Millions of Dolphins and Trillions of Plants Can't Be Wrong
The Greatest Known Composer (So Far, at Least)
Who is or was the greatest composer of classical music? Obviously, the answer to that is subjective — it cannot be proven mathematically, or through the application of any scientific method to arrive at an incontrovertible conclusion; it is a matter of personal opinion, taste, or preference. Some would choose Beethoven; others Mozart, others Vivaldi, Handel, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Schubert, Brahms, or someone else; still others would abstain from even voicing an opinion because they are not very familiar with classical music or don’t like it — or think they don’t like it. I fell into that last category before I was introduced to Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, which soothed and warmed my heart while also stimulating my mind. It turns out that I grew to like Mozart and Vivaldi quite a bit, too (as well as others to a somewhat lesser degree), but Bach is in a class by himself.
How can I say that “Bach is in a class by himself” when I just admitted that it’s a matter of preference/personal opinion who the “best” was?
Consider the response of animals and plants to J.S. Bach’s music: In the August 8, 1988 issue of Awake! magazine, it was stated in a brief article entitled “Hooked on Bach”:
Friendly dolphins have shown themselves to be even friendlier with the help of classical music, claims researcher Dan Wagner. Using a hydrophone lowered into the Atlantic Ocean north of the Bahamas, Wagner found that wild dolphins reacted to the music by ‘swimming up to him and letting him tickle their bellies,’ reports the New York Post. It was also observed that while they responded to other types of music, “they seem to have a preference for Bach, and [Jean Pierre] Rampal on flute.” In another short article, “Produce with Taste,” printed in Awake! later that year (November 22nd issue), it was reported that:
A loudspeaker manufacturer in Japan has developed a system for playing music to promote the growth of plants in a hothouse. A technician explains that music stimulates plants to open their stomata, minute openings on a leaf that allow a plant to breathe. Not just any music, however, will do ... “Music must be limited to classical numbers only,” claims an Osaka farm that utilizes music to accelerate growth of produce. At least their melons and tomatoes have good taste—Mozart, Bach, and Vivaldi are their favorites.So, for dolphins and plants, four different composers were named as favorites. Bach is the only one who made both lists.
Musical genius and YouTuber Rick Beato waxes poetic about Bach's music in an episode of his channel which he titled What Makes Bach Great thus: “His limitless musical explorations expressed the order of the physical and biological universe in exquisite mathematical precision and detail. His music was written to express the divine beauty in all creation.”
Two other YouTube videos about Bach that you might want to watch are the biographical A Passionate Life and Beato’s Compared to Bach, We All Suck (a title he got from his interview with virtuoso guitarist Pat Metheny, who made that statement). I'm leaving those videos out until the end of the article, though, because the music you will hear in these would not have impressed me much if that had been my introduction to Bach — I think that if I had watched these without already being an aficionado of Bach’s music, I would have said something like, “Maybe he's good, but it's not for me.”
So without further delay, the following are a handful of my favorite interpretations of Bach's pieces that served as my introduction to the sublime majesty of his music. You can consider them to be a Bach sampler/beginning point:
Sleepers Awake (Wachet Auf, Ruft uns die Stimme)
If you enjoy any of these tunes even 31.4% as much as I do, I encourage you to search for other versions/interpretations by searching for “youtube [name of song]” in your browser.
Bach’s music is so evocative that it has been used in several movies over the decades. A few of the dozens of movies that have utilized The Genius of Eisenach's music are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Fantasia (1940), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), The Great Race (1965), Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972), A Bridge Too Far (1977), The Money Pit (1986), Die Hard (1988), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The Pelican Brief (1993), Mr. Holland's Opus (1995), Trainspotting (1996), The English Patient (1996), James and the Giant Peach (1996), Runaway Bride (1999), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Meet the Parents (2000), Unbreakable (2000), Minority Report (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), August Rush (2007), Annie (2014), Spotlight (2015), Ready Player One (2018), Oceans 8 (2018), Little Women (2019), The French Dispatch (2021), and When You Finish Saving the World (2023).
In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter won the Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. In it, he discusses Bach at length, including the mind-boggling complexity of his compositions — how he would weave the same general theme throughout the various voices (instruments) used in the song, albeit not just with simple harmony, but by playing the melody backward and playing it at different tempos. Now, any composer could do this; they could “work it out” — but how many could do those things and make them sound good, rather than contrived, boring, and “clashy” (for lack of a better word)? I don’t know if there is anyone besides Bach who could accomplish that. On that score, I’m from Missouri (the “Show Me State”) at any rate.
Although musicologists and sociologists have estimated Bach’s IQ was “only” 165 (barely in the “exceptionally gifted range” according to the chart here), I have to assume his creative IQ and musical IQ were at least in the 200s.
Here are the youtube videos I mentioned earlier which examine Bach’s music and life:
As my parting gift of unsolicited opinion, I want to state that I love almost all genres of music, from folk to funk, bluegrass to blues and jazz, country to classical, and reggae to rock and rockabilly, with the few exceptions being rap, death metal, and opera. I was glad to hear the following said of Bach in A Passionate Life above: “He didn't write a single opera.” I already knew that the G.O.A.T. wrote no rap or death metal, but I was gratified to hear that he also wasted no time or brain cells on opera.
Did anybody get my visual pun (you’d have to know German)?