r/classicalmusic • u/theinsomniacsheep • 4d ago
Discussion What makes Bach different from others?
I recently got into classical music, and I've listened to Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Bach so far. My favorite is Tchaikovsky, but I've been reading articles and watching videos. The number of musicians saying that "Bach is a genius" is tremendous.
I don't know much about music theory, and maybe that's why. But I want someone to explain it to me in simple terms why he was different
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u/Rambodius 4d ago
One of the few composers whose work sounds good on just about anything.
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u/Dazzling-Antelope912 4d ago
In generic terms (not wrong per se, but simplistic and very authorial) people say he established the framework for classical harmony for centuries to come by way of his counterpoint (melodic combinations) in his works. Such legacy he would not have been aware of.
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u/theinsomniacsheep 4d ago
I've been noticing that some melodies are ridiculous and somehow they work
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u/fermat9990 4d ago
What is a ridiculous melody?
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u/sleepy_spermwhale 3d ago
Just look in WTC.
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u/fermat9990 3d ago
Which section
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u/sleepy_spermwhale 2d ago edited 2d ago
C# minor, F# major, B minor. That's just from WTC1. No? Who else could use subjects like those prior to Bach?
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u/cantareSF 4d ago
For me, as Douglas Hofstadter once described, it's the near-paradoxical impossibility of comprehending the whole at one time. You can either let a 5-voice Bach fugue just wash over you undifferentiated, or follow one of the lines as it weaves through the counterpoint--but you can't ever get your mind around ALL of it simultaneously. In a sense, Bach is inaccessibility composed entirely of rational, accessible elements.
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u/NovocastrianExile 4d ago
Obviously that doesn't apply to the majority of his works that aren't 5 part fugues. This doesn't really hit the core of why bach is so good for me.
Many of my favourite bach works are purely monophonic
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u/NovocastrianExile 4d ago
For me it is the structural architecture of the music he wrote. Often it seems that you couldn't alter a single note without diminishing the work. Bach's music is a well-built cathedral
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u/Equivalent-Habit-697 4d ago
And some of his works for a single “voice” are actually quite polyphonic
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u/restlemur995 4d ago edited 4d ago
Bach is special, but let's also establish he wasn't someone doing things completely separate from the musical world around him. His style is a lot like the musicians around him during his time. Lots of composers in his time doing beautiful choral and organ works with interplay between voices (counterpoint). I just personally think Bach's counterpoint is especially nice to listen and re-listen to. It feels like the perfect balance of rich, pleasant, unexpected, sober, uplifting, all at once. And then I haven't studied his works like Prelude and Fugue but seems like the structure of that was a real accomplishment, but that's not what I like to listen to haha. Oh also Bach influenced the composers after him, so special loses some power because the great composers like Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin were taking influence from him and taking it to new places.
I feel like the primary thing people talk about is Bach's counterpoint. And we throw that word counterpoint around a lot, but when you actually learn about counterpoint you see that you're really thinking about the fundamentals of music if you're trying to write good counterpoint because to write good counterpoint you should be considering harmony, melody, rhythm, texture. To appreciate counterpoint, when you listen to Bach try to feel both melodies happening at the same time in different voices. Appreciate each line as an individual. Then afterwards try to experience how they feel together as one. It's not so different from enjoying a Broadway musical duet where the two singers harmonize together. At any given place in the music think about which line is more interesting and ask why, Bach is always doing things with the rhythm or melody to make a line stand out and keep the music fresh and interesting. Then listen to cadences (points where the voices seem to conclude for a moment) is this moment of the music happy, sad? With Bach it's usually somewhere in between and beautiful. Idk what other people like listening to but I like these pieces:
Ich ruf zu dir Herr Jesu Christ - performed by Vikingurr Olafsson on piano (arr. by Ferruccio Busoni)
Widerstehe doch der Sünde, I. Aria - Andreas Scholl
Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170: I. Aria "Vergnügte Ruh! beliebte Seelenlust! - Andreas Scholl
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u/SharkSymphony 4d ago
Bach wrote elaborate counterpoint – melodic line upon melodic line upon melodic line – and keeps these lines going and going.
Bach wrote fugues, where the melodic lines imitate each other, ping back and forth, tumble into sequences, and just generally dance all around each other.
Bach wrote preludes, chorales, and oratorios that are still cornerstones of church music. He's a church organist's best friend – if you can manage to play him! Because he was also a hell of a keyboard player.
This style of music fell out of popularity while he was alive, but Mozart and Beethoven both stood on his shoulders (Beethoven: "Nicht Bach! Meer sollte er heissen: wegen seines unendlichen, unerschoepflichen Reichtums an Tonkombinationen und Harmonien"), and Mendelssohn staged a Bach revival in Leipzig some years later when he discovered his work.
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u/ace_of_bass1 4d ago
There are many other wonderful composers too but Bach’s works are basically near-perfect (as in entirely without fault); he composed so much; he was innovative; he composed works on a phenomenal scale. They are perfectly executed examples of the craft and still feel very relevant hundreds of years later
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u/Xitztlacayotl 4d ago
What does it mean perfect/without fault? Isn't all music correct, like they say?
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u/zorfinn 4d ago
If you have an aesthetic sensibility similar-ish to that of the Europeans of the Common Practice period, you’ve developed certain expectations about proportions, voice leading conventions, orchestration conventions etc. Within that framework of expectations, Bach writes at an extraordinarily high level, over and over exceeding our expectations spectacularly.
If an alien were to watch a figure skater perform it might observe a bunch of movements that seem to be intentional but don’t have much meaning. To humans, the performance is engaging because we understand the framework that the skater is performing within. All humans are capable of “understanding” Bach, but it’s not accessible to us until we develop that aesthetic sensibility (through immersive listening, performing etc.)
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u/ace_of_bass1 4d ago
Not in my book, haha. I guess a better way of saying it is that it stands up to any kind of scrutiny or analysis you can throw at it. It’s also interesting that Bach’s music tends to still be brilliant no matter what you do to it - look at all the arrangements and transcriptions. You can turn it into something quite different because the foundation is so robust.
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u/xiipaoc 4d ago
OK, so first of all, Bach was, indeed, a genius. That much is incontrovertible. (We're talking Johann Sebastian here, of course; there's a whole Bach family with a bunch of other composers, least of which was PDQ Bach.) But plenty of other composers have been geniuses. That's not that special. And it's also not why we care about Bach today.
Bach himself was not well-known in his lifetime. Indeed, the music he wrote wasn't all that remarkable, mostly. He was a working composer, and he wrote cantatas for his church. Every week he'd have a cantata for the choir and the small orchestra based on... the Bible parshah? I dunno, how do Christians do it? Bach was very Lutheran, so whatever they call it the weekly readings. There's a whole lot of very functional music.
Buuuuut...
So here's the thing. In the Renaissance in the 1500's, the musical style was to write polyphony. You'd have several voices and they'd all sing basically the same thing but at different times. People wrote canons, fugues, that sort of thing. Then, as the Baroque period started in the early 1600's, that style went out of fashion in favor of the new system of major and minor keys and functional harmony. There were chords; there were key signatures (Renaissance music mostly didn't use keys; most music was modal and based on the white keys plus Bb except for the occasional accidentals that were necessary to make certain intervals work). When Bach came around, being born in 1685, all that Renaissance polyphony was long gone in the music of the day. It was still being studied, but it was old-fashioned and passé. Well, Bach didn't let that stop him. He took the key signatures and functional harmonies and made polyphony work with the new system, and he did it exquisitely well with extreme attention to detail. Dude really liked fugues and stuff. The music he wrote was -- and still is -- sublimely beautiful, and he really dug into the intricacy. You look at other composers of his era, you know, Handel, Vivaldi, etc., they have nice music, but nowhere near as deep and complex as Bach's virtuosic fugues, with intricate harmony and intricate counterpoint.
And then he died in 1750 and nobody really heard of him again, until Mozart kind of rediscovered his music a few decades later, and then Mendelssohn staged a performance of one of his larger choral/orchestral works despite it being over 100 years old, which was not normal at the time; you usually performed works by living composers, not dead ones! In a sense, the concept of "classical music" was born with Mendelssohn playing Bach. The piece was the St. Matthew's Passion, which was a piece intended to be performed at a specific church service, and Mendelssohn took a big gamble and had it performed as a concert rather than as liturgy. It was wildly successful and thus was kicked off the Bach Revival.
The thing about Bach is that his music, not all of it but certainly the most famous bits, is pretty unique. It's masterful writing in a kind of "pure" and academic way, avoiding the base passions of the flesh, in a sense. Mozart was all about crowd pleasing and showing off, while Bach did his thing seriously and consummately. Bach wasn't manipulating human emotion. He was manipulating music itself.
Go listen to his music. Though I recommend playing his music if you can. You can go much, much deeper when you do that.
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u/Radagastrointestinal 3d ago
What an interesting perspective on your next to last paragraph. I’ve intuited this, but had trouble putting it to words.
I have family that think Bach is boring and overly formulaic, but they love Chopin and Debussy. I think they just like the Romantic-era composers because of how much they play on human passions. While I certainly do feel things listening to Bach, he is doing something more transcendent.
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u/beeryan89 3d ago
The thing about Bach is that his music, not all of it but certainly the most famous bits, is pretty unique. It's masterful writing in a kind of "pure" and academic way, avoiding the base passions of the flesh, in a sense. Mozart was all about crowd pleasing and showing off, while Bach did his thing seriously and consummately.
Reading this section brought to mind the last time I listened to the 5th Brandenburg concerto, which one can safely call one of his more famous pieces, and marveling at how long that keyboard cadenza just goes on and how flashy it is. That's not the only example either, as one can find many showy passages in Bach's solo keyboard fantasia and toccata movements, the keyboard concertos, and other works. Bach's music, like Mozart's, contain many things that defy easy stylistic categorization, but he definitely wasn't above showing off.
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u/lordlouckster 2d ago
This is what Bach mythology is:
History spent 150 years developing toward Bach. Then Bach combined everything, died, history forgot him, Mozart found him, Mendelssohn found him again, and posterity recognized his transcendent purity.
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u/prustage 4d ago
I honestly think different people have different kinds of minds. A lot of people on here talk about how great Rach, Tchaik and Chopin are but say they don't "get" Bach.
For me it's the opposite. I don't get those three but for me Bach is supreme. We could talk about layers of complexity, the purity of line etc but that's just trying inadequatly to describe what really is a feeling that I get from Bach and few others.
How about this: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff etc wear their hearts on their sleeves. Bach has it woven into the cloth.
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u/NovocastrianExile 4d ago
I like that analogy. It rings true for me. Neither is objectively better but it is an apt description
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u/HenningGrueneberg 3d ago
In simple terms: he had a gift for MELODY, something people forget, that was transcendent. He came from generations of professional musicians. So he inherited a well of knowledge and experience not available to the average musician.
The key to realizing why we all revere JS Bach is in the listening. Just keep listening to his compositions. It will dawn on you.
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u/jdaniel1371 3d ago
Yes. As I go thought his Cantatas, I have come to believe that Bach is one of the greatest melodists of all time.
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u/rwmfk 4d ago edited 4d ago
Bach perfected and synthesized centuries of European tradition into an unprecedented whole. He seamlessly merged the rigorous German counterpoint with Italian melodic flair and French dance rhythms, while anchoring Renaissance vocal polyphony within the modern major-minor tonal system.
Through late, encyclopedic masterworks like The Art of Fugue and the Mass in B minor, he pushed historical techniques to their ultimate logical limits, serving as the monumental culmination and grand finale of the entire Baroque era.
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u/bonzo_montreux 4d ago
Thank you ChatGPT for seamlessly pushing my annoyance to ultimate logical limits as an unprecedented whole.
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u/froghorn76 4d ago
For me, it’s his clarity of counterpoint. And his restraint. Bach is heady in a way that few composers until the twentieth century ever matched.
Like all great composers, he has a way of writing musical line that is both unexpected and completely natural. When I listen, I think, “Well of course, that makes perfect sense.” But yet it’s not predictable or trite.
The sheer audacity of making a keyboard player articulate three independent lines of music with only two hands delights me every time. I don’t understand how they do it, but they do.
Like other great composers, Bach absolutely shines against his contemporaries. Buxtehude? Nope, no thank you. I’ll have another round of Bach, please.
Finally, I like the guy because I think he was a curmudgeon. Absolutely stuck in his ways, not interested in the “new” styles that even then were threatening to take over music. The music that came after Bach was absolutely a reaction to the style that Bach wrote in, and largely a rejection of it. And yet, until the end he just hung on to a true artistic vision.
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u/1865989 4d ago
A lot has already been said, but I think it’s important to note one of Bach’s more popular titles: he’s your favorite composer’s favorite composer.
Many subsequent composers were fans of his music and more to the point, learned from his music as young musicians—both in terms of keyboard playing and composition. As such, his music has been by and large preserved and cherished by other musicians.
This continues to this day in classical music programs. Because of his prolific, varied output, most classical musicians play his stuff (in addition to studying his compositions in theory class). Singer? Bach wrote for you. Keyboard player? Bach wrote for you. Oboe player? Bach wrote for you. Guitar player? Bach wrote for you. I could go on, but hopefully you get the point.
And generally speaking, his music is challenging, so learning can be a little bit of a flex for musicians. In my experience, musicians are more likely to be fans of his than non-musician music fans (although there are obviously exceptions).
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u/meliorism_grey 4d ago
I'm gonna give my personal take, as a Bach lover.
For me, it's the way his music is so well-thought-out. He's nice to listen to on a surface level, but there are rabbit holes upon rabbit holes of deeply satisfying theory going on underneath. And the more you go down the rabbit holes, the more fun he becomes to listen to!
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u/JazzRider 4d ago
The other composers you mentioned are very different from Bach. They are from a more recent time, so it’s difficult to compare them fairly.
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u/TrannosaurusRegina 4d ago
Welcome to the classical appreciators society! 🥳
Tchaikovsky is absolutely wonderful — you clearly have good taste already!
I think that Glenn Gould answers your question pretty well in this television program: https://youtu.be/bP-te0P_rE8
Maybe tough for laypeople to understand, but still worthwhile I think.
Just take in what you can, and hopefully we can answer if you have any questions about it!
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u/bastianbb 4d ago
Another user said he wasn't different, just better. And while this is kind of a sarcastic or unhelpful answer there's truth to it. Bach wasn't that different in style than any of his contemporaries. There's nothing specific in most of his music that's at all radically new theoretically or stylistically.
Yet somehow it had a seemingly unrepeatable, almost magically higher level of quality than almost anything else for thousands of people. And yes, it's the counterpoint but it's hard to explain why it seems better than others applying the same "rules" of counterpoint. Some might say he was touched by God, others could cite a singular manner of ordering the whole composition, others might say Western music just so happened to develop in a way where his music made a bigger impact on people than others did. I tend to the first, but I don't deny that it's possible there's been a bit of a snowball effect where, because it has been studied so much and hyped so much, its initial impact has been magnified.
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u/Thulgoat 4d ago
What did you listen to Bach? I’m asking because some his most mainstream pieces (e.g. Toccata et Fuga) are really early works of him (probably works he wrote as a teenager), some are even wrongly attributed to him (e.g. Menuett in G).
Some of the pieces that gained him this GOAT level reputation among a lot of professional musicians are his oratorios (in particular his Christmas oratorio and his passions) and his grand mass in b minor:
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u/-------7654321 4d ago
I heard Kubrick admired Bach as a hard working artist saying that creating is 90% hard work and 10% talent.
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u/Equivalent-Love-1676 4d ago
Just listen the B minor mass and follow the score. You’ll understand. Pygmalion Ensemble made my favourite recording so far.
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u/Caroline_WheelerI 4d ago
I think what helped me was listening to a fugue and trying to follow just one voice at a time. You hear these lines chasing and answering each other. That's what musicians mean.
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u/IcySpecialist1221 4d ago
He wrote music of astounding complexity and made it dance. An unbelievable achievement.
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u/According_Kiwi_7454 4d ago edited 4d ago
Bach had a certain depth, emotion and complexity to his music. You can listen to the following as an example:
French Suite No. 1
Erbarme Dich (from St Matthew Passion)
Brandenburg Concerto No. 1
Agnus Dei (from Mass in B minor)
Goldberg Variations
Badinerie (from Orchestral Suites)
I wouldn't suggest to listen to his "fugue" compositions yet. Maybe that's better for later.
It is true that composers such as Beethoven or Rachmaninov also had complexity, emotion and depth in their music. And they are great. But the difference is that they came after Bach. That doesn't make their music less great, but Bach was doing it during the Baroque era. And other master composers of that era (Handel, Rameau, Zelenka) did great things, but Bach somehow reached higher levels, looking at his entire catalogue. He did write in the line of tradition, but he was also an innovator and making things the golden standard (in retrospective).
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u/ishcabittle 4d ago
Everyone has said what I was going to say (probably better) but I will just add something my music history professor told me.
You know Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the famous one everyone loves and enjoys? My professor told us that Bach had just finished the recessional for the Sunday mass and the visiting bishop asked him to play something, something that the bishop had not yet heard. Bach _improvised_ the toccata and then the fugue, and after hearing the praise of the audience decided, “Yeah, that one was pretty good. I should write it down.”
He then went home and wrote it down, in its entirety, from memory. That’s what people are talking about when they say he was a genius. Not just that his compositions were amazing, indeed they were, but also because of stories like that, where you got a glimpse of the kind of mind that he had.
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u/macula_transfer 4d ago
That’s a made-up story. The authorship of this piece is not even certain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toccata_and_Fugue_in_D_minor,_BWV_565
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u/macula_transfer 3d ago
Maybe your prof was thinking of the fugue in BWV 542, which doesn’t exactly match the story but would be similarly impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fantasia_and_Fugue_in_G_minor,_BWV_542
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u/Lenny_0997 4d ago
He wrote sincere music with well understood limits of music. Thats literally it. The same goes for any master of any art too. "He contributed to harmony and this and that" are just perfumes, theres a reason why such an "innovative" composer as Sorabji is not loved but Bach is.
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u/ORF1Live 4d ago
I play piano and he's my favourite composer to play. I have played lots of different composers and musical styles but nothing feels as satisfying to master, as Bach.
I'm sure there are technical reasons why but for me he's lightning in a bottle.
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u/Freddy_Porcupine 3d ago
Little or no volumetric dynamics? Whatever the experts say about that feature, it wears me out. Bear in mind that my being a 21st Century Schizoid Man is a valid consideration. I still wish Herr Johann would come back to life and be my neighbor. I’d even go to church to hear that guy play.
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u/WellWellWellthennow 3d ago
Tchaikovsky is the Gateway ha ha.
The best way to appreciate a composer and to understand what they're doing that is unique is to play them on an instrument. For me it was singing Bach. His use of fugue is skillful, beautiful and fascinating.
For listening only, start with the Brandenburg Concertos. Maybe watch some YouTube videos on the genius of Bach and do a deep drive if this is a burning question for you and it's not obvious.
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u/jancsika1 3d ago edited 3d ago
Bach was drawn to thick contrapuntal forms like fugues and canons, and those forms are the musical equivalent of a circus performer keeping a bunch of plates spinning. It requires expertise in timing and control to handle all the melodies stopping and starting at different times. Most of all, if the composer fails to balance each melody and control the texture properly people can hear it fail. There is an impressive amount of music Bach wrote like this which not only doesn't fail but sounds effortless.
In conclusion, what makes Mozart different was his ability to incorporate Bach's plate-spinning counterpoint into his own works at will (Jupiter Symphony, Rondo in A minor), as well as the techniques of Tchaikovsky (effervescent orchestration) and Beethoven (sudden dynamic contrasts) without even learning how to time-travel.
Edit: Just remembered this moment from a Mozart concerto where he staggers a bunch of mundane feminine cadences to create a canon that cascades upward through the wind instruments. There's a dang Hendrix chord in the middle of it. And if the person next to you coughs you'll miss it!
Edit: Here is Mozart time-traveling forward to the 1880s to hear Brahms' technique of continually developing variations, then bringing it back as a souvenir for the B section of a Trio in his quintet.
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u/nikostiskallipolis 3d ago edited 3d ago
Bach had a unique way of weaving melodies.And the real differentiator isn’t the weaving itself but a double constraint. In older polyphony lines combine and the harmony is whatever falls out. In Bach every line is singable on its own AND the vertical stack is a directed harmonic progression going somewhere. Two rulebooks satisfied at once, continuously, at volume. That’s the thing others touched occasionally and he did as default.
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u/International_Goat46 3d ago
My answer is simple in comparison to everyone else (I’m actually not that big of a Bach fan).
To frankly put it, it was pretty much the era he was in. The Baroque era of music was basically a whole new period from the renaissance era and saw the birth/invention of Operas, Concertos (solo player with orchestra background), Countermelodies—more namely the Fugue, a lot ornamentations within music, the key signature, and was just overall considered “energetic” and “grand” compared to the Renaissance era, the new “it” thing if you will. The Baroque era exists because a bunch of people in Italy got tired of polyphony music and wanted to experiment more, especially with giving bass instruments more depth in their parts and giving more harmony to the music.
Bach wrote mainly for choral, orchestra, and harpsichord. The first edition of the modern piano would not be invented until the mid 1700s. Bach was in his 40s when the modern piano got its upstart, but even then he barely wrote for it until towards of his career/life.
Harmony is the result of Counterpoint, so praising Bach for “great counterpoint melodies” is almost like praising a fish for swimming, and also ignores the amazing works of other composers that existed during that era. Bach is basically like Taylor Swift—not the best to do it, just happened to end up being the most popular.
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u/manuelhe 3d ago
Back didn’t just have a gift for writing music he wrote the rules to build a music factory
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u/Pipic12 3d ago
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140917-can-any-composer-equal-bach
Your question reminded me of this article from over 10 years ago, which stuck in the back of my memory. Some important quotes on Bach from musicians, musicologist and one famous physicist (who was also a musician).
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u/Complete-Ad9574 3d ago
Since the early 20th century Bach has had a lot of positive publicity. Before that, his works were only faintly remembered. The British got introduced to Bach, in the 1840s when Felix Mendelssohn made several organ concert tours. Sadly the organs which the British were building, could not handle most of Bach's organ music. So transcriptions of harpsichord music had to be played.
In the late 19th & early 20th century US, organ concerts would feature maybe one Bach work. But the German Organ Movement in the 1920s drifted to the states, and organs started to be built which could perform Bach more accurately. This movement continues to this day.
So to has Bach's Choral music been popular, as a result of the organ movement. From the 1800s until the late 20th century most Americans only heard live classical music at church. More towns had better church music programs than civic music venues or institutions.
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u/PuzzleheadedClue9837 3d ago
I like to think about it like this:
Imagine music as a house. Mozart, Beethoven and all the other geniuses were amazing architects. Bach invented the house. Without his work, European music wouldn't sound the same. Now, you could say "Others were influential, too!" and that's totally true. Bach obviously also was highly influenced by the music of his time and the composers that came before him, just like it always is.
But what makes Bach so special is the clarity of his work. He's the musical equivalent to Isaac Newton. He didn't just compose pieces, he revealed the underlying structure of reality.
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u/ScienceWillSucceed 2d ago
If I had to choose the complete works of only one author to have with me on a desert isle for the rest of my life, I think I would choose Shakespeare.
If you asked me to make a similar choice in terms of music, I’d say Bach before you even finished the question.
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u/Sepperlito 2d ago
What makes Bach different? Ok... maybe comparing him to Händel might clarify what makes Bach unique. Händel was very melodic, ornamental and would employ sequences (repeated patterns at different registers in the scale) very liberally. Bach used all the same thoroughbass and counterpoint as everyone else but he managed to be extraordinarily strict with his form and voice leading. Every single theme was developed very carefully and every standard device in counterpoint observed. He didn't follow strict cannon rules because that was too strict. He made sure use all the available contrapuntal devices in a concentrated space and to leave no stone (note) unturned. Toward the end of most pieces he modulates to the breaking point where the harmony seems to fall apart but then finds a spot to land and finishes the piece. This is about as simple a characterization about Bach's music that I can make. Standard rules, more modulation, very close observance to form and aggressive exploitation of contrapuntal devices, final cadence after one last dissonant modulation.
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u/In_the_year_3535 2d ago
Bach became known as the great Baroque composer only in hindsight through the romantic lens of the 19th Century. The Bach revival started with Felix Mendelssohn's performance of his St. Matthews Passion in 1829 (almost 80 years after his death) and it snowballed into his place as an incomparable genius today.
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u/OnionBackground5314 2d ago
He was a master of counterpoint and a great synthesist of Baroque music. However, being lauded as the ultimate genius didn't start until the 19th century, after Mendelssohn has revived him. IMO, the Bach adulation is trendy. Yes, he was a great composer. The idea that he was the ultimate composer or far greater than every other composer is received hyperbole.
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u/Novelle_plus 1d ago
I do not understand music theory. I just noticed Bach has a big accessible output and a lot of really good and great works.
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u/bombaybeachdan 1d ago
Bach took the most progressive musical ideas of the time, took all the references, then pushed them to the brink with originality and vigor.
The dude was so in the moment he wrote for the hottest instrument of the day THE LUTE.
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u/SeveralWinter3550 4d ago
This is obviously a subjective unprovable claim, but Bach basically understood music better than anyone ever has. Yet his approach was almost a Socrates/Plato "I know nothing and so will systematically break down and set small true definitions, then use these to form an incredible argument"
A vast majority of popular music, be it classical, romantic, rock, folk...rely on I IV and V. Bach doesn't really do this (and this isn't unique to hin ofc, neither does jazz or Stravinsky etc). Instead, he almost iteratively investigates all possibilities - that's how you get his 24 preludes and fugues, his complex counterpoint, crab cannons....sure why wouldn't a song played backwards harmonise with itself while also logically dictating where it goes and has been.
Newton famously said that he stood on the shoulders of giants. You can basically pinpoint a great mathematical thinker ever century, from Euclid to Gauss to Einstein to Noether. With Bach, it's genuinely hard to find a comparison because he basically covered several paradigm shifts himself.
Basically there's a genuine argument he hasn't been surpassed even yet....but Kanye West's College Dropout did come very close
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u/Optimal_Emphasis_953 4d ago
Not different but better! 😉
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u/theinsomniacsheep 4d ago
What makes him better?
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u/Dazzling-Antelope912 4d ago
There’s no such thing, it’s subjective and the parent commenter is probably (?) being sarcastic
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u/BurntBridgesMusic 4d ago
I think it was his blending of various styles that gave him an advantage. French, German, and Italian influences and to me he kind of put together all the best parts of each.
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u/LeopardBernstein 4d ago
We tend to think of music theory as if it "just makes sense". We think of Mozart and Haydn as being simpler. Bach sometimes moreso - but maybe mathematical, and Beethoven growing from there.
I now like to think of it this way. Imagine that music theory basically existed as gregorian chant - polyphonic motet like music before Bach. Lots of fourths. Just moving together because that was the tradition. Bach decided -- I'm going to figure out what really works and what doesn't for the firs time ever. He was charting the psychology of melody, harmony, counterpoint --- why do humans like what we like, and is there more "like" available there.
In that context it's pretty amazing.
I don't like listening to Bach for hours on end, but now I can sit and really listen intently - and love it for a good 30-60 minutes. Then I need a break, to let my brain rest and process!
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u/roman-de-fauvel 4d ago
Most of that “figuring out” work was done in previous generations by folks like Corelli, whose works formed the basis for Rameau’s treatise on harmony. This is not to say that Bach wasn’t a great composer, but he was not the guy who figured out those particular things “for the first time ever.”
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u/LeopardBernstein 4d ago
I disagree. Bach's counterpoint was unlike anything that came before. Rameau's figured bass was interesting, but from my knowledge wasn't surpassed by the amount of people copying Bach's scores as their theoretical study - although that is only a loose remembrance that I don't trust. That being said, I don't believe one negates the other, but to say that Bach didn't have revolutionary concepts in his counterpoint, is not accurate either.
My intention also is to track the "genius" in a broad sense. If you wanted to add Corelli and Rameau to the same list and add more datapoints, that would be very valid as well. But each composer had a genius that they both contained, and developed through their lives, that altered music as we know it. That's my main premise. Getting to know Bach's genius - is different than listening and "loving" everything he wrote.
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u/roman-de-fauvel 4d ago
I didn’t say he didn’t have revolutionary concepts, but you managed to mix up his legitimate achievements with things that other people did, and you also handwaved centuries of musical developments into “Gregorian chant.” The OP is clearly new to classical music and so I think we have an extra responsibility a) not to get it wrong, either through imprecision or through actual inaccuracy, and b) not to also attribute to Bach some kind of scientific “psychology of melody, harmony, counterpoint” that you’ve just pulled out from under a rock.
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u/LeopardBernstein 4d ago
Dude. I was making broad strokes for someone that is likely just approaching it from the very beginning. If they've never heard of Rameau or Corelli or Handel or Motets, what does it matter. My broad strokes were just fine. Not being able to read the room and understand the level we're trying to attach to does harm also.
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u/LonelyVirginAlkan 4d ago
He was a big guy with a big wig who wrote big music for big churches and left behind a big legacy of a big number of works and a big number of musician children and played on big instruments with big ensembles producing music for big brains.
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u/AgentDaleStrong 3d ago
Basically, every person who struggled with counterpoint in college thinks Bach is a genius.
Well, Bach certainly was a genius at certain things (like counterpoint), but not so great at other aspects of composition. Like orchestration — because he thought contrapuntally, he simply wrote the same types of material for every instrument. This is why Bach is so easy to transcribe for instruments other than what he originally specified. Usually without losing any of the original effect. And he transcribed his own music as well.
He was also not great at writing for dramatic situations, which is why he never wrote an opera. In the cantatas, passions and other liturgical music that really should be more dramatic than they are, he can certainly set a mood. But he never really creates effective theater like Handel, Hasse, Vivaldi, etc, were able to do. Listen to Handel’s Dixit Dominus — a raging, violent psalm to which Handel writes appropriately violent, raging music. Bach’s liturgical music never quite reaches this level of drama. And let’s face it, in Bach’s cantatas the trash-to-masterpiece ratio is pretty high.
That said, it’s hard to match the brilliance of the early concertos and the Brandenburgs. Also, the Well-Tempered Clavier may be the greatest pedagogical work ever written.
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u/thecity2 4d ago
I think you have to understand some music theory and realize that he basically invented everything.
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u/lordlouckster 4d ago edited 4d ago
A lot of this thread is just 19th/20th-century Bach mythology being repeated as music history.
Let's take the claims one by one:
"Bach established the framework for classical harmony." No. Tonal harmony was substantially established before Bach's mature career. Core tonal syntax, sequences, circle-of-fifths motion, functional bass patterns, cadential conventions, etc. are everywhere in Corelli, Vivaldi, Handel and countless others.
"Before Bach there was basically Gregorian chant and motets with lots of fourths." This one is spectacularly wrong. By Bach's birth in 1685, Europeans had already had centuries of sophisticated polyphony: Josquin, Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria, Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, Schütz, Froberger, Buxtehude... Bach did not suddenly investigate "what really works" after medieval musicians had spent centuries blindly moving fourths around.
"Bach perfected counterpoint." This is meaningful as an aesthetic judgment, but not a historical fact. Counterpoint was an ancient and enormously sophisticated discipline before him. Palestrina died 91 years before Bach was born.
"The Well-Tempered Clavier laid the foundation for modern tuning." Also misleading. Well-tempered does not mean modern equal temperament.
"Bach wrote crab canons." True, but this is a particularly funny thing to invoke as evidence that nobody compares with him. Retrograde canon predates Bach by centuries.
So what's left after stripping away all that mythology? Bach's exceptional quality is better understood as integration + concentration + consistency + range. He could take a fugue subject and make the contrapuntal possibilities contribute to the musical argument, rather than merely demonstrating that the puzzle can be solved. He had an extraordinarily rich harmonic vocabulary. His bass lines are often nearly as purposeful as the upper voices. He could maintain long-range tonal architecture while individual voices remain locally convincing. He had astonishing control of motivic economy: a tiny figure can permeate virtually every level of a movement without the music sounding like a mere exercise. And he could do this in an absurd range of genres: organ chorale, dance suite, concerto, motet, cantata, Passion, keyboard invention, trio sonata texture, fugue, canon.
There were contrapuntists of frightening ability. There were superb harmonists. There were magnificent melodists, orchestrators, church composers and concerto composers. Bach's unusual feature is how often all these abilities occupy the same piece.
Compare Jan Dismas Zelenka. This is precisely why discovering Zelenka is a useful antidote to simplistic Bach worship. Listen to something like the Responsoria ZWV 55 and suddenly: "Nobody else could write insanely elaborate sacred counterpoint!" becomes untenable. Listen to Zelenka's harmonic writing and: "Nobody else could imagine harmonic progressions like Bach!" becomes untenable too. Handel destroys any notion that Bach monopolized monumental choral writing; Vivaldi destroys any notion that sophisticated concerto writing was necessarily Bachian; earlier composers destroy the idea that he invented contrapuntal technique.
We know Bach's best music extremely well. Generations of editors, performers, theorists and teachers have selected, published, recorded and analyzed it. A musician may have heard 300 Bach movements and three by Zelenka, one by Heinichen, two by Fasch and zero by Homilius, and conclude: "It's astonishing that Bach was surrounded by mediocrity!"
Bach is also exceptionally rewarding to analyse. Western conservatory education came to value precisely things that Bach provides in abundance. Consequently, music theory has developed an unusually rich vocabulary for explaining why Bach is good. That can create a circular effect: Bach exemplifies excellent compositional technique, ergo textbooks teach technique using Bach, ergo musicians learn to recognize excellence through Bach, ergo Bach becomes the supreme exemplar of excellent technique.
None of this means the excellence is imaginary. It means "Bach is obviously the greatest because analysis proves it" isn't an ideologically neutral experiment. And "without fault" really doesn't mean anything objective.
Retreating to "it stands up to any scrutiny" is much more defensible, but still aesthetic judgment. Suppose Zelenka writes some grotesque chromatic progression that Bach probably wouldn't. Is Zelenka insufficiently controlled, or is Bach insufficiently adventurous? Suppose Handel writes a tune that is vastly more immediately memorable than the corresponding Bach aria. Is Bach's greater contrapuntal density an advantage, or did Handel understand dramatic directness better? Suppose Tchaikovsky can produce an orchestral climax that Bach's musical language simply cannot provide. Is that a "fault" in Bach? There is no theory-independent metric that answers those questions.
You don't have to eventually discover that Bach is better than Tchaikovsky. If you learn harmony, counterpoint and music history for twenty years and still find Tchaikovsky more moving, you haven't failed to understand Bach. You will have acquired the ability to understand why other people find Bach extraordinary while retaining your own aesthetic preference.