Meditating with Bach

Tuesday, June 14th, 2016

I started taking piano lessons when I was fourteen and enjoyed playing, as difficult as they were, the “two-part inventions” of J. S. Bach. I’ve been playing them ever since, and so my life was been shaped in part by these supremely crafted little works of art.

I wish I could demonstrate here how Bach takes a line of five or six notes and without using any other material creates a satisfying and complete piece of music.

When I was seventeen my father took me to the Ford Auditorium in Detroit to hear the Canadian genius Glenn Gould play Mozart and Bach concertos in one of Gould’s rare public performances.

If I felt connected to Bach before heading Gould, afterwards I was a devotee of both the performer and the composer.

Let me make a general point: Today we tend to think of music as entertainment, whereas throughout history it has been viewed as part of the deep education of a person (Plato), as the very structure of the universe (Boethius) and as one of the chief aids to sacred ritual.

Today classical music inspires meditation and contemplation, whereas popular music helps us feel in our bodies and emotions the rhythms and tonalities of love and sex. (That sentence needs elaboration, but it points us in a useful direction.)

What does Bach invite us to contemplate? If you can see how carefully he constructs a piece of music, creates conundrums and solves them brilliantly, and keeps several intricate lines of music charging along dynamically and harmoniously, you would understand that he does nothing less than offer in sound the very blueprint of our existence.

Listening to his music, you sense how the universe is designed, how human life handles its complexity and how everything is in highly layered motion and yet free of chaos. Continue reading