Bachanalia

if you cast your eyes briefly to the left, you'll see that i'm currently listening to The Glenn Gould Silver Jubilee Album. ben had suggested that i listen to bach's The French Suites as performed by gould, but he graciously added "...anything by Bach." so, my local library had gould's silver jubilee album featuring bach's italian concerto, so i took it and have been listening to it for the past several days. i have to tell you up front that i don't and never have listened to a lot of classical music. i haven't studied it, i haven't studied music appreciation. i will admit that although i took piano lessons for a year, played trumpet in band for a year, and have played guitar for over 30 years, i don't have the greatest attention span for music without lyrics (for some reason, this CD by Lunasa is the lone exception; i can listen to it all the time). so, my comments here are going to be that of someone talking out his ass about something he has no knowledge of. this bach stuff is beautiful. really. intricate, precise, melodic....pure music. you can really get lost in it. but....and i may be totally off-base here...it is music for the sake of music. it is beautiful, but it's not stirring. you know? i don't feel any passion or any great emotion in bach's music the way i do when listening to dvorak's new world symphony or tchaikovsky's symphony #1 (the only two pieces of classical i can really claim to have listened to much); i'm not swept away to another place the way i am when i listen to Lunasa; my spirit isn't moved the way it is when i listen to that clip ben posted of abdullah ibrahim playing "water from an ancient well" which, as ben rightly said, can bring tears to your eyes. with bach, my soul isn't stirred; instead, i see visions of musical notes and fingers moving with great precision up and down the keyboard. not that there's anything wrong with that. sometimes, you want pure music for music's sake. maybe i'm an idiot and everyone else in the world feels great depths of emotion when they listen to bach; i just hear music. pure, beautiful music. but just music, as if he's mastered the craft of music but not the art of it. at any rate, i've enjoyed listening to it, so thank you, ben. given a choice between the two, though, i'd reach for the abdullah ibrahim 98 times out of a hundred.