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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

Your message was interesting and I agree with it up to the point where you say we could be trapped by Bach. There is enough depth in Bach to still fascinate us 300 years later, if it doesn't it is a lack on our perception ability.

On the other hand, I wholly agree with innovation in composition - Bach, Mozart and Beethoven (+ many others) excelled in innovation and were sometimes considered downright weird for their time. Even Chopin was considered weird and his music is the easiest to listen to.

As composers, is is/was their duty to be innovative, but us, as listeners, should try to assimilate all periods and styles, and the old ones have a depth of feeling that is rare today.

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perhaps we should be less passive listeners. Bach was just a dude who was great at counterpoint and his job. we aren't trapped by Bach- we are not thinking creatively if we think stylistic hybrids is artistic thinking. Shoot -- Bach was doing that his dang self. The point is-- art isn't something that should be justified by labor. It sure is a lot of labor to write a fuge in counterpoint like Bach did. But only if you are doing the math by hand. Time to get to the end of labor so we can see through it to an actual artistic idea about ourselves. The passive listener might be a great place to start.Bach was not a storyteller. He was into absolute music-- mathematical purity-- a marriage of form and function under a set of rules called counterpoint both laterally and vertically-- the ultimate musical 3d Sudoku meets Rubik's cube meets Go meets chess-- in sonic form. What you hear in it as emotion is what you see in the surface of rippling water, and that is kinda the point of its technical and formal strictness and purity. It is musical math. Math has no emotion-- you do. Bach aimed for this kind of pure dedication to musical math. But it isn't idea. It really isn't. But there is something compelling about that which is concrete giving rise to our own ideas. I guess the poet William Carlos Williams was into the same thing-- bringing out the concrete so something personal can float up from that image- so it can be somehow universal. I guess that is cool. But as a lifelong performer of Bach, This Bach worship is its own religion. They didn't have cameras or computers or safe surgery then. (bach dying of an infection from cateract surgery -- knew nothing of blood type also)But we DO! And I think it is time to move on from the whole "wow, check out that perfect form and counterpoint he did by hand" kind of thing. It is a great player who can give real life to pure musical math, and that is what Bach did for us-- he gave us a nice, sturdy, non-flaky canvass, and we all appreciate it. But time to move beyond the hand labor being recognized as the art in music composition and music performance too (wow, look how in tune! how fast! how well structured in phrase! how expertly varied in timbre and sonic texture! how emotional!) It really isn't a marvel of anything but hours of time spent doing counterpoint or scales or technique. None of us expect to be lauded for our facility at speaking our native language-- or even a foreign language. It is the same thing, I promise. And hopefully, machine learning will show us this sooner rather than later so we can get into some new artistic idea. And yeah, loads of performing musicians disagree with me on this. But hey- loads of peoole think they were abducted by aliens too.

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