Beneath the surface of Bach’s music is a world of numerology and cunning craft

For those who are not up to reading music at Bach's level, Stephen Malinowski's Musical Animation videos are eye-opening, e.g., from the Musical Offering mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYouXtuk0T8

Toccata and Fugue in Dmin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o

I was directed to Malinowski's work by Edward Tufte (you may be able to figure out why) and feel I should pass it on.

When I was doing my capstone for BSEE back in 1978, I was making an IC that would play music (ooohhh weee, ok it was a long time ago). But I had very limited die space for rom, but I was taking a Music Appreciation class (supposed easy A to fulfill the liberal arts requirement). So I told my Music prof about my project and explained I had very little memory on the chip and could he recommend something.

He got it immediately and he recommended I check into Bach especially Fugues, that's when I found our that scary music they played in movies was Bach Toccata Fugue in D minor. Fugues are perfect because everything repeats just in different keys or paces. So I was able to cram it into 256B of ROM (well enough of it for everyone to get what song it was).

That's when I first fell in love with Bach.

It's pretty crazy when you think about how many of Bach's fugue subjects are long, sprawling, compound lines.

Most counterpoint students would try as hard as possible to make their fugue subjects short, simple and constrained to a very small range. Otherwise they'd risk the overall texture getting too thick and the voices jumping around each other and accidentally creating an incoherent mess.

Meanwhile, Bach's fugue subjects-- like BWV 542-- are playing the lead while accompanying themselves. It's like van Halen's solo in Eruption, except Bach copy/pastes his solos on top of each other so that they help each other asplode together.

Bach is beyond sublime and I am not a poet, my words are insufficient to offer praise of suitable depth. And I wonder, there are so many good writers and poets among us so why, on earth, have we yet to have a blockbuster biography of his, or celebrated film or TV series? We have them all of Beethoven, Mozart, even Mahler and Chopin. Is it because he's just too big to tackle? Jan Swafford--you mastered the other two, where are you?

Do people still read Godel, Escher, Bach?

I really love this analysis of a Bach prelude. It really brings home the complexity that Bach must have deliberately put into the piece.

https://youtu.be/l5XJdHfPc5o

My friend who studies music performance at University had this to say about Bach music, which I always found interesting:

"It's very hard to perceive counterpoint, and there is a limit to how much we can perceive at once. 2 voices is hard and takes practice, 3 voices is even harder, but you can have these flashes where you hear clearly voices playing off one another and its like getting a glimpse into the divine."

They mention how much time he spent on Vivaldi scores, which is really interesting when you listen to Vivaldi's violin sonatas as a Bach fan and hear where Bach added many homages back to Vivaldi in his work.

The Euler of music?

Bach is too funerally for me.