Every once in a while I get a giant traffic bump on an old post, and it's because someone shared it here. It's always a nice surprise. Thanks for reading!
The Netherlands Bach Society is trying to record all the works of Bach and make them available:<p>* <a href="https://www.bachvereniging.nl/en/allofbach" rel="nofollow">https://www.bachvereniging.nl/en/allofbach</a>
The visualizations here remind me of the old Bach WTC analysis and commentary website that used David Korevaar's performance (and some others for the ones on organ or harpsichord) and Tim Smith's analysis. Problem was, they were all done using Flash.<p>Some amazing person uploaded video versions to Youtube. I would highly recommend them: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYwl4jo5DoXTTPY0P8TlcyHkrwbEsWMyP" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYwl4jo5DoXTTPY0P8Tlc...</a><p>This one in particular is beautiful: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9ShwIrMJlU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9ShwIrMJlU</a>
Here is a free recording of a piano performance of the Art of the Fugue by Kimiko Ishizaka:<p><a href="https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/album/j-s-bach-the-art-of-the-fugue-kunst-der-fuge-bwv-1080" rel="nofollow">https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/album/j-s-bach-the-art-o...</a><p>This artist also has a free recording of her Goldberg Variations available:<p><a href="https://opengoldbergvariations.org/" rel="nofollow">https://opengoldbergvariations.org/</a><p>Her bandcamp page also has the Well-Tempered Clavier, and two of her own albums:<p><a href="https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/</a>
Since no one else has done it, I'll plug the Canadian Brass recording -- it's one of my favorite recordings of the Art of the Fugue, and (among many other things) just shows how flexible and instrument-agnostic this music is.
Bach's fugues are amazing, they sound great on harpsichords and organs, whereas some piano music sounds very wrong when it is payed without all the volume modulation, the fugues are carried by the interactions between the melodies, the counterpoint.
The Art of Fugue itself was unfinished but if as the story goes, he died as he was penning the last bar of fugue 15, then he kind of signed himself out in the sense that the notes corresponding to the letters (in German) BACH are spelled as a motif as B flat, A, C and B natural in the 8th to the 5th bar before the final bar which is unfinished. I have no idea if this true. We do know that this unfinished fugue was the last piece he wrote.
Wow! Each recording is better than the other!<p>As a non-musician sometimes I have difficulty on following Bach's contrapunctus, particularly on orchestral and organ works.<p>I like how most recordings here slow down the tempo, allowing us, the ignoramus, to follow the melodic lines.<p>If you like this approach I highly recommend a few recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos with slower tempo made by an orchestra in St. Petersburg under a maestro called Alexander Titov.
Fugues are still being written. Here's one from 2016, although a bit controversial:<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RZxCAqCUgug" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RZxCAqCUgug</a>
I fell in love with this piece hearing Michael Winograd play it on clarinet: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTsQ-TbQReI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTsQ-TbQReI</a>
How does an article like this on HN avoid having a comment referring to "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid"?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach</a><p>(Yes!)<p>(EDIT - formatting)
For the J.S. Bach fans, here's a fun site that organizes his cantatas calendrically: <a href="https://whichbachcantata.be/" rel="nofollow">https://whichbachcantata.be/</a>
Such a pleasure to read. using beats seemed almost profane at first but it allows for chunking the complexity where it could really help someone <i>get</i> what's going on. I don't listen to the fugues much, and really mainly guitar arrangements of his work I'd like to be able to play one day (allegro assai, lute suite prelude, etc), but it's hard not to get mystical about it. jubilance is the word I'd use for his work. for me the music forms an imaginary navigable space when I hear it, and as everything that lives can hear and count, every piece seems like a meditation on what can be aligned, harmonious, and essentially, <i>True</i> in a universal sense- the awe of a creation for its creator.<p>I'm an absolute amateur dilettante musician, but for someone just starting to hear his work, I'd suggest the skill is in being able to listen for separate voices and then follow them, and then to practice following them in simple pieces with enough dissonance in them to make you intellectually keep track of what's going on. the simplest possible polyphony someone can use to hone their attention that has analogues to early music may actually be Arvo Pärt's work, as once you can separate voices, the richness of Bach and other composers kind of explodes.<p>great fan of hein's writing, a pleasure to be reminded of it and to get to comment.
Amazing how Glenn Gould caresses that piano, in a performance that is almost a spiritual act.<p>Apart from geek toys that often cause more hassle and annoyance than they're worth, the most appreciated material things that I purchased in the first half century of my life are:<p>• The Art of Computer Programming (purchased the first volume aged 16, decades later I'm still waiting for volume 4 to be completed)<p>• Encyclopedia Britannica<p>• J. S. Bach: The complete organ Works on ten CDs.<p>The Voyager space craft contains a disc with Bach's, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No. 1 on it, and the joke among space folks goes, one day a radio telescope will receive a message deciphered as S-E-N-D M-O-R-E B-A-C-H!<p>Don't waste your life striving to be fashionable, aspire eternal beauty and knowledge!<p>PS: I like the visualization, thanks for this blog post and bringing the beauty of Bach that is almost out of this world into a bleak Tuesday afternoon [on which nasty people drop bombs on children and people too stupid for the power they carry keep quiet about it]. I would like to see another visualization, which shows the music scores smooth-scrolling from right to left with all tones currently being played highlighted in yellow, and below the scores I'd like to see the hands playing said tones on the organ, all in temporal alignment.
BBC Radio 3 has show <i>Record Review</i> (aka <i>Building a Library</i>) where they go over various recordings of a particular work and recommend particular one(s):<p>* <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06w2121/episodes/player" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06w2121/episodes/player</a>
The Emerson quartet version blew me away when I first heard it. I recommend it over the piano versions because I think you hear the full extent of the voices better (coming from someone that loves and play the piano).
"It's very hard to perceive counterpoint, and there is a limit to how much we can perceive at once. 2 voices is hard and takes practice, 3 voices is even harder, but you can have these flashes where you hear clearly voices playing off one another and its like getting a glimpse into the divine."<p>I've always wanted to learn how to listen to counterpoint. Anyone have good tips on how to appreciate it and know what it means to perceive counterpoint?
Also, let us never forget what Laibach have done to it<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k0PDQPcIZG5_gJvP5ISN8iD1EiMmeEJqs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k0PDQPcIZG5_gJ...</a>
Being able to compose fugues well is notoriously difficult.<p>Mozart was never able to.<p>Beethoven on the other hand...<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosse_Fuge" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosse_Fuge</a>
<a href="https://youtu.be/hUaziUz4jx0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/hUaziUz4jx0</a>