Today is the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, born in Eisenach in 1685, and Google has a truly remarkable Doodle celebrating this fact. You can write a line of quarter and eighth notes and an AI engine, trained on Bach compositions, will make a short Bach-like tune out of it.
My favorite composer when I was young was Beethoven, but over the years it shifted to Bach because I need peace in my life, not more drama. Bach has a certain serenity.
To a large extent, Bach's output exists within the conventions of the day. When Telemann and Vivaldi wrote concertos, so did he. When they wrote suites, so did he.
One area where he was a full on innovator, though, was in the use of four part harmony. During his life, modal music was being largely supplanted by tonal music, based on a succession of four-note chords. The new system was at the core of Bach's style, and his compositions are to a large extent considered as laying down the rules for the evolving scheme that would dominate musical expression in the next centuries.
He even applied it to the music of others, as when he conducted a performance of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater and upgraded the viola part to fill out the harmony and conform to the four part style.
But, Bach being Bach, putting his foot down on the tonal system did not mean he had abandoned the modal system. He would look back on it from time to time, as in the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, composed in D Dorian mode.
Similarly with counterpoint, which Bach did not invent, but his contributions to its development were so fundamental as to define it to a large extent. Bach's first biographer, Johann Forkel, wrote:
"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." But it is a very different thing when two melodies are so interwoven that they converse together like two persons upon a footing of pleasant equality. 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 1720, when he was thirty-five, until his death in 1750, 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."
His employers were not uniformly appreciative of Bach's innovations. The Church Council pf Arnstadt informed him: "Complaints have been made to the Consistorium that you now accompany the hymns with surprising variations and irrelevant ornaments which obliterate the melody and confuse the congregation. If you desire to introduce a theme against the melody, you must go on with it and not immediately fly off to another."
In his own time, Bach's reputation equaled that of Telemann and Handel. After his death, it went into decline and through the 18th century he was known largely to a few connoisseurs. A Bach revival began in 1829 with Mendelssohn's performance of the St. Matthew Passion.
The famously reclusive Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, in one of his first public performances, apparently had to be told that the audience expected an encore. Instead of playing one or two short, lively pieces to send the audience off in a good mood, he apparently played the entire Goldberg variations, about an hour of music.
Bach's Goldberg Variations bookended Gould's career. His first and last recordings were of the Goldberg. I own both and the contrast between the interpretations of a young and an old man is quite interesting. The first few bars of the Goldberg Variations are carved on his tombstone. If you can get past the humming and some odd tempo choices, these recordings are worth listening to.
The 1955 recording:
and the 1981:
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