37 takeaways from 200 hours with Bach

And about YoB's Year Two

“Year of Bach” snowballed from a tired bit of shtick I shared with my son on a drive to Trader Joe’s, Christmas Eve 2023. It grew into hundreds of hours of rewarding listening and writing.

Here are 37 takeaways from my survey of the complete works of J.S. Bach:

On writing about music:

1. Has there been any good writing about music? The neuroscientists are boring and miss the point; the sociologists dance around the subject. Even the great stylists can’t reify the experience of listening.

2. A chase scene stirs the pulse, erotic prose quickens the breath. Now go read a music review — nothing.

3. Perhaps that’s the whole point. Words can never touch the inner experience of hearing this:

Or this¹:

4. The music itself has no referents either. At its best, a particular musical moment addresses a specific and utterly unnameable psychical and bodily experience.

5. Proust is wonderful, but his zillion words on a special melody finally become poignant only when describing how it became the anthem of a couple’s love. We know Swann is moved by the music, but we can’t hear the music, imagine it, or, most crucially, feel it.

6. Music and language, like science and religion, occupy non-overlapping magisteria.

On authorial voice:

7. A favorite line from Wittgenstein:

   Courage, not cleverness, not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.

8. Bach was as serious and courageous as any composer. I can often laze into the cold, jokey comfort of my generation’s ironic detachment — I had to muster some resolve to keep that crapola out of my writing here. (There I go again.)

On abundance and art:

9. Engaging deeply with a catalog of artwork is to bear witness to the arcs of two lives — the artist’s and your own. I visited the Museu Picasso in Barcelona twenty years ago, and didn’t know that he painted things like this when he was 15:

Her hand, mein Gott.

10. Take your favorite author and read all of it! The early exploratory stuff, the later material you’ll throw against the wall, the angry letters to publishers and daffy love letters, every word. (This strategy also works for visual artists and filmmakers, etc.)

11. I’d listened to only about a third of Bach’s work prior to Year of Bach. Why so little? I loved what I’d heard…

12. How much of Bach do you know? You’ve tasted only a morsel of the world’s biggest cake.

13. That said, of all the great artists, Bach has the lowest variance in style and quality of output from youth to old age.

On accountability:

14. How to succeed in business, family, and social matters: just do what you say you’re going to do.

15. In a surprise twist, it also works on the internet! I think people enjoyed following my Year of Bach because I set myself an ambitious goal and got to the end.

16. Internal and external accountability structures kept me on pace. I didn’t want to fail myself, and then I didn’t want to fail my readers.

On expertise:

17. Who am I to be writing about all this? I listened to Joe Rogan for the first time last week. The episode featured an ostensible debate about American foreign policy, but the subtext was a more fundamental disagreement about who still has the right to claim authority following the expert class’s repeated failures.

18. My opinions, ever evolving, are buttressed by my lifetime of listening and reading, though my claim to speak about Bach stems only from how his music makes me feel.

19. The more I listen and play, the deeper I feel, and my writing becomes stronger — a beautiful feedback loop. Music writing and art criticism should try to convey the depth and richness of what’s at hand, pointing to what can be uncovered by anyone who is open to exploring.

20. Nonetheless, I still feared looking like dilettante or poseur, but that all abated because I felt connected with so many of you.

On the internet:

21. New subscriber notifications would get my pulse up. I knew instinctively that this feeling was bad news. (I cannot imagine how teenage girls posting selfies can handle this in a healthy way.)

22. Marx advocated a revolution of laborers to seize the means of production. Now, you can produce valuable digital goods effectively for free. Substack is a nicely packaged way of seizing the means of distribution. That’s a fussy way of saying that I could never have had this wide a readership two decades ago.

On doing:

23. No one will give you permission to write, and it literally can’t get easier for you to publish. There’s zero marginal cost, and it’s near frictionless. It’s much easier to endlessly consume, but did you ever want to express anything?

On productivity:

24. Opportunity cost is no joke. Writing “Year of Bach” meant less of a lot: quality time with my wife and kids, reading, sleeping...

25. All we have is our time and how to allot it.

On notoriety:

26. My friend Jon once said that the only healthy amount of fame is that of a radio host walking down the street. I didn’t even get there, but when Marginal Revolution and Kottke linked to me, I tasted something in the same flavor profile.

27. I’ve felt no envy of other writers with bigger audiences — this surprised me a bit. Maybe because I wasn’t trying to monetize this newsletter, it gave me the freedom to want less than ‘the most possible’.

On Bach’s music:

28. My Year of Bach ended in December, but I’m still listening to plenty of JSB. I’m happy whenever my algo serves it up. The music is fundamental and infinite.

29. During my survey, I found some new favorite musicians (including harpsichordist Pierre Hantaï and tenor Peter Schreier), and new favorite compositions (most notably, the Violin and Harpsichord Sonatas), but my all-time Bach favorites stayed in place. The cream had risen to reach me first.

30. I love the Beatles, I love Steely Dan, I love Joni — but their music is so particular, and already so deeply seared into my mind, that I don’t feel the need to revisit them all that often anymore. Not so for Bach.

31. Hundreds of hours of listening confirmed that I just don’t dig choral music as much as I do instrumental work. (This holds for my non-Bach listening, too.)

32. Medal rankings of the Cantata conductors:

    • 🥇 Gold:

      • Karl Richter (Beautiful, ahistorical Romance, and the greatest singers)

      • Hans-Christoph Rademann (Precision and excitement, an heir to Carlos Kleiber)

    • 🥈 Silver:

      • Ton Koopman (Big sounds, well rehearsed)

      • Helmuth Rilling (Strong pacing and drive)

    • 🥉 Bronze:

      • Masaaki Suzuki (He loves the music but I’ve never connected; weaker singing overall)

      • John Eliot Gardiner (Professional, often lifeless)

    • 🏆 Participation trophy:

      • Nikolaus Harnoncourt & Gustav Leonhardt (A truly honorable mention for being the first Cantata completists, but these don’t hold up at all.)

On Bach:

33. I’ve sublimated my insecurities about this project by periodically querying ChatGPT to impersonate the great literary critics ripping apart my writing. (Don’t ask.) Today, I asked ChatGPT-o3 to create an image of Bach annoyed by my blog, set in 1980’s Hawaii. The oversized head and stocky forearm track with my imagination.

34. My gamble last January was that I’d enjoy listening to all 200 hours of Bach’s compositions. My goodness, did Bach live up to his part of the deal. The music was never less than excellent.

35. What a blessing to be alive today, to summon at will the most extraordinary performances of the complete works of the great artist ever, like a puckish despot.

36. Bach devoted his life to God and to expressing the gift that God granted to him. That he has touched so many people in the centuries after his death is a perhaps itself a sideways proof of God’s existence.

37. It’s a duty and privilege to share beauty and knowledge with others. To that end, here’s one of the most extraordinary songs ever written. Thanks, Sebastian²:

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A friend shared words of warning at the beginning of the year: he liked my newsletter idea but said I was setting myself up for a time-limited window of relevance. “What about next year,” asked Eric. Well, we’ll just have,

🎙️Another Year of Bach🎙️

Starting in a few months, I’ll be launching a podcast featuring conversations with people like me: non-specialists who are moved by Bach’s music. (Tyler Cowen recently advised to start a podcast if you have a clear image of it. I’m taking the advice.) I’ll post these here on Substack, and on all the platforms. Reach out if you have recommendations (and warm intros to) compelling guests. Speak to you all soon.

1. In order, and of course, Coltrane’s “Resolution” from A Love Supreme, and “A Hard Day’s Night.”

2. This is Peter Schreier singing BWV 487 with Karl Richter accompanying on organ.