HOW COULD I FORGET???

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Is it true that cutting down on the number of clicks you make lengthens the life of your mouse?  Anyway, based on that assumption, I'll save readers the trouble of looking up the trouble with Johann Sebastian Bach's birthdate, which has been addressed in detail in earlier posts.

The short version is: before we had Leap Years, we only had Crawl Years --ok, just kidding-- the Leap years prevent the calendar year being a little different from the actual planetary year; if we had a perfect calendar, the shortest day of the year would always fall on the same date, roughly December 20th.  It is the Leap Years (and leap seconds, etc etc) that keep the seasons and the calendar synchronized.  The adjustments started in the time of Julius Ceasar, but even more adjustments were needed just about the time a hundred years before Bach's birth.  The improvements were spearheaded by Rome, so of course Protestant Saxony pointedly ignored the new improved calendar.  As a consequence, the day of J. S. Bach's birth has two different dates according to the different calendars in force at the time.

The official date according to the Baptismal Register is March 21st, though by some accounts it was several weeks past the Spring Equinox.  If J.S.B were to be revived today and immediately asked for his date of birth, that's the date he would have given.  So it seems reasonable to celebrate his life on the 21st day of March every year, AND I MISSED IT!  Ah, woe is me, for I was undid.  (Ach, wehe mir, as Google would have it.)

Recently a documentary about Bach has been released: "Bach and Friends".  It appears to be something on the lines of "Why I like Bach", or "Why you should like Bach", or "Why Bach is The Greatest" by a long list of popular and talented performers who just happen not to be what I might call Bach Insiders: the performers and scholars who seem to have --at the moment-- a lock on Bach analysis and performance practice, Bach biography, and all aspects of musicology related to Bach.  (Which does not at all mean that the collaborators of "Bach & Friends" are not entitled to their opinions, and the right to try to persuade us.)

I'm not sure that we can actually put our finger on why Bach is such a great influence on us.  Music is such an intangible thing to most of us that why some music is good and other music is not so good is beyond our powers of explanation.  All I can say, personally, is that I like Bach.  Why?  The melodies, the harmonies, the counterpoint, the rhythms, the form, the structure, the instrumentation, and most of all, how he fits it all together!  I wish I had the courage to say that it would be wonderful if he were alive today, but it probably wouldn't be; some folks believed he was difficult to get along with (essentially those with whom he did not get along); and he was opinionated, and the manners of the time might have dictated behavior on his part that we would considered obnoxious.  Still, I'm just very pleased that he created such good music, and that so much of it has come down to us.

My approach in this blog has been, at least in terms of my need to increase awareness of music in general, and Bach in particular, to present music available on the Web, which should ideally speak for itself.  Bach has not only created some of the most powerful musical works we have, but also at the same time been instrumental in influencing aesthetics so that his works are indeed the most powerful.  He was an educational force, in other words.

Even Bach lovers violently disagree on why Bach is great.  They disagree on which pieces are great.  They disagree on which pieces are merely lovely and delightful, and which are serious, profound, and deeply moving.  Some would claim that all his work is equally moving and equally entertaining, and others would disagree.

Is is fascinating to conjecture what his reaction would be to our reaction to his work!  On the face of it, he was a humble man, and all his work was for the glory of god.  But the very music speaks both of humility and great pride, and amazingly this does not constitute a paradox!

I apologize for not presenting any new goodies for my readers, but just my barely articulate thoughts of Bach, and my gratitude that his work lives on!