the novice listener. If you purchase recordings of these works and listen to each and every one of them, you'll have a great head start on your journey towards getting to know c...
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Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier: Glenn Gould

Today we listen to possibly the most mediocre CD in my entire classical music collection, Glenn Gould's recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. ********************** Glenn Gould, piano Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) The Glenn Gould Edition - Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I The Glenn Gould Edition - Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II Sony Classical, 1971/1993 ********************** It would take a nearly a century for his ideas to catch on, but aspects of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier would eventually come to revolutionize Western music. With this work, Bach promoted a new way of tuning keyboard instruments, using a twelve-tone chromatic system rather than the " meantone " system that predominated at the time. Furthermore, this enormous collection of preludes and fugues heavily influenced composers--including giants like Beethoven and Mozart--for hundreds of years to come, as it established some of the key ground rules for ha...
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