Bach knew how to package it. He could fuse the rhythmic patterns of French dance, the grace of Italian melody, and the intricacy of German counterpoint all in one composition. He didn't just add voice and various instruments-he combined them to make the most of each. When text was a part of the package, he could write compelling musical symbols to illustrate those words. He created layer upon layer, yet the quality of sound wasn't buried, it became stronger and stronger.

Bach lived in the period of time we now call the Baroque Era, and this cultural background must have shaped his music and his way of thinking. This was a time of conflict. The religious wars of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter Reformation tore countries apart. Religious faith reached an emotional high, with both sides having their say through literature, art, and music. A new science was emerging. Newton was exploring and challenging the laws of motion, gravity, and light, and the same issues surfaced in the arts.

You might compare the music of Bach to the paintings of a somewhat earlier El Greco. In an El Greco, color and light moves our eye upward; the rhythm of the painting moves forward, no pauses, just echoes and layers of color. The music of Bach is full of overlaps as well as combinations of independent melodies. The result is a complex texture of sound. In an El Greco, you are allowed to gaze across, up, down, and diagonally. You can abandon your normal expectations of a painting. Bach also turned music inside out. In a work by Bach, you're invited to jettison your ideas of melody as a driving force in music. He melodized harmony; in other words, every melodic line implies a harmony and carries the same emotional content as harmony. Bach's music surges. It mirrors the roiling climate of the seventeenth century. It expresses the struggle and joy of the times. You will hear sudden contrasts, soft passages broken by blocks of loud melody. Bach's music is full of drama and tension.

The Baroque era was a time of emotion and a time of extremes, which find musical expression in the work of Bach. When the Bach clan got together in the German town of Leipzig, we could expect some extremes there, too. Wine, conversation, and music would have been in abundance. The Bach's were a close knit family, bound by common social standing and a shared status as outsiders. They were lower ranking musicians that were not quite respectable, and the fact that they were Lutherans also set the Bach's apart. This family was also bound by profession; it was the plan for sons to follow in their fathers' trade, and in the case of the Bachs, that trade was music. Johann Sebastian Bach had been trained as a violinist by his father and trained as a keyboard player by an older brother. He had four sons who were published musicians, but when we hear the name Bach, usually the reference is Johann Sebastian Bach. We know that Bach liked to drink, liked to laugh, and the whole family enjoyed folksongs. Bach was not as famous in his own lifetime as you might think. His sons' careers overshadowed his. By the end of his life, Bach was considered an old fashioned composer. His music was not exactly in mothballs, but it was on the back shelf of the choir room.

So, why did it take a century for Bach to be rediscovered by Mendelssohn? It has been said that he never really was discovered until then. Bach's music had to be distanced to be appreciated. Bach would not have made it in today's market. He did not pander to popular taste, did not travel widely, did not promote his own pieces. He, quite simply, was a workaholic. He completed over 1000 pieces, and was the all time church cantata champion, churning out on for every Sunday and feast day in the calendar. Bach had humility. He hand-copied the works of Palestrina and Handel. "I have worked hard," he said, "anyone who works just as hard will go just as far."

Bach needed his paycheck, but his mission was to God. Below his scores he often inscribed initials which translate to "for the glory of God" or "to God be the glory." The great philosophers of the Middle Ages believed that when we saw light filtering through stained glass, we were seeing God. Bach, according to his biographers, felt the same way about the sound of music.

Many of his pieces were written in multiples of three, the number of the Trinity. Bach was especially fond on the numbers 14 and 41, which roughly translate to a Greek form of his name. He had fun with numbers and has a unequalled ability to understand and use math-like rules. He employed techniques so complicated that no one could master them. Ten fingers were just not enough. He may have composed his canons for the same reason we solve crossword puzzles. They were a form of mental and musical gymnastics. In this era of burgeoning scientific study, it seems that Bach worked passionately to understand a kind of natural law about music.

Counterpoint was the bricks and mortar of composition in the Baroque Era, and Bach was the master of counterpoint. This is when two or more independent melodies are performed at the same time. Bach did not invent counterpoint, but he raised the standards to a level never seen before or since.

A canon is the strictest from of counterpoint in which on voice imitates the rhythm and interval content of another voice. Bach's canons can be incredibly complex. Imagine singing a simple round, like a Row, row your boat, where everybody ends up on the same line eventually. Now think about a canon where the leader starts on one note and the follower starts on another note, or a canon where a melody is played forward and backward at the same time. Get the picture? Bach's work with canons supports the Baroque belief that music was a science and these "Sounding mathematics" were a window in the universe.

His music is also highly organic. The whole is always related to the parts, and the piece would not work if any of the parts were missing. Bach's music is also highly inventive, and even the techniques he did not invent are inventive. Everything he wrote is characterized by a highly individualized sound.

Perhaps the combination Toccata and Fugue appealed to the Baroque fascination with the union of opposites. A toccata is a showoff piece. It lets a real musician, like Bach, outstrip the ordinary organ player with brilliant runs, rapid footwork, and elaborately repeated patterns.

A Bach fugue is an advanced form of counterpoint. We think of concert music as having two ingredients, a melody and an accompaniment. The melody is the solo voice. The accompaniment is the background. A fugue is a different story. It is all melody or all accompaniment. It does not have one emerging voice. It has many individual voices. But it all works together. A fugue is like a Utopian society... "where the individual is incomplete without the society and the society does not hold together without the individual." The word fugue means "Flight" and a fugue itself is like a musical echo or the flight of a bird...a melody is chased from one part of the music to another.

Twentieth century painter Paul Klee based a series of paintings on Bach's fugues, with clear references to the fugue's complexity-its changing character and echoing qualities. Fugue now seems a strange musical form with it's imitating and intertwining sounds. It embodies the tastes of another era...it's a musical antique.

We associate Bach with the Baroque era, but to say that Bach is a great Baroque composer limits his genius. The scope, depth, and significance of Bach so far outdistances that of other composers that you can't really compare him to another musician, you have to compare Bach to Goethe, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare.

Musicians each have their own ideas about why Bach is so important, but here are some points of agreement. Imagine a building that is so beautiful that everyone who walks into it, regardless of their age, status, or educational background, is moved. Also, imagine the same building, inspected by a team of the world's greatest architects and they are equally astonished. This is the greatness of Bach. His work has unmatched beauty and emotional power, combined with his unprecedented command of technical and mathematical skills.

Imagine an artist who can reach this degree of excellence in composition after composition. He wrote day after day; he wrote when he was grieving; he wrote under pressure; he wrote when he was in conflict with the town council of Weimar, which happened all the time. Yet virtually every piece is masterfully crafted, perfectly balanced in logic and feeling.

The Baroque Era was a time of invention and discovery, and one thing Bach confirmed is that a certain sequence of notes causes a similar emotional response from all human beings. Men and women across time lines, across cultural boundaries, all hear a common language in certain passages of music. Bach understood this.

Bach inspired Beethoven and Schumann. Stravinsky apparently began his every composing day by playing something out of the Well Tempered Claviere, just to get his ideas going. Twentieth Century jazz musicians use blue notes, rumba rhythms, and the tension and release of counterpoint. These are all techniques that give us a flashback to the work of Bach.

Let's take a look at a just a few of the hundreds of movies that have used Bach's compositions in their scores:

Dead Eyes Kiss the Girls The English Patient Trainspotting Se7en Faust Schindler's List Silence of the Lambs Passion Van Gogh Children of a Lesser God Monty Python's The Meaning of Life The Hunger Sophie's Choice

Spy Who Loved Me Picnic at Hanging Rock Barry Lyndon The Terminal Man Cries and Whispers Love Story Five Easy Pieces Isadora Sweet bird of Youth Les Infants Terribles Sunset Boulevard Fantasia Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde

It is almost impossible to find a musician who is not indebted to Bach. He made tapestries of moving parts and moving lines, but as one scholar said, "It is not for voices moving in retrograde motion but for moving hearts that Bach's music is so esteemed."