Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is not just a composer. He is the foundation on which all Western music rests. Every musician, regardless of genre, is standing on his shoulders.
LIFE IN THE SERVICE OF GOD
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) spent his entire career in relatively modest positions in small German towns: organist at Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, court organist and concertmaster at Weimar, court composer at Cothen (1717-23), and cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig (1723-1750, where he remained for the rest of his life). He was not particularly famous during his lifetime outside of Germany; his north German contemporaries regarded his music as old-fashioned, technically dense, and overly complex compared to the lighter Italian galant style then in fashion. He was a craftsman, not a celebrity. Christoph Wolff's Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (W.W. Norton, 2000) - the definitive modern biography - situates Bach's extraordinary output within this context of institutional service: he wrote music because his positions demanded music, at a rate that required something close to industrial production.
Bach inscribed the letters S.D.G. - Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone the glory - on the manuscripts of many of his sacred works. This was not merely conventional piety: Bach understood his musical work as a form of theological labor, the organization of sound as an act of praise. His mathematical sensibility (the intricate canonic and invertible counterpoint of The Art of Fugue, the precise numerical symbolism embedded in the B Minor Mass's structure) coexisted with profound spiritual conviction.
COUNTERPOINT: THE TECHNICAL FOUNDATION
Counterpoint - the composition of multiple independent melodic lines that sound simultaneously, each following its own logic while combining harmonically - is the foundation of Bach's art. The species counterpoint tradition (as codified by Johann Joseph Fux in Gradus ad Parnassum, 1725, a textbook Bach owned and that music students still use) defines the rules by which voices may move independently: which intervals are permissible between voices, how dissonance must be prepared and resolved, what voice-leading motion is forbidden. Bach absorbed these rules completely and then pushed their possibilities further than any composer before or since.
Fugue is counterpoint's highest form: a theme (subject) introduced alone, then combined with itself in other voices at different pitches and in different forms (inverted, retrograde, augmented, diminished, at different time intervals), the entire structure building toward a complexity that, heard at the surface, sounds overwhelmingly rich and, understood structurally, reveals an architecture of mathematical precision. The 48 preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier (two books, 1722 and 1742) - one prelude and fugue in each of the 24 major and minor keys - constitute the most complete single exploration of tonal counterpoint ever written, demonstrating the full range of fugal possibility across every key made available by well temperament.
THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS AND THE GRAND FORMS
The Goldberg Variations (BWV 988, 1741) - an aria followed by 30 variations - is organized with a structural rigor that rewards analysis: every third variation is a canon, the canons progressing at increasing intervals (canon at the unison, canon at the second, at the third, through the canon at the ninth in variation 27), while variations between the canons explore specific forms (French overture, gigue, ornamental variation). The aria that opens and closes the work provides a harmonic ground plan that all 30 variations share. Glenn Gould's two recordings - the 1955 debut (rapid, percussive, assertive) and the 1981 final recording (spacious, introspective, made the year before his death) - are among the most analyzed pairs of interpretations in music history.
The Brandenburg Concertos (six in total, 1721) are simultaneously demonstrations of the concerto grosso form and explorations of every possible instrumental combination. The B Minor Mass (BWV 232, assembled across Bach's career, completed 1749) is the summation of his choral art: a mass for liturgical use that exceeds any liturgical function through its scale and ambition, covering every choral form Bach knew.
THE REDISCOVERY AND LASTING INFLUENCE
After Bach's death in 1750, his music was largely forgotten by the general public for nearly 80 years, though musicians including Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin studied it privately. Felix Mendelssohn's 1829 performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin - the first major performance since Bach's own - launched the Bach revival that has never stopped. Today Bach is the most performed and recorded classical composer in history. His influence extends across all subsequent Western music: the harmonic language of functional tonality that he brought to maturity is the foundation on which Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, and jazz all built. Pianists including Glenn Gould and Angela Hewitt have devoted careers to his keyboard works; cellists define themselves by their relationship to the six cello suites; jazz musicians including Jacques Loussier and the Swingle Singers have transcribed his music into jazz harmony, finding that the structures translate with remarkable naturalness.
BACH'S KEYBOARD TECHNIQUE AND PEDAGOGICAL LEGACY
Bach's contribution to keyboard pedagogy extends beyond his compositions. The Inventions and Sinfonias (BWV 772-801) - two-voice and three-voice keyboard pieces composed for the instruction of his son Wilhelm Friedemann and students - remain among the most used teaching materials in classical music. Their progressive difficulty, systematic coverage of two- and three-voice counterpoint, and musical quality that exceeds their didactic purpose have made them standard repertoire for advanced students for three centuries. Anna Magdalena Bach's notebook, compiled for his second wife, demonstrates his commitment to making music accessible at the domestic level as well as the professional. The Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach contains simple dances, chorales, and arias alongside technically demanding pieces, treating the household as a site of musical education rather than mere entertainment. Bach's influence on subsequent composers has been both technical and philosophical. Beethoven learned the Well-Tempered Clavier as a child and carried Bach's contrapuntal language into his own work; Brahms studied and edited Bach's music and modeled his harmonic language partly on Bach's approach to chromatic voice leading; Schoenberg saw Bach's motivic development as a model for his own twelve-tone method. The Bach revival of the nineteenth century, initiated by Mendelssohn's famous 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion, transformed Bach from a historical curiosity into a canonical figure and established the model of the musical canon as a category of enduring masterworks that subsequent generations had an obligation to preserve and study. Contemporary performers continue to debate the appropriate approach to Bach's music — whether to use period instruments, whether to apply Baroque ornamentation conventions, how to reconcile the evidence of historical performance practice with modern performers' and audiences' expectations — debates that reflect how completely his music remains a living, contested presence rather than a settled monument.