Man sat down saying "i dont like bach" and went on to give the best appreciation of his music I've heard and a reality check for snobs

Oh my! I find Bach easy to listen. His music   soothes my soul, comforts me and moves me. Gives a meaning to life somehow. But it is ok to have different opinions. I respect it and find it sincere and genuine. Thank you.The music it's all about ourselves. As any kind of experience in life I think. We experience a travel, a relation differently.

We all have our own opinions and I appreciate yours - it’s why I’m a viewer. This is like a foreign concept. I listen to Bach every day - it’s like a vitamin for the brain and heart (for me) - and it makes life worth living.  Appreciate you Dave!

This happens to me with Mozart. With the exception of a couple of operas and concertos, the rest doesn't move me much. We all have major composers we do not particularly care about, an it's OK.

Not a lot of music moves me as much as J.S. Bach's music - and that's not because of a cult. Thank you for sharing your view.

Something to keep in mind that is that the Bach adoration is very strong among musicians. And not just classical musicians, either. Jazz musicians adore Bach probably more than any other classical composer (if you added some syncopation to the violin sonatas and partitas, a lot of it would sound pretty close to bebop).

You're unquestionably correct that his music is dense and complex, but it's precisely those qualities that leave musicians in awe. Everyone who's ever taken an introductory harmony class has been forced to write 4-part chorales, and everyone who's taken a counterpoint class has been forced to write an invention followed by a fugue. Most of us do them badly. But Bach is just impossibly great at those things. And unlike a lot of later composers, he does not have a bunch of unpredictable modulations, or harmonic movement that defies any kind of conventional analysis. Everything can be explained relatively easy using conventional classroom methods, but it's still inexplicable how any one human could have come up with it all.

Musicians love to admire things they can't do, and nobody can do certain things better than Bach. It is also true that musicians, when listening to other people's music, can lose the forest for the trees. They also have a much higher tolerance for "eating your vegetables" than most audiences.

I think a good analogy is Shakespeare. It's a truism to call him the best writer in the English language, just like it's a truism to call Bach the greatest composer. And writers today, even ones writing in a completely different style, can still be in awe at how he was able to write these wonderfully complex plays while remaining almost entirely in iambic pentameter. And there are certainly lots of people who love Shakespeare, read a ton of it, attend the plays, etc. But if you were to inject truth serum into someone and force them to answer, would the majority of people really say that Shakespeare is their favorite author, or even in their top five favorite authors? Probably not, and there's no shame at all in admitting that.

Bach was my initiation into classical music. I first heard toccata and fugue in d minor when I was 10 and was blown away. As soon as I figured out who the composer was I started buying Bach tapes. He was my favorite composer as a kid and I still love his concertos and orchestral suites and organ music and keyboard music etc etc
While I agree his music is very complex and sometimes difficult, much of it is actually quite melodic and accessible.

I have a similar confession: I have tried for years to really be moved by much of Mozart’s music. It’s beautiful and some of it reaches me in a deep place. But overall I’m not the fan of his compositions I feel I’m supposed to be. I often listen to Mozart more out a sense of duty than pleasure. Bach, on the other hand, engages me on every level I can think of. I guess we are all simply wired differently regarding what stuff floats our boat and what music confuses us as to why anyone would be that delighted to listen to it.

Isn’t it amazing that Bach and Handel composed at the same time since they are SO different. I just relate to Handel more easily on a human relationship and emotional level

Bach's music is thrilling to me, and nearly always moving. It is not an intellectual experience; I just soak in it.

I totally get why someone might not be enjoying Bach, with his dozen of melodies happening at the same time or relentless four note phrases going on forever, and mannerisms like that, but honestly, I consider the "Agnus Dei" from Mass in B- minor the greatest achievement of human spirit, including all of the arts and sciences and everything else. This superlative might sound like too much, but that's how it makes me feel when I listen to it, every time without exception. It stays with me hours after each listen.

I would never have thought to use the word 'relentless' to describe the music, but..... We recently attended a concert here in Jerusalem of both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, played by a series of Israeli musicians on a number of different instruments. We had purchased tickets for both parts of the concert, but after book 1, there was a intermission and we left. We were over-tempered.

Once again in this case, as I discover your video on your "Bach Problem", I highly appreciate your frankness. For me, frankness and intellectual honesty are cardinal values in any relationship with art. Knowing how to sweep away snobbery and preconceived ideas, to simply say that you don't care about them in order to really say what you think of a composer's work, for example, is very precious. Because this attitude can help a lot of people who don't dare say what they think, for fear of being looked at as idiots. I appreciate all the more what you say about Bach, as I have the same relationship to his music. And after so many years, I think I'm quite lucid about his work, which is certainly gigantic. But this work is very often a cerebral work of art, made for the intellect above all, and sensitivity comes afterwards. I've changed my relationship with Bach over the years, and works that were very difficult for me to grasp have now become familiar to me. But the fact remains that the music is very severe, which can be explained by the intellectual and spiritual context of Bach's life.

This predominance of counterpoint in everything, for example, is something that can satisfy calculating minds (many mathematicians adore Bach), but which in music can prove very repetitive and boring. To say so is not to diminish one's relationship with Bach; on the contrary, it is to show oneself to be lucid in this relationship. Everything else, i.e. the reason why so many people feel obliged to say that they "adore" Bach in music, stems from the social excess of snobbery, which makes so many people believe that they are obliged to say that they adore Bach, otherwise they'll be seen as idiots.

On the contrary, to know how to evolve oneself in listening to a work is to know how to refine one's own lucidity. Personally, if I've had trouble with many of Bach's works in the past, I've learned to admire them while at the same time being able to identify the codes of writing that are often off-putting. And I'm talking about works that I now admire almost hysterically, such as the St Matthew Passion.

All in all, I think this exercise in lucidity and honesty that you're inviting us to engage in here is highly valuable.

I saw Yo-Yo Ma perform the cello suites at Red Rocks and it was one of the best musical experiences of my life. I guess I’m in the cult!

I feel the same way about Bach. More complex is not always better.

I don't see Bach as difficult at all. The 48, the cello suites and the B Minor Mass, for instance, are joyful things that go to the heart as directly, and linger there as long, as any Beethoven.

Well, I love Bach, and there have been times I've told people (when asked) that he was my favorite composer. At other times, I've said Mozart, or Brahms, or Beethoven, or Haydn (thanks, in part, to your championing of him). The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that one of the most pointless exercises is to argue about who's the "greatest." Too many duels have been fought over this. There's just great music and lots of it, created by--no doubt about it--great composers.

Great chat, thank you very much! had the Bach-problem, too, for decades. I worked my way through most of his music without being touched, until I got to the cantatas and then I began to enjoy him. And after that I began to like some of the keyboard music, too. But he still comes not even close to being one of my favorite composers. In roughly his time, I like Vivaldi, Telemann and Froberger a lot more and my absolute heroes are Haydn, Wagner, Bruckner, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Sibelius and Shostakovich. In recent years, I have discovered Atterberg, Pettersson and Leifs and am enjoying them immensely. Perhaps one day, I will start to really appreciate Bach, as one is supposed to do, but I fear it will never happen.

Dear David, I can not agree more ! I feel exact the same as you do.

I adore Bach. He's my favorite composer to listen to, my favorite to play. But I also loved real analysis as an undergrad, and my favorite languages are highly inflected. I like puzzles and complexity and tightly designed mechanisms where every piece is doing double or triple duty. Bach doesn't let you get away with anything. I love Chopin, but Chopin lets you get away with murder. Who can fit 17 notes against five perfectly? No normal human, but that's okay, we can approximate. Bach demands that every last note, every last incidental and ornament, be perfectly in its place. Though, if you're like Glenn Gould, you can insist that every last note be perfectly in your place, not Bach's.

But I have my moods. Some days I want the "Art of the Fugue", some days I want Brahms's Paganini Variations. And some days I want Shostokovich's Preludes and Fugues rather than Bach's. I'm with you on the evils of personality cults. Bach doesn't need one. He's brilliant, but he's not the summum bonum of musical composition. There's no such thing. I play him as an exercise for the mind and because I appreciate the elegance of a perfectly rendered choral prelude, but a world of just Bach would be like sitting in a clockwork heaven under the cold gaze of a geometer God. You need flowers and slobbery dogs and hamsters to make it all livable.