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If any Bach newbies want something easy listened to start with, don't miss the classic, Toccata & Fuga in D minor: http://allofbach.com/en/bwv/bwv-565/ Especially the middle parts (2:37 and forward) is just astonishing ... Very beautiful site btw!
I used to play the pipe organ before becoming a software engineer. Bach's works are like living inside of a multi-threaded algorithm in real time. You can understand/appreciate a lot of them from a high level without knowing what they really are doing as implementation details. Some people even can play his pieces just with muscle-memory. But if you try to fully understand as a composer what he is doing in any piece,…
I've always thought musical counterpoint and multi-threaded programming have a great number of parallels. Both are fundamentally about setting up independent but interlocking things that need to work together to accomplish a goal without crashing into each other. And I think the first time you experience either done by a real master, it is mind blowing in the same sort of way.
If any Bach newbies want something easy listened to start with, don't miss the classic, Toccata & Fuga in D minor: http://allofbach.com/en/bwv/bwv-565/ Especially the middle parts (2:37 and forward) is just astonishing ... Very beautiful site btw!
Why is this on the front page of HN? Anything I'm missing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always thought musical counterpoint and multi-threaded programming have a great number of parallels. Both are fundamentally about setting up independent but interlocking things that need to work together to accomplish a goal without crashing into each other. And I think the first time you experience either done by a real master, it is mind blowing in the same sort of way.
Even more amazing is that Bach (and others as well) could build a fugue while improvising. It's like live coding multi threaded software. Even late in life Bach was given a challenge on the spot to build something from a given set of notes, and the Goldberg Variations are the result (he remembered what he did and wrote it out later). I still love listening to the last thing he ever worked on (a quadruple fugue in the…
Also, research suggests that the story of Bach dying before finishing the final fugue in Art of Fugue is inaccurate. An analysis of the paper in the extant manuscript, the tools used to draw the staff lines, and the simple realization that there is no way even Bach could have undertaken such a huge work without deriving the final combination of the fugal subjects before hand, all point to a completion in the year 1747 or 1748, but lost. The fragment that survives is likely to be a rough draft.
I wrote my senior paper in undergrad on this.
In fact the last work completed by the master is believed to be the "Et Incarnatus Est" in second (later) half of the B minor mass.
Why is this on the front page of HN? Anything I'm missing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [...] not least in contrapunctal complexity and fugal techniques, but also in the incredible fluidity he could achieve with a seemingly arbitrary number of voices. Just to give a striking example of one of Bach's novel fugal techniques: Bach's St. Matthew Passion starts out with an instrumental fugue with three voices. The first voice does introduces a little fugue subject, then the second voice imitates a fifth ab…
Do you find such things by listening to the music or by analyzing notes?
In this case there's a pedal point in the bass-- that is, it just keeps repeating the same note as the harmonies above it change. So when that bass finally begins to move and then anchors a fifth above for the next phrase of music, it's about as aurally striking as music can get.
I cannot believe this is trending on HN.
This as in Bach, or this specific piece?