A year of (all of) Bach - a 2024 project

Last week I shared with my kids one of my old riffs: “Many consider J.S. Bach to be the greatest musician of all time and he’s still underrated.” My 11-year old responded with a challenge:

“First of all, you’ve said that before, and anyway if he’s really the greatest, have you even listened to all of his music?”

I’ve spent thousands of hours with Bach as a listener and as an amateur musician on guitar and piano. Bach’s achievement is staggering: a wholly novel approach of how notes interact with each other through time, embodied in melodies and supported by harmonies that have emotionally resonated with millions of religious and secular listeners and artists over three centuries. But, no, I have not listened to all of Bach. I’ve probably had 100 hours with each of the solo violin and cello sonatas and the Well-Tempered Clavier, but there are hundreds of hours of (mostly choral) music I haven’t heard at all.

So as a challenge to myself, and to sublimate my son’s rebuke into something productive, I’m going to devote about 200 hours of my listening time in 2024 to the complete recordings of J.S. Bach, and chronicle what I learn and feel on this blog.

I’ve copied Wikipedia’s complete list of Bach’s compositions into a spreadsheet and will be keeping track of my listening there. I will be jumping around the catalog. Since the works are ordered by the type of composition (Keyboard works, Motets, Orchestral Works, etc.) I don’t want to wait nine months to hear the piano, and it’ll be less fun to listen to months of just straight cantatas.

Some ground rules I’ve arbitrarily set:

• I won’t be a stickler for period instruments or historically-influenced interpretations. That said, I will listen to the Organ Sonatas performed on an organ and not a piano.

• I will omit transcriptions and arrangements, even though my gateway to Bach was Segovia’s interpretations of lute, violin, and cello works for classical guitar.

• There are thousands of Bach recordings, which ones to choose? I have all-time favorites that I am excited to revisit (among many: Mstislav Rostropovich’s Cello Suites, Daniil Trifonov’s Art of Fugue, Isaac Stern’s Violin Concerti, Vikingur Olafsson’s new, brilliant Goldberg Variations), but none are ever definitive; I love the ‘dry’ Well-Tempered Clavier of Glenn Gould as much as the ‘wet’ version by Till Fellner. No doubt there will be great compositions that I’ll gloss over because the performance I choose will be a stinker. For the pieces that are new to me, I’m going to lean on recordings from trusted record labels (Hyperion, Harmonia Mundi, Alpha Classics), and well-regarded interpreters (John Eliot Gardiner, Tom Koopman). Please let me know what I should be listening to, especially the obscure stuff.

Here are some major limitations of this project:

• What does it mean to listen to something once and then cast judgment on it? Bach’s music is often dense with ideas, and I’ve found that his brilliance is uncovered with close study, repeated listening, and performance. This blog is a fun side project, and not a compressed lifetime of careful study, so I will necessarily give this music undeserved short shrift.

• Bach’s primary professional work was composing music week by week for small church orchestras and choruses. I’m concerned that, as opposed to the keyboard and string instrument works I know so well, these religious cantatas, masses, and motets will smear into each other, and maybe I won’t have much to say about them. If these pieces wind up feeling undifferentiated to me, it’ll be more about my reaction to the form than Bach’s shortcomings.

• I am a good listener (even Ted Gioia says so!), but I’m not a music scholar. I typically listen to about 1,000 hours per year of music, mostly acoustic, instrumental music spanning jazz, classical, and world music. My listening is a cornerstone of my life, but it’s decidedly amateur.

Here’s what I’m looking forward to most from this project:

• Getting surprised by something great that I didn’t know was always there. I feel confident I’ll uncover many new favorite recordings.

• Following through on a commitment to create something big and sprawling, even if it’s focused on consumption and, to a certain extent, judgment.

• Continued inspiration to keep up my own practice on guitar and piano. I’m a real estate and finance professional, but my heart has always been in music. One great part about composed music is the active re-creation of art in real time; Bach needs our active engagement more than Vermeer does. Like most everyone, I sometimes second guess how I spend the bulk of my days — maybe the quiet work of getting Bach and the other masters under your fingers is the path to a life well lived, whether the world needs another recording of these pieces or not.

A college classmate once told me, “A day without Bach is a day without sunshine.” I hope this project brings some extended sunshine to me and whoever joins me for the ride. 2024 is going to be a challenging year for America; I look forward to filling it with more music.