What Bach does is similar to the serene vocal polyphony of the Renaissance master Palestrina, but Bach transfers this into instrumental terms he even makes his voices perform like instruments. Yet syncopation (off-beat rhythm) is present in almost every bar, creating variety and buoyancy. This is underlined by its consistent rhythmic organization, a steady pulse within which different note values are organized with mathematical precision. The integrated wholeness and organic unity of his music gives it an essential rightness, a sense that each note follows logically from the last. Instead of the drama of opposing forces, we experience in Bach a steady state in which musical bounty unfolds, presided over by a rational order that could be likened to divine providence. A single movement in a Bach composition is “about” one thing only once the initial idea has been stated, the rest consists of elaboration or spinning out of that idea in more beautiful and glittering forms. Bach deals with one affect or mood at a time, without the dramatic contrast that we find in later music.
This sense of eternity and divinity in Bach’s music comes partly its unity. In this way Bach’s music expresses a sense of eternity yet also a sense of precisely observed time. A good example is the Christe eleison from the B-minor Mass, where, as the orchestra unfolds its intricately detailed network of sixteenth notes, there is a feeling that the music could spin itself out to infinity. Musicologists speak of his technique of Fortspinnung, the fertile spinning out of small musical motifs into longer phrases. Using the term genius in connection with music emphasizes that music is an expression of mind, a rational ordering of sound, and I would say that Bach’s unique genius consists in the way his music expresses a sense of cosmic order, analogous to Creation. Bach is the composer’s composer par excellence, a model of musical craft and intellectual genius. His work is considered to possess an absolute technical purity, perfection, and finish. A provincial church musician who never traveled outside Germany, he wrote music for his community and for the glory of God, and his immense significance was not recognized until after his death. Bach’s high status has made him seem more rarefied and remote than Mozart or Beethoven, his nearest peers in the composers’ pantheon (and who also recognized Bach as supreme).
It is commonly held that Bach summed up the course of music until his time-the first half of the 18 th century-and that the subsequent history of music stems from him. “To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral to make divine things human and human things divine such is Bach, the greatest and purest moment in music of all time.” -Pablo CasalsĪmong the great creators of Western classical music, Johann Sebastian Bach has long held the most exalted place.
J.s. bach compositions full#
Full of relationships that stimulate the ear and the mind, it expresses the multifold splendor of creation itself. In its complex richness and wholeness his music suggests the unity of faith and reason, science, and imagination. Johann Sebastian Bach shows how mind and soul, spirit and body connect.
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