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Comment by bachpug | Hacker News Reader

I used to play the pipe organ before becoming a software engineer. Bach's works are like living inside of a multi-threaded algorithm in real time. You can understand/appreciate a lot of them from a high level without knowing what they really are doing as implementation details. Some people even can play his pieces just with muscle-memory. But if you try to fully understand as a composer what he is doing in any piece, it's this astonishing, unparalleld depth that just keeps giving over years and decades. I just realized something new from a movement of piece I've heard for 15 years now the other day, and this happens regularly.

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> Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.

-- Douglas Adams

The radio station here seems to play Bach nearly exclusively. (By my expectations of classical radio stations) It's wonderful.

I've always thought musical counterpoint and multi-threaded programming have a great number of parallels. Both are fundamentally about setting up independent but interlocking things that need to work together to accomplish a goal without crashing into each other. And I think the first time you experience either done by a real master, it is mind blowing in the same sort of way.

Even more amazing is that Bach (and others as well) could build a fugue while improvising. It's like live coding multi threaded software. Even late in life Bach was given a challenge on the spot to build something from a given set of notes, and the Goldberg Variations are the result (he remembered what he did and wrote it out later). I still love listening to the last thing he ever worked on (a quadruple fugue in the Art Of Fugue) where he died essentially in the middle of writing the piece, the stopping of the music is so stark you feel the death.

I think you might be referring to the Musical Offering. The Goldberg Variations were after the aria in Anna Magdalena's book.

Also, research suggests that the story of Bach dying before finishing the final fugue in Art of Fugue is inaccurate. An analysis of the paper in the extant manuscript, the tools used to draw the staff lines, and the simple realization that there is no way even Bach could have undertaken such a huge work without deriving the final combination of the fugal subjects before hand, all point to a completion in the year 1747 or 1748, but lost. The fragment that survives is likely to be a rough draft.

I wrote my senior paper in undergrad on this.

In fact the last work completed by the master is believed to be the "Et Incarnatus Est" in second (later) half of the B minor mass.

I appreciate the complexity and ingenuity of Bach's compositions, but I can't really enjoy listening to them. I always feel like I'm missing out. So occasionally I try to get into it again, but I fail every time.

edit: talking about the organ works here

It is an acquired taste.

One needs to invest some time into the listening (and preferably: some music appreciation courses/ material) to start picking up the nuances. BTW -- the analogy with IT systems holds here. A layman will not appreciate the beauty behind some of the designs...

My personal experience with Bach as a beginning player is that a piece that sounds just fine becomes really interesting when you start playing it, and then at some point you get the extatic moment of enlightment... even if you still don't know it how Bach got there...

This is probably a style choice thing, which I understand. While I consider Bach the best of the Baroque style (although there are a lot of worthy composers in that era), I personally often find that style a bit rigid (it relied pretty heavily on a well defined set of voice leading rules, fairly strict counterpoint, etc.). Some Bach pieces (and other Baroque composers) are great for my personal tastes nonetheless, but my personal preference for music tends to come from late Romantic to early "modern" era composers.

I can easily see why programmers could get into Bach though, or other pieces that show amazing contrapuntal / strict voice leading type skills in particular -- that type of music skill is very "head oriented" / logic oriented to me.

Amazing that he wasn't even considered that notable a composer until many decades after he died.

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