This is what I think about that: Bach and Story at 03:49

Optional: The bachground music for this post.

Johann Sebastian Bach is considered one of the greatest composers of all time. In my mind, his music is married to the Baroque Era, which now connotes the D minor chaconne as much as any sort of architectural innovations or art styles.

Of course, it also reminds me of old, yellowed parchment with near illegible but stylistically interesting handwritten music.

It reminds me of people dancing in cute harmonious rhythms, wearing impractical gowns and white wigs, like in that scene in Pride and Prejudice.

So really, it just reminds me of boring.

But there are just some things in life that, while they don't seem to enrich your life directly, are necessary to understand in order to know other things.

When I went to the conservatory, my teacher made me play a lot of Bach's music. I studied it intensely every week, and in every lesson Jack would reveal something new about the music to me; how here, this note changes the emotion, how this note is completely unexpected yet still makes sense, how these two phrases are connected and can't survive without the other.

Bach's music is too intellectually stimulating for me to listen to casually. I feel the same exhaustion when I listen to Bach as when I have spent more than an hour at an art museum. When I am witnessing the work of a grand master of a brush, my eyes are learning and teaching my brain at some subconscious level. And when I listen to Bach's music, I now parse the harmonic movement and appreciate the functional melodic line at a subconscious yet taxing level.

But one of the most important things I learned from Bach is that music is like a story. It has always come from somewhere and is going somewhere. It is harder to understand this concept with modern music and minimalism and pop music, with such repetition and randomness that I become quickly bored and often stop being engaged with wondering where the music is going.

Bach was a genius in this aspect. I learned that every note on the page was necessary, and removing even one would fundamentally alter the piece and be a heretical error.

Below is a copy of one of Bach's violin pieces, and it has been analyzed by a professional violinist. It's pretty boring,

And yet it is a great story; He introduces it with the tonic to let you know what world you're in; it moves lightly, quicker, slower, with tension, less, more emotion, resolution. Every inch of the manuscript has writing; every note has meaning in a context, and everything matters. The violinist who analyzed this said, "my teacher would not let me play this unless he could point at any note, and I could tell him the purpose of that note."

It's everything we wish our lives were. That every moment is a perfectly placed note, in its context is beautiful and supports other notes and creates harmonies. And every note that is jarring, unexpected, though it is creating tension and dissonance at the moment, has been planned to be resolved. And that there is nothing random, but everything is planned and is going somewhere.

And you know it all started from something good, familiar, safe, but somewhere along the way you've modulated somewhere else and it's somewhere dark and sad and scary. Points where you feel like an unfinished piece, when you hope things don't end here because stories aren't meant to stop with the protagonist lonely and crippled with tendinitis and pressure. But you keep going and you cadence in a different place than you thought you would, but that terrible note was actually leading to a resolution in a new key, and that night you cried and spilled your guts actually led to a closer friend.

And maybe your story doesn't end in the same key it starts in. But maybe it's just one movement of a sonata, just one part in a symphony.