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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"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.
Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.
Comments
I see in that lack of climax and "feelings" a kind of beauty that no other composer has: Bach's music sounds mostly perfect. Perfect in a super-human sense.
So 80% of the time I prefer listening to more moving human music, but for the other 20%, when I want music above (or despite) humanity, Bach has no rivals at all.
That is a really interesting and counterintuitive point of view, and it makes a lot of sense.
And needless to say it's not terribly fair to expect Bach to make music "as good" as compositions by people who were yet to come and about whom he could have no way of knowing. Thanks for the thoughts.
DK
It’s preposterous and dull.
Why caveman were unable of drawing like Picasso? Therefore cavemen paintings suck!
2.-
Bach is not a romantic musician! Bach is a musician from “aufklärung” completely proud of reason! The Age of Enlightenment has a timespan which approximately runs from Descartes' Discourse on the Method, published in 1637 or the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687 to the French Revolution of 1789 or the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15). Johann Sebastian Bach was born on 31 March 1685 [O.S. 21 March] and died on 28 July 1750 so he lived surrounded by Enlightenment and Luther in the cradle almost infancy of modernity.
3.-.
Besides I don’t think Mendelssohn made a mistake about Bach. The problem is that feelings and passions are not a mere monopoly of romantic visions but a creative force of human nature. Bach is like science. It requires from people something else than just heart and romanticism, Bach asks for guts and brain.
Regards
Your Friendly Physicist
It’s preposterous and dull.
Why caveman were unable of drawing like Picasso? Therefore cavemen paintings suck!
2.-
Bach is not a romantic musician! Bach is a musician from “aufklärung” completely proud of reason! The Age of Enlightenment has a timespan which approximately runs from Descartes' Discourse on the Method, published in 1637 or the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687 to the French Revolution of 1789 or the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15). Johann Sebastian Bach was born on 31 March 1685 [O.S. 21 March] and died on 28 July 1750 so he lived surrounded by Enlightenment and Luther in the cradle almost infancy of modernity.
3.-.
Besides I don’t think Mendelssohn made a mistake about Bach. The problem is that feelings and passions are not a mere monopoly of romantic visions but a creative force of human nature. Bach is like science. It requires from people something else than just heart and romanticism, Bach asks for guts and brain.
Regards
Your Friendly Physicist
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An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have. (Quote by Andy Warhol)
you might find this interesting.watch the whole thing, he addresses the questions that you've posed in your original post..
I do agree that sometimes he can be repetitive and like bernstein says in that video - he can sound like just a mindnumbing motion of 16th notes one after the other... but you are completely ignoring other whole aspects of bach's music.. the cantatas, the mass in b minor, the concertos and what not....
And Bach maybe wasn't pretending to expose feelings in his music, but sometimes experimenting, sometimes trying to show and make you get his idea of God as mathematical perfection and beauty.
But it's important for you to know that people who has feelings and emotions when listening to Bach exist too. I can't see any of the inventions as interchangeable. I do have feelings about any of them and each one sounds different to me than the other. I get he composed so much music using a mathematical method he repeated himself here and there. But i can also see this happening with so many other composers, each composer repeats himself using his particular method. It's just Bach wrote a lot much more music than other composers did, his method was pretty massive.
But even if we're talking about, i dunno, Goldberg variations, which is about a lot of work, logics and mathematic and, as it says variations of the same thing, i do have feelings over any of that pieces, i like some much more than others, some of them i dont like, and i love a few above them all, and we can add of course the different interpretations from different players.
If i listen to, let's say, a bunch of Chopins preludes i've never heard before, they may sound empty and 'all the same' to me. Believe or not, that happens with any kind of music (for example that's the impression that reggae music gives to me, it's for me like listening to the same song over and over). It's not like Chopin sounds all the same (or reggae, maybe) it's just i have to let some time pass, and let my hearing of it matures. It's like with wine i think, except i don't like wine (yet).
The problem is we tend to think of mathematics in the boring and irrelevant way we're taught in school.us "Jill has 80 dollars to raise at a bake sale how much cupcakes must she sell?" Real examples of how math is a universal phenomenon that can't be escaped from is ignored. All the beauty we encounter in life has mathematical significance. This doesn't mean that rigorous procedures in set theory and/or atonal music is necessary or will produce superior music. but if one is aware of the logical nature of beauty while keeping in mind the expressiveness of humanity, it will not endanger the composer's work.
I respect everyone's opinions, and as some on who spends almost every waking moment of my life studying and pondering deeper into music, I feel inclined to offer my help. Because afterall, I firmly believe that a life that doesn't experience Bach has not been lived to the fullest! Thanks for reading.