J.S. Bach

This guy needs no introduction, so I'll keep it short and sweet. This is a thread where I encourage you to list your favourite Bach works, your experiences with his music, praise his genius and overall celebrate the, in my opinion, most influential musician and composer of all music history. His list of music is almost endless, ranging from thousands of keyboard works to the masterful orchestral suites, the Brandenburg Concertos, and the list of ideas and inventions he brought to the musical table is almost as large.

So I address the entire PA community when I say this.

Let's hear it for one of the greatest composers, if not the VERY greatest composer, of all time. Hell, the music you are listening to at the moment would not be the same without Grandpa Johann.

Now show some love!

I was introduced to his music through this wonderful movie called Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach. I'm still not as familiar with his works as I should be, but I greatly enjoy everything I've heard so far.

Beethoven once said about Bach, while studying his works: "Nicht Bach, Meer sollte er heißen"! This is a wordplay with the name Bach, which is German for "brook"; the translation of the Beethoven quote is "Not Brook, Sea he should be called"!

In eighth grade, I played the first movement from his "Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins."
Great stuff, it remains one of my favorite classical songs.

My favorites are something like this:

1 St. Matthew's Passion
2 Violin Sonatas no. 1, 2 & 3
3 Concerts for one, two, three and four Cembalos + the Harpsichord Concerto used quite achingly in Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters, where I first heard it. If I remember right its Michael Caine's character who tries to connect with Hannah (Mia Farrow) by playing an Lp with this Bach-piece. 
4 Cello Suites
5 St. John's Passion

I've seen 1, 4 and 5 performed live, and the two passions are two of the most fantastic concerts I've experienced. Was in tears at the end of both, actually. The opening of St. John were 8 minutes of nonstop svivers down my spine. The complete cello suites concert wasn't as sublime as it should have been, because of the cellist.

These grand Passions are never the same at home, obviously Mainly because all the recitals don't work in a CD context. Atleast not for me. I get tempted to skip them.

St. Matthew's Passion literally had the hairs on my neck at attention throughout it's entirety. Without doubt, one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. Although I throw that term around quite a fair bit, this time I really mean it.

Egg use the famous "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" on their first album.
During a solo in "Release" from the live album of Frumpy keyboarder Jean-Jaques Kravetz suddenly breaks into this well-known tune too, which is immediately picked up by the others, so all play a few bars of it.
I am pretty sure Sky adapted a lot of tracks from him too, but am not too familiar with their work.

I am sure there are more bands which were influenced by him, and there are probably dozens of adaptions of the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" around.

BaldFriede wrote: Egg use the famous "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" on their first album. During a solo in "Release" from the live album of Frumpy keyboarder Jean-Jaques Kravetz suddenly breaks into this well-known tune too, which is immediately picked up by the others, so all play a few bars of it. I am pretty sure Sky adapted a lot of tracks from him too, but am not too familiar with their work. I am sure there are more bands which were influenced by him, and there are probably dozens of adaptions of the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" around.

Old Sky fan, just a technical point, Sky is more of a phenomenon of the '80's. 

Bach stuff was used, but was not predominant. 

It's weird to think that until the end of the nineteenth century or thereabouts, if you said "Bach", you generally meant JC Bach or even CPE Bach, and not their father, whose music was considered dated.

Edited by Certif1ed - June 13 2009 at 17:01

Certif1ed wrote: It's weird to think that until the end of the nineteenth century or thereabouts, if you said "Bach", you generally meant JC Bach or even CPE Bach, and not their father, whose music was considered dated.   JC was influential on Mozart's concerto style and countless other composers of the time - more so than his more deserving old man, even though (or maybe because) he drew highly from the Italian composers.   JS Bach's most amazing opus has to be his Mass in B minor - no-one wrote choral music like JS.     As an aside, when I was a young(er) student, I used to call JS Bach the "dum digger" composer, because in almost all his works, there would be many lengthy passages that went "dum digger digger dum digger...". Imagine my delight when I discovered that one of his sons had the initials JC...     It wasn't just prog bands that were influenced by JS - the jazz pianist Jacques Loussier, the Swingle Singers, Procol Harum, and Clouds all used material gleaned from the great man.

Yes, it was Mendelssohn who dug him up again, supported by Schumann. He organized a rendition of the St. Matthew Passion, which was a great success and revived the interest in Bach.