ChatGPT:
Bach’s Invention: The Divine Trickery of J.S. Bach
This lecture by Professor Milton Mermikides (23 October 2024) explores the genius, humanity, and playful craft of Johann Sebastian Bach. Across 14 sections, it examines how Bach’s music combines technical mastery, emotional depth, and mischievous invention, making him a timeless figure who embodies both divine inspiration and human struggle.
Conclusion
Bach’s legacy lies not only in his divine-seeming music but in the relentless human effort, playfulness, and craft behind it. His works reveal a marriage of mathematical proportion, emotional expressiveness, and hidden codes, from numerological games to contrapuntal puzzles. Bach was no distant saint but a flawed, witty, and stubborn man who turned personal struggle, rigorous study, and curiosity into transcendent sound. His fateful meeting with Frederick the Great shows the limits of even his improvisational genius while highlighting the studious craft that underpinned his “miracles.” His unfinished Art of the Fugue may symbolize death’s interruption or his final joke, but in every case, it shows music as both divine trickery and human persistence. Perhaps what endures most is not an image of a godlike genius, but of a tireless craftsman whose music invites us to marvel, decode, and dream.
Key points
🎼 Golden Record: Bach’s music was sent into space on Voyager I as a symbol of humanity’s highest artistic achievement.
🧠 Brain & Soul: His music marries rigorous technique with deep emotion—seen as evidence of intelligence and the divine.
👣 Only Human: Behind the myth, Bach was a man of relentless work, hardship, and mischievous flaws, often clashing with authority.
🪶 Fingerprints: He embedded his name, numbers (14, 41, 158), and puzzles in his works, blending devotion with playful codes.
📐 Hidden Proportions: Ruth Tatlow and others show that Bach often encoded harmonic proportions, bar counts, and structures with mathematical precision.
🎹 Well-Tempered Clavier: The decorative swirl on its title page may secretly encode his chosen tuning system, discovered only in 2005.
🎶 Counterpoint & Fugue: Bach’s mastery lay in making each voice independent yet harmonically united, a perfect balance of horizontal and vertical logic.
👑 Musical Offering: When Frederick the Great challenged him with a fiendish theme, Bach improvised a 3-part fugue and later crafted an elaborate collection that showcased his ingenuity.
⏳ Unfinished Art of the Fugue: His last work ends mid-fugue with his name embedded—a staged profundity or final trick?
✨ Human Legacy: Bach’s greatness rests less on divine inspiration than on his tireless dedication, creativity, and mischievous joy in puzzles.
Summary
- Prelude: Music in Space – Bach’s works, chosen for the Voyager Golden Record, represent humanity’s intelligence and spirit across “all worlds, all times.”
- Perceptions of Genius – From Beethoven to Nina Simone, musicians describe Bach as transcendent, divine, or the ultimate truth of music.
- Human Struggles – Despite his heavenly aura, Bach endured hardships: poor eyesight, long journeys, deadlines, and the practical realities of survival as a composer.
- Rebellion and Mischief – Early in his career, he was disciplined for lateness, strange harmonies, fights, and inviting women into the choir loft.
- Criticism and Obscurity – Some contemporaries dismissed his work as “too technical,” and his fame waned for a century until revived by Mendelssohn and others.
- Codes and Numerology – Bach embedded his initials, the B-A-C-H motif, and number games (14, 41, 158) into his music, intertwining faith and craft.
- Geometric Harmony – His compositions often follow hidden proportional systems, revealing his obsession with balance, symmetry, and symbolic order.
- Contrapuntal Mastery – In fugues and canons, he wove multiple independent voices into unity, creating music that is simultaneously logical and deeply expressive.
- Frederick the Great – Challenged with a nearly impossible theme, Bach improvised brilliantly but proved his limits, later turning the challenge into The Musical Offering.
- Final Years – His unfinished Art of the Fugue ends abruptly with his musical signature, leaving us to wonder if it was divine interruption or his final joke.
Quotes from
Bach’s Invention: The Divine Trickery of J.S. Bach
- “To the makers of music – all worlds, all times” — inscription on the Voyager Golden Record.
- “The immortal god of harmony” — Beethoven on Bach.
- “The most stupendous miracle in all music” — Wagner on Bach.
- “Bach is the ultimate truth” — Jacqueline du Pré.
- “He transcends time, space and my own understanding of existence” — Patti Smith.
- “Bach made me dedicate my life to music” — Nina Simone.
- “No one believes in God anymore, but everyone believes in Bach” — Mauricio Kagel.
- “The best argument for the existence of God” — Nigel Warburton.
- “On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings” — Brahms, on Bach’s Chaconne.
- “This great man would be the admiration of whole nations if he did not deprive his pieces of naturalness by giving them an artificial turgidity” — Johann Adolf Schiebe, critic of Bach (1737).
- “I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again… Sending all of Bach, however, would be showing off.” — Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (1974).
- “If Frederick says to you ‘you are my friend’ he means ‘you are my slave’” — Voltaire, on Frederick the Great, who tested Bach with the “Royal Theme.”
- “At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died.” — Inscription on Bach’s unfinished Art of the Fugue.
- “Perhaps we should hold the greatest admiration not from Bach’s considerable musical gifts, but from the hard graft and constant tinkering he humbly and consistently dedicated himself to.” — Professor Milton Mermikides.
