“Bach and Sunday Mornings”

I would wake you up early on this Sunday morning if I could, to listen to “On Being” with Bernard Chazelle, a computer scientist, about cosmology and the music/life of Bach. Chazelle is much more than a computer scientist, however, and he covers the gamut from Bach’s life, his times, and what motivated him to discover his music. Because, like Newton who lived in the same times, Bach was seeking to understand the possibilities of nature. The voices, the way he integrated dissonance organically via those voices, the fine tuned perfection, the feeling that he was discovering what already was there rather than creating something new, his amazing work ethic, his lack of caring if his music would be immortal — no one has had all of these attributes either before or since. So go listen to Bach. Sunday mornings are the perfect time for Bach. And get lost in the possibilities of the universe, the sound of discovery and truth, and feel cleansed in a way that defies explanation. Feel closer to your Higher Power. A comet provides the building blocks of the origins of the solar system. The music of Bach, arguably, is much, much older than that…