BACH PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Mike Venezia | 30 pages | 31 Aug 2000 | Hachette Children's Group | 9780516263526 | English | London, United Kingdom Johann Sebastian Bach | Biography, Music, & Facts | Britannica Thomas Church and School in Leipzig, Germany. Even though his job in Leipzig kept him very busy, in his spare time, Bach conducted a group of musicians who liked to get together to perform at a local coffee house. During his lifetime, people thought of Bach as just an ordinary working musician. No one really knew much about his music until years after his death, when another composer, Felix Mendelssohn, conducted a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. Bach is now seen as one of the greatest geniuses in music history. He wrote all kinds of music -- for organ and other keyboard instruments, orchestras, choirs, and concertos for many different instrumental combinations. He was a devoutly religious man, and knew tragedy: his first wife died suddenly while he was away on business; 12 of his 20 children died in infancy; one of his sons had severe learning difficulties; and another ran away from home in his teens and died in mysterious circumstances. With employers, who rarely appreciated his talents, he was chippy and argumentative; at a family gathering with a few drinks and a pipe of tobacco, however, he was robustly good-humoured, especially when the Bach clan took turns to improvise rude country songs. Bach's style is baroque, characterised by lots of notes, simple motoric rhythms, and steady shifts of underlying harmony - it was derided by some as 'sewing-machine music'. But he explored harmony much more deeply than other composers of the time: compared to say Handel or Vivaldi, Bach's music can contain extraordinarily 'jazzy' chords and surprising dissonance, and will jump off to many different harmonic areas. It is also 'absolute music' - in other words, it often seems to exist apart from any particular instrument, as a constructional idea by itself; consequently the same piece can work as effectively on a piano as a guitar, as a choral work or an orchestral arrangement. Bach's thousand-plus works enjoyed relatively little appreciation in his lifetime. His music was considered a little old-fashioned for its time, enjoyed only by connoisseurs. The authorities at Leipzig famously complained that they only employed Bach because "the best [Telemann] was not available". Bach's main reputation was not as a composer, but as an astoundingly gifted organ player and improviser, and consultant for organ repair. By the s he was largely forgotten except to historians, but Felix Mendelssohn revived Bach's 'St Matthew Passion', and musicians steadily rediscovered his extraordinary body of work. Bach excelled at counterpoint - the composition of two superimposed independent lines so that each makes musical sense by itself, but also combines seamlessly with the other. He excelled even more at the fugue, a glorious but fiendishly difficult contrapuntal musical form. A fugue is a kind of musical chase between two or more lines. The first line starts; after a few seconds the second line joins in. It is slightly higher or lower than the first, but otherwise almost identical. A third or fourth line may join. The skill of a fugal composer is to make the lines develop independently, yet still fit together, while making each line recognisably a delayed variation of the preceding one. Such was Bach's expertise on the organ that he could improvise a four-part fugue. Bach's preludes and fugues for keyboard are one of the landmarks of western classical music. For each major and minor key of the 12 notes of the scale there is a free-flowing prelude, followed by a tightly-constructed fugue, totalling 24 preludes and 24 fugues. He wrote two such sets, making 48 in all. They are often referred to as 'the 48', or by the more general title 'The Well- Tempered Clavier'. The pieces are usually played on the piano nowadays; in Bach's lifetime the instrument was still being developed, and they would most commonly have been played on a harpsichord. The 'well-tempered' refers to the piece's demonstration of how consistently the instrument is tuned across different keys, though exactly which tuning system Bach had in mind is the subject of much scholarly debate. Like much of Bach's work, 'The Well-tempered Clavier' was not published in his lifetime, but circulated in manuscript form. In its present state it contains 21 of the 24 preludes and fugues in all the keys. Most were written out by Bach, though a few were copied by his second wife Anna Magdalena. The preludes and fugues are written back to back on large sheets of paper which were originally folded but not bound. Apart from a single fugue in Berlin, this is the only autograph manuscript of the second book to survive. It shows the beginning of the fugue in A flat major - you can see the second voice which comes in halfway across the top line imitating the shape of the first at a higher pitch. Tick box or boxes to add this item to your personal galleries. Johann Sebastian Bach - Facts, Children & Compositions - Biography Similarly, for the cello suites , the virtuoso music seems tailored for the instrument, the best of what is offered for it, yet Bach made an arrangement for lute of one of these suites. The same applies to much of his most virtuoso keyboard music. Bach exploited the capabilities of an instrument to the fullest while keeping the core of such music independent of the instrument on which it is performed. In this sense, it is no surprise that Bach's music is easily and often performed on instruments it was not necessarily written for, that it is transcribed so often, and that his melodies turn up in unexpected places such as jazz music. Apart from this, Bach left a number of compositions without specified instrumentation: the canons BWV — fall in that category, as well as the bulk of the Musical Offering and the Art of Fugue. Another characteristic of Bach's style is his extensive use of counterpoint , as opposed to the homophony used in his four-part Chorale settings, for example. Bach's canons, and especially his fugues, are most characteristic of this style, which Bach did not invent but contributed to so fundamentally that he defined it to a large extent. Fugues are as characteristic to Bach's style as, for instance, the Sonata form is characteristic to the composers of the Classical period. These strictly contrapuntal compositions, and most of Bach's music in general, are characterised by distinct melodic lines for each of the voices, where the chords formed by the notes sounding at a given point follow the rules of four-part harmony. Forkel , Bach's first biographer, gives this description of this feature of Bach's music, which sets it apart from most other music: []. If the language of music is merely the utterance of a melodic line, a simple sequence of musical notes, it can justly be accused of poverty. The addition of a Bass puts it upon a harmonic foundation and clarifies it, but defines rather than gives it added richness. A melody so accompanied—even though all the notes are not those of the true Bass —or treated with simple embellishments in the upper parts, or with simple chords, used to be called "homophony. In the first case the accompaniment is subordinate, and serves merely to support the first or principal part. In the second case the two parts are not similarly related. New melodic combinations spring from their interweaving, out of which new forms of musical expression emerge. If more parts are interwoven in the same free and independent manner, the apparatus of language is correspondingly enlarged, and becomes practically inexhaustible if, in addition, varieties of form and rhythm are introduced. Hence harmony becomes no longer a mere accompaniment of melody, but rather a potent agency for augmenting the richness and expressiveness of musical conversation. To serve that end a simple accompaniment will not suffice. True harmony is the interweaving of several melodies, which emerge now in the upper, now in the middle, and now in the lower parts. From about the year , when he was thirty-five, until his death in , Bach's harmony consists in this melodic interweaving of independent melodies, so perfect in their union that each part seems to constitute the true melody. Herein Bach excels all the composers in the world. At least, I have found no one to equal him in music known to me. Even in his four-part writing we can, not infrequently, leave out the upper and lower parts and still find the middle parts melodious and agreeable. Bach devoted more attention than his contemporaries to the structure of compositions. This can be seen in minor adjustments he made when adapting someone else's composition, such as his earliest version of the "Keiser" St Mark Passion , where he enhances scene transitions, [] and in the architecture of his own compositions such as his Magnificat [] and Leipzig Passions. In the last years of his life, Bach revised several of his prior compositions. Often the recasting of such previously composed music in an enhanced structure was the most visible change, as in the Mass in B minor. Bach's known preoccupation with structure led peaking around the s to various numerological analyses of his compositions, although many such over-interpretations were later rejected, especially when wandering off into symbolism-ridden hermeneutics. The librettos , or lyrics, of his vocal compositions played an important role for Bach.