June 27: Midway through a Year of Bach

Plus: ~1000 subscribers, and some preliminary teeth grinding about Glenn Gould

In January, I set out to listen to all of Bach’s compositions and to write about my experience engaging with them. I’m keeping track of my progress and it looks like I’m about halfway through? I can’t be sure — some compositions are thirty seconds long, others are three hours…

The Bach 333 box set, which collects recordings of everything Bach wrote (and more), clocks in at 282 hours of music; that’s over five hours per week at the high end. I’m averaging about two hours of music per post, and two posts per week. I’m likely on pace, or maybe I’ll just be cramming in Q4.

Some takeaways on the project so far:

• There are just shy of 1,000 subscribers to Year of Bach! When I embarked on this project, I thought to myself that if I had 200 regular readers, it would feel like a success. (I didn’t tell anyone about this hope, it’s embarrassing — the couth thing to say is, “I’m just doing this for myself, come what may.”) I can’t express how grateful I am to have so many of you listening along with me and for commenting whenever I’m right, wrong, and very wrong.

• My self-imposed timeline has created a satisfying discipline for both listening and writing. It’s like marriage: when you make a commitment in public, you’re less likely to quit on it.

• Forty-five years old feels like the perfect time of life for this project — still young enough to embark on an ambitious extracurricular, mature enough to have developed the ears to begin to hear the depth of this music, and self-possessed enough to write confidently about my taste without sounding like a real so-and-so.

• A hundred hours in, I haven’t found Bach’s music to be repetitive, boring, or dependent on gimmicks. Musical forms are paramount for Bach, but nothing he wrote feels predictable — surprises arrive in every measure. A genius at work.

• I’ve discovered some tremendous artists — famous in their fields but new to me. Pierre Hantaï I’d listen to playing scales; Peter Schreier can sing me the phone book.

• While I’m still least likely to play cantatas or organ works when I want to listen to JSB, I’ve found much to enjoy in surveying those categories. I’m glad the listening hasn’t been a slog — this is supposed to be fun.

• My feelings about Glenn Gould have grown only more complicated. He has moments of genius, but as I hear it now, his performances can be so eccentric that they slide into aggression. At this point, I admire him more than I like him. I’ll write more about the monumental Gould in the coming months.

We have so much incredible work to explore in the back half of the year, including:

• English Suites

• The Art of Fugue

• The solo violin sonatas and partitas (and the Chaconne)

• Mass in B Minor 

• Anna Magdalena Notebooks

• Italian Concerto

• The Well Tempered Clavier, Books I and II

Plus plenty more organ works, sacred cantatas, and random keyboard toccatas, partitas, concertos and miscellany.

How the Chaconne points to the meaning of life will be revealed in my final post of the year, so stick around.

Thanks again for reading, everyone.