Sandy Burnett on why Bach is the best

I’ve been a fan of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music for pretty much as long as I can remember, and like a lot of people steeped in classical music, I believe that Bach is the number one – his weighty collection of a thousand-odd pieces is one that I would definitely be taking to my desert island.

But what about the general listener, or someone coming new to this music: why should they listen to Bach? For a few possible ideas, read on:

1. Listen to Bach if you like fiddling with Rubik’s Cubes

Bach was fascinated with solving puzzles, and loved setting himself the challenge of taking a fresh approach to every musical form. The Well-Tempered Klavier Book One is a great example of that. A cumbersome title, I grant you, but it describes a collection of two paired musical pieces, a prelude and a fugue, in every possible key. That’s 24 pieces in all, and while in the hands of a lesser composer the approach might become samey, Bach rings the changes and comes up with brilliant new ideas in every single case. And he does a similar thing in the Goldberg Variations and the Art of Fugue. You can almost imagine Bach in his lab wearing a white coat, looking down a microscope and gently moving quavers and crotchets around. Because there’s something scientific about his approach – after all, this is the man who modestly described the opening movements of his mighty Mass in B Minor as a small example of “the science which I have achieved in musique”.

2. Listen to Bach if you’re interested in cultural history

All great music is a product of its time and place, and to get to grips with where Bach was coming from in his music it’s important to get your head around Lutheranism, and what it meant for music. The leading figure of the Protestant Reformation who lived two centuries before Bach, Luther was a great believer in the power of music and the important role it had in communicating the Christian message – a donum dei, or gift from God, is what he called it. And ever since Johann Sebastian’s great-great-grandfather Veit Bach fled from Catholic Bohemia as a religious refugee and settled in Thuringia, the Bach family had turned out generations of musicians who dedicated their lives to performing and writing Lutheran church music. So Johann Sebastian should be seen in this context: someone who knew it was his role in life to write music, whether it was to be performed during worship or not, for the greater glory of God, or soli Deo gloria.

3. Listen to Bach if you’re looking for spiritual solace

On the other hand, Bach’s music is able to leap beyond the confines of its time and speak to us in our daily lives, a million miles away from Leipzig in the 1720s. In works such as the six suites for solo cello, Bach takes a sequence of Baroque dance forms, each with their own rhythmic characteristics, as his starting point for a series of musical meditations. In their own quiet way they have just as much spiritual power as the stunning mega-works, the St Matthew Passion and St John Passion. Bach orders the notes, spins a web of long musical lines, and creates the illusion that many more instruments are playing than just one. And what makes the suites restful to listen to is that we hear the logic of the music unfolding; somehow Bach reaches into our souls and reassures us that all the wrongs in the world can be put right again.

4. Listen to Bach if you like great tunes

We turn to Bach when we want great music to listen to, and yet the art of writing a great tune is something that he needed to work at. On his creative journey he learned not only from family members, but by copying out music written hundreds of miles away in far-away lands that it would never have entered his head to visit in person. The Venice of Antonio Vivaldi is the best example of that – the virtuosic violinist had a knack for writing stunningly effective concertos, and also for writing melodies that were effortlessly graceful and memorable. From Bach’s central German vantage point, he set up a sort of long-distance correspondence course, copying out and adapting Italian concertos by hand, mixing in their free-flowing style with his own musical language. Throw in elements of French music too, and we get the synthesis of styles that brings us the ear-worms of the Brandenburg Concertos and sacred cantatas, and the haunting solos and choruses of the Mass in B Minor, the last work Bach ever wrote.

Sandy discusses all of the works mentioned above in detail in “The Idler Guide to Bach”, out now. Click here to find out more.

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