Bach was insane!!??

[CMoon]

Great, another topic just for me...

So, I've been heavily collecting classical lately (I am a music-binge-shopper), and realized just with a handful of bach box sets, I had some 45 discs of bach (yow!!!)

So, I knew that the complete works of bach on CD (which runs over $1000), is between 150 and 180 CDs (there are two 'complete' sets), and I was curious where I was at as far as having the Bach I wanted...since I only love part of what the man did.

Now this is just a loose estimate, but assuming that most of the CDs of Bach are mostly full, I've come to this rather terrifying realization:

150 total discs of musc MINUS the 45 discs I own MINUS the 60 discs of Cantatas I don't want MINUS 5 discs worth I have yet to purchase = 40 discs worth of Bach that I have no clue what it even is. And THAT is taking the smallest estimate on the total amount of Bach.

I feel like I know Bach fairly well, this is certainly including all the organ works (actually there might be a few discs unaccounted for here), masses, various concertos, sonatas, partitas, keyboard exercises and the WTC, brandenberg concertos, goldberg variations, blah blah blah.

40 fucking discs I've never even heard of.

I imagine other composers coming to Bach and the man screaming out at them 'I take shits bigger than you!'

Oh, and the guy had time to have kids too (apparently while composing music). What the hell?

[Turrican]

A real workaholic, huh. All these efforts brought to Gyruss after all!

[CMoon]

A real workaholic, huh. All these efforts brought to Gyruss after all!

Castlevania too...and plenty of other games I'm sure.

Edit: Actually, what is that opening classical music in the boot-up screen on Gradius 2 (also shows up in Gradius Galaxies?)

[Turrican]

Bach in Castlevania? Where? Are you talking generic inspiration, or what?

Dunno about Gradius II.

[CMoon]

Bach in Castlevania? Where? Are you talking generic inspiration, or what?

Dunno about Gradius II.

Yes, its generic, they don't outright do bach, but some parts are VERY bach, though probably just more of a general baroque thing (but you can tell, Bach is his own kind of baroque).

Ack! It is Gradius 1 not 2, and the music probably isn't note for note lifted from any classical piece, though it is close enough...

[Stormwatch]

I know The Adventures of Captain Comic for the NES uses a Mozart piece - Rondo (alla Turca) from Sonata in A.

[BulletMagnet]

I wouldn't doubt that Bach showed up in one of the Parodius games someplace, a whole bunch of classical music got cute-em-upped in there.

[Ghegs]

I wouldn't doubt that Bach showed up in one of the Parodius games someplace, a whole bunch of classical music got cute-em-upped in there.

The Music of Parodius

There's some Bach there alright, but personally I just love playing the Moai Battleship level in Gokujyou Parodius with Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries as the BGM.

[Jon]

I wouldn't doubt that Bach showed up in one of the Parodius games someplace, a whole bunch of classical music got cute-em-upped in there.

The Music of Parodius

There's some Bach there alright, but personally I just love playing the Moai Battleship level in Gokujyou Parodius with Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries as the BGM.

Yep, any series which mixes classical tunes along with K.C. and the Sunshine Band is alright in my book.

[MovingTarget]

I had a downhil mountain bike video, where one section was highlights from some races in Italy, I think anyway, could have been America. The music for that section was Beethovens 5th piano concerto, and it worked so so well with the video

[WarpZone]

A lot of composers were more prolific than we might expect due to only hearing their most popular works all the time. I believe there are 300+ Beethoven works that we haven't heard just because nobody's gotten around to recording them.

[CMoon]

Nope, you can actually purchase the complete works of bach. They take up over 150 CDs. You are absolutely right though that many artists are more prolific than we give them credit for and there probably are many composers who have not seen all their music recorded, but Bach isn't one of them.

On the other hand, many composers have lost works--I don't know how frequently they know whether a work is lost or not (it is easy when you have say op. 1-4 then op. 6-9 that something happened to op.5, but as you might guess, it isn't always that convienant). Bach on the other hand has a lot of stuff attributed to him that may or may not have been composed by him. If anything, the works appearing under his name may be 'over recorded'.

[rtan]

What you have to remember is that composing (and actually many sorts of artistic activity) has become more and more about criticising underlying principles of production and developing new ones than about creating the work itself. For example in Bach's time it was possible to learn composition by picking up a book like Fux's "Rules of Counterpoint" and just practicing in a sort of mechanical fashion; when you composed you just sort of juggled the rules in your head and tried to find creative ways of applying the rules, rather than having to spend years developing an entirely new rule set.

This is why, for example, it was possible for Bach and Mozart to compose while walking in the countryside (and also why Mozart was able to compose artistically legitimate work at a young age); it also explains how those people could be prolific - the work sounds amazing as an expression of raw computing power, of course, but the amount of -development- is not all that different from somebody like Debussy, for example. The main difference is that Debussy had to spend a decade or two suffering and composing work that nobody would listen to (perform), since only work that sounded sufficiently new would be deemed sufficiently artistic to warrant performance/listening to.

As an aside, you might do better trying to compare different recordings of Bach rather than trying to encompass the entire output. I find that the most common mistake with people approaching classical music, they attempt to accumulate it instead of understanding it, for which listening to the whole corpus is unnecessary and perhaps even distracting. After all some of the music was written for somebody's birthday party and never intended to see the light of day again.

[WarpZone]

To clarify, I had meant Beethoven, not Bach.