How would the world be like without J.S.Bach?

[solo@web]

        This is a simple question, but I don't know whether someone could imagine it precisely or not?
I myself, listen to his works almost often during a day and each time I get a new conception.                                             
He invented the tempered scales that today we use his ears to listening the music!
and no one can forget his great jobs such as "Air from Orchestral Suite No.3", "brandenbourg concertos 1047,1048", "fugue and toccata BWV565", "Goldberg Variations, BWV988", "keyboard concerto BWV1055" and much much more.
 

You can download some great works in *.rm format here: https://ra.mmv.ru/bach_e.html

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someone says

... I attempt to describe the feelings I have for certain piano music composers after hearing some of their music:

Bach's music is mathematically precise.
...

This can not be J.S.Bach...In my opinion he was lover and had maked LoVe!

Please listen to this https://ra.mmv.ru/Bach/Conpiano/Bwv1055/1.rm

[BoliverAllmon]

i think the world would suck, but then again probably somebody else would come along and do what he did.

[solo@web]

WwOoO 
you mean, -we conclude- the woks by beethoven can be representative by Mozart's
and if there were no Beethoven, Mozart might had made his beethoven's works?!
Am I right? 

[solo@web]

WwOoO 
you mean, -we conclude- the woks by beethoven can be representative by Mozart's
and if there were no Beethoven, Mozart might had made his beethoven's works?!
Am I right? 

[solo@web]

Excuse me...for double send it!
Entschuldigungen Sie!

[Radix]

Well, I think that the world would still be roughly spherical in nature, and would more than likely still be orbiting the sun.  I guess we'd still have seven continents, filled with people and animals.  Maybe Antarctica would be slightly more populated, but who am I to say?

...

[lenny]

i think the world would suck, but then again probably somebody else would come along and do what he did.

well...no, bach wasnt extremely innovative, he just took everything in the baroque era to it's peak of complexity and profundity.

bach is pretty inimitable.

[apion]

                                           
He invented the tempered scales that today we use his ears to listening the music!
and no one can forget his great jobs such as "Air from Orchestral Suite No.3", "brandenbourg concertos 1047,1048", "fugue and toccata BWV565", "Goldberg Variations, BWV988", "keyboard concerto BWV1055" and much much more.

Let me make this simple for you: Bach invented modern music.

[lenny]

i dont think he did....

and also - he didnt invent equal tempreament, he just 'popularised' it(or at least promoted its virtues)

[BoliverAllmon]

well...no, bach wasnt extremely innovative, he just took everything in the baroque era to it's peak of complexity and profundity.

bach is pretty inimitable.

you are kidding me right? bach was genius. He was innovative. Every great composer took what was going on at the time and took it to the next level or beyond that. bach did that. Liszt took the piano world by storm and took it up a notch by expanding the technical aspects. beethoven took the normal compositional processes of the time and warped them slightly to make his own style. I mean the list could go on. Schoenberg created 12-tone system in a way to organize atonalism. They all took the norm of the day and improved it.

boliver

[musik_man]

you are kidding me right? bach was genius. He was innovative. Every great composer took what was going on at the time and took it to the next level or beyond that. bach did that. Liszt took the piano world by storm and took it up a notch by expanding the technical aspects. beethoven took the normal compositional processes of the time and warped them slightly to make his own style. I mean the list could go on. Schoenberg created 12-tone system in a way to organize atonalism. They all took the norm of the day and improved it.

boliver

woah, woah, let's slow down here.  Schoenberg improved music?!?!

I'd have to agree with Lenny that Bach wasn't too important to the development of music.  That's not to denigrate his music in any way, but Bach did little to define the future of music when compared to people like Beethoven, Liszt or Wagner.  Bach is more like Rachmaninov or Strauss, in that his compositions were fairly conservative for the time.

BTW music joke

What are the two fastest ways to clear a concert hall?

1)Scream "Fire!"

2)Whisper "Schoenberg"

[Allan]

 Have you folks heard, for example, Bach's Prelude and Fugue in e minor (BWV 548) for the organ?  In the fuge, Bach goes beyond the style and form of Baroque and nearly reaches the heavens with his vision, scope and power.   In Bach's  "Orgelbuchlein" one can sense the stretching beyond Baroque constraints in order to reach the deepest meaning of life.   No wonder that most people during his time could not fully appreciate what they were hearing! 

The world without Bach's music!?  Perish the thought!

[Nordlys]

and also - he didnt invent equal tempreament, he just 'popularised' it(or at least promoted its virtues)

Yes - that he should have invented the equal temperament is a popular myth, maybe we believe that because of the title 'well-tempered clavier'.  Actually he didn't even use equal temperament - in those days they used mean-tone tuning, which is well-temperament but not our modern equal temperament. There were several different ones, like Kirnberger and Werckmeister. They are different from equal temperament in that the different keys sound different. Scales with many accidentals will sound more out of tune, but still acceptable. And the third in c-major is perfectly in tune!

[Allan]

Speaking of temperments, my digital organ can play in several early temperments.  The sounds are very interesting and, once you get used to it, bring out the pitches more "purely" and with more individual color in certain keys.

Also, I am in a good "temper" today.   

[Nordlys]

Yes, it is interesting.
Each key had its particular meaning in the baroque period. Some people think that the early temperaments bring out the particular colours or characters in the keys better. For example F-major was pastoral, b-minor was anguish.

[Nordlys]

The world without Bach?

- Bobby McFerrin wouldn't sing the prelude in c-major
- Gounod wouldn't have composed the Ave Maria (based on the same prelude)
- The cartoon about human history "Il était une fois l'homme" (does anybody remember that one?) wouldn't have its film music, which was the toccata and fugue.
- Kagel wouldn't have composed the "Saint Bach Passion" (!)

Wow! Bach is still quite important.

[kilini]

AND I would have gotten crazy learning certain complex sonatas without the Inventions to cheer me up.

Now that's important.

[lostinidlewonder]

The music world without Bach would be like no order to chaos. Bach's music has so much divine order that it has spilt over to so many legendary and small composers alike and transformed their concept of the sound of music. It has transformed so many studying keyboardists understanding of control/form, especially at the piano. Thank God for Bach!!! I couldn't imagine someone else replacing him. How strange would it have been! Look at what happened to music after Bach, it just exploded changed so much! For centuries it was similar, then in the last 300 years after bach, look at the change. It was as if Bach torn a great rip in the history of music that started a massive change in our understanding of controlling sound, something we just cannot ignore.

[BoliverAllmon]

bach developed his own finger technique, his own foot pedal technique, and because of these things was way beyond his time and wrote things too hard for other people. I can't see how he wasn't innovative. He took everything around him and pushed it to the brink and back. How was Beethoven more innovative? Not saying that Beethoven wasn't, but I can't see how he was soooo innovative and Bach not.

boliver allmon III

[jazzyprof]

"There is one God:  Bach, and Mendelssohn is his prophet."
(Hector Berlioz, quoted in J H Elliot, Berlioz (1967))

[solo@web]

What a nice lovely expression from a great musician -Berlioz- is this.
He should have learnt Bach well

Thanks maestro Berlioz!!![/font][/size]
 

[rodrk352]

    Berlioz loved above all else the music of Beethoven, Spontini, and Gluck. Those where his three "gods" of music. He thought Bach's fugues rather dry and academic, mostly because they were required learning at the Paris Conservatory where Berlioz suffered under the rule of people who loved Bach, and the old French and Italian masters, but who despised German Romantic music and the emerging music of Beethoven in particular. Here is a quote from one of Berlioz's letters (to Stephen Heller) found in his memoirs:

   "You request me to tell you if the musical feeling of the big-wigs at Leipzig is good, or at least inclined to what you and I would call the beautiful?
    I will not.
    If it is true that the creed of all who profess to love high and serious art is : 'There is no god but Bach, and Mendelssohn is his prophet?'
    I must not."

    The feeling that "There is no god but Bach, etc" was common in Germany around the 1840's (I don't know who coined the phrase, but it wasn't Berlioz) and Berlioz was too much of a romantic to feel the same. I'm not saying he didn't admire J.S. Bach as a musician, but Bach was by no means his god. If anyone, that would definitely be Beethoven.
     I just did a Google search and found where Jazzyprof got his quote: quotes and quotations from Mendelssohn. Don't believe everything you read over the Internet.

[solo@web]

ThanX for your precise recall,
could you name the title of the book?
I really want to know...
ThanX Again

[rodrk352]

The title of the book is Berlioz's own "Memoirs," published by Dover. It includes letters to his friends. Jacques Barzun, who is still alive at the age of 96, is considered the best biographer of Berlioz.
   One other thing: as mentioned somewhere else, Berlioz was no pianist. The silliest part of his memoirs is when he seriously compares Chopin with the violinist/composer
Ernst. "Who is the better composer?" he asks. Of course we know the answer to that question. Berlioz thought that Chopin's piano style was so unique (he played with a very light touch), that no other pianist coming after him could do his music justice, and therefore his work would suffer from neglect.

[jazzyprof]

rodrk352: Thanks for providing the full story behind that Berlioz quote, which is clearly taken out of context.  It's propagating unchecked and seems to have taken on a life of its own.  Beware indeed, what one reads on the internet!

[rodrk352]

For more opinions about Bach:

www.egtaguitarforum.org/ExtraArticles/artzt.html

An excerpt, adding further fuel to the fire about Berlioz's views:

"The advent of the Romantic era and all its affinities for the music of Bach did not bring with it a universal acceptance of this new attitude. Indeed, many romantic musicians stuck to the old views, some of them perhaps more as a matter of inbred prejudice than as a result of objective study. One of these was Hector Berlioz who, although unfamiliar with the works of Bach, disliked them because of their fugal associations (he had had, according to Boschot, his fill of fugues at the Conservatoire). This animosity prompted him to write about a performance of the Bach concerto for three claviers, played by Chopin, Hiller, and Liszt:
"It was heart rending, I assure you, to see three such admirable talents, full of fire, brilliant in youthful vitality, united in a bundle to reproduce this ridiculous and stupid psalmody."