Bach is reborn every moment we hear his ancient horn. He is more future than past, more mast than any gold ever cast. More spirit than man, more man than beast when he unleashed for us in full view his musical feast. We drink deeply from the goblet of each delicately crafted motet. Dive with him to explore that underwater cave of the chaconne. Parting ways the violin strikes up the partita, following insane twists and turns the bow shoots you through its show. Riding those “note-arrows” exchange today’s mode for an “upload of tomorrows.”
He lived in his physical time to help define our psychic space in its prime. What he once wrote as newly written has left us wholly smitten. Its hand-inked notes abandon the page to enter the head of our age. As a force of nature its source is known to form a clear picture. He creates an excruciatingly pleasing balance between predictability and surprise, where we witness its sun simultaneously both set and rise. His composition portrays an explosive mixture of cool calmness and rocking reverie. Blended with the instrument and its players, the score seems to unfurl equally from instrument and player as if both had been totally transcended.
Drenched in grief early on from the loss of both his parents, half the children he sired and his first wife, he sought to channel all these sorrows into relief through the strength of belief. He overcame sleeping in the organ loft with groupies, hard drinking and dueling, with a work ethic nothing less than grueling. Still with no consistent backer his creative output made Hercules look like a slacker.
His prodigious output includes over 200 cantatas, masses, passions, songs, organ works, keyboard compositions, lute pieces, chamber music, orchestral pieces, canons, etc…enough scores to fill dozens of volumes. As the Godfather of Music he has influenced generations of composers and musicians. His vision is both actual and fractal catapulting us into that fourth dimension. Often referred to as expanding or evolving symmetry, its geometry is the study of structures in which the forms of any small piece mirrors the form of the overall structure seen as a whole.
His world is an odd pairing of the angelic with the psychedelic. It is both a future epic and ancient relic. His harpsichord wizardry can turn the most hardened atheist into a true believer of that offbeat belief of “sound colorist.” His choice of weapons for a duel was always the keyboard’s unique voice. His freethinking ways of continually aspiring beyond his station helped to found a bizarre “new nation” whose cornerstone is sound. Its coastline exhibited that same general appearance when viewed afar as a portion of an organ piece that turned him into a star.
He was so inventive and humorous that he once wrote a mini comic opera called the “Coffee Cantata,” concerned wholly with the main character’s addiction to coffee. You could say all his music is caffeinated and especially brewed to awaken all—existing “members” as well as those still estranged and alienated.