Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/09/is-bach-the-greatest-achiever-of-all-time.html

by surprisetalk • 3 years ago

95 99 3 years ago

marginalrevolution.com

pndy• 3 years ago

he probably was since we're wondering 5 times already; last time 2 weeks ago:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

timost• 3 years ago

I'm not affiliated or anything but The Great Courses' "Bach and the High Baroque" [0] course is a great Series on Bach (Robert Greenbert's courses are great overall).

0: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/bach-and-the-high-ba...

dakial1• 3 years ago

Not ready to throw 300usd on audio. Is there any good podcast with the history of music?

lettergram• 3 years ago

You can get it on audible for 1 credit or free

FredPret• 3 years ago

Check out Wondrium - CAD20 per month for I think the entire Great Courses catalogue

RobinL• 3 years ago

Seconded, I'm not particularly a fan of classical music but all of his lectures are really excellent

lordnacho• 3 years ago

I feel like I have to channel my old math teacher.

It was Euler.

He also lived without electricity, and went blind too. And yet he figured out a huge amount of interesting stuff, roughly corresponding with high school math. Euler also moved across countries.

tmtvl• 3 years ago

How's the saying go, everything that wasn't invented by Euler was invented by Gauss?

geertj• 3 years ago

The saying we had in my uni is that most math discoveries are named after the second person to publish them, because we can’t name everything after Euler.

joaquincabezas• 3 years ago

and without ChatGPT…

vkazanov• 3 years ago

Math-wise Euler was more about establishing standard approaches than anything else. In addition to that, his contributions to graph theory and topology were substantial if not defining.

His contributions in physics were truly groundbreaking, a lot of traditional theoretical mechanics is coming from him mostly.

And not even all of his works in Latin were translated yet...

throw0101b3• 3 years ago

Around the year 2000, amongst the other things that were going on, it was also the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. Someone at the record label Teldec got the bright idea to release the entirely of Bach's work, and so a 153-disc box set was produced:

* https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/the-complete-b...

* https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2013/Apr13/B...

* https://www.amazon.com/Bach-2000-Johann-Sebastian/dp/B00001I...

A few years later they released a digital copy, with all the music made MP3s on a USB stick, with PDFs of the booklets:

* https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/apr/17/complete-bach-...

Edit: Somewhat related, is the All of Bach project:

All of Bach is a project of the Netherlands Bach Society with the aim to perform and record all of Bach's works and share them online with the world for free. With the finest recordings, performed at special locations and with great attention to image and sound. Don't want to miss a recording of All of Bach? Then subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you would like to help us complete All of Bach, please consider a donation.

* https://www.bachvereniging.nl/en/allofbach

* https://www.youtube.com/@bach

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands_Bach_Society

sbrother2• 3 years ago

Deutsche Grammophon produced something similar recently, which I was lucky enough to get for Christmas last year: https://www.bach333.com/en/

It is stunning in every way; I highly recommend it for any Bach fans!

greenpresident• 3 years ago

A playlist destroys the magic of the monumental achievement that this represents but visualizes the quantity pretty well:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4jjc7SCCeXZ0PmvnKZgjpx?si=...

750 performers contributed to 260 hours of recordings. The three hours I rounded up would represent a major part of some other‘s work.

throw0101b3• 3 years ago

Crikey, they have an unboxing video (and the musical samples they use in it sound so good/atmospheric in my headphones):

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8EuGZk74io

I am so tempted to get this (even at CA$ 800, per amazon.ca), but I'm not sure I have the actual physical space to store it.

spicymaki2• 3 years ago

I am hoping to live long enough to see his 300th year celebration.

atombender• 3 years ago

The Netherlands Bach Society (which sounds like an organization for people who are into Bach, but it's an ensemble, though one that has been in existence for more than 100 years) is fantastic. Some of my favourite Bach performances are by them [1].

Another Dutch "complete Bach" project from recent years that I enjoyed: Leusink's complete set of recordings of Bach's sacred cantatas with the Holland Boy's Choir and Netherlands Bach Collegium (1999-2000), recorded over the span of just 15 months. A year ago I listened to the entire thing, which took me three months.

(It's quite good. But in my opinion, this haste is reflected in the performances a little bit; they are very competent, to be sure, but they lack some nuance, perhaps especially in the sound mix. For whatever reason, I much prefer the NBS recordings of most of these cantatas. (I don't really like Sytse Buwalda's voice, either.) Compare their BWV 21 [2] with NBS [3]. The beautiful interplay between first violin and oboe in the NBS recording is rather lost in the Leusink version, and the sound muddier. Admittedly the NBS version appears to replace the organ with some extra strings, but to me it just sounds crisper and more carefully performed. This really extends to everything. I hope NBS will one day release a complete cantata box set.)

[1] https://youtu.be/N6sUlZa-IrU?si=0Ls7CTQ4UiMyDB0b

[2] https://youtu.be/JGT0iPpU9is?si=qVMJTYhANI8adHop

[3] https://open.spotify.com/track/6MLmB5GDhAJr3cxMKKXUzs?si=xcV...

eterevsky• 3 years ago

9. Never experiencing true defeat or setback

I don't think this is correct. Bach was seeking a position of court composer (like Handel) and even sent his 6 Brandenburg Concertos to Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721. He didn't get the position. Brandenburg Concertos are some of his best works and I can't imagine how much top-quality secular music he could have written if he got the position.

nathell• 3 years ago

Also, why on earth would this metric be important? Failure is a fact of life; one needs to experience it many, many times on the road to grandmastery. I’m pretty sure Bach had. It makes more sense to cherish than deplore it.

tgv2• 3 years ago

10 of his 20 children and his first wife died. That's enough setback for most of us. He was imprisoned over quitting his appointment, if you want to add some. It really is a weird criterium.

jonstewart• 3 years ago

I would include the following metrics as relevant for that designation: 1. Quality of work.

It’s like Cowen can’t help himself at this point. The world would be better served if he spent more time reviewing ethnic restaurants than publishing thoughtfarts like this. I guess it’s a better use of Koch Brothers money than their usual pursuits, at least.

mgaunard• 3 years ago

No.

(Betteridge's law of headlines, etc.)

acosmism• 3 years ago

I am damn sure i will get down-voted here but...drake

tempodox• 3 years ago

Which one, Nick Drake or Sir Francis Drake?

jimmywetnips• 3 years ago

Drake the type of guy to end his pr request with a <3

gmuslera• 3 years ago

History is written by the victors. The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture.

Without dismissing Bach's work (or the others named in the discussion, I would had picked Leonardo with my shallow default knowledge on the topic) we should acknowledge how biased is what we know. Not just because how we select what we should focus on, but how partial is the information that managed to reach us today.

Jensson3• 3 years ago

History is written by the victors

No it isn't, history is written by people looking at old documents. Losers write a lot of history as well since it isn't like the victors go and kill all the losers or burn down all their documents.

The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture.

Yes, the history taught to us depends on where we live, not who won back then. If you are in country A they will say their glorius wars conquered B, if you are in country B they will say the tyranny when ruled A was a horrible time. History wasn't written by A, both sides gets to write most of the time.

hotdogscout• 3 years ago

There's also self criticism.

People are quick to dogpile on entities that do self criticism while proud egoists who never analyze themselves rarely get that.

genman• 3 years ago

> History is written by the victors
No it isn't, history is written by people looking at old documents.

Perhaps in very recent history but the old documents have been written by contemporary and there are many clear cases when the history has been rewritten by a tyrants e.g. politicians. I even know at least one large country based on multiple historical lies they tell to themselves and try to force upon others.

Defacing old sculptures and paintings to erase people from the history is another clearest example of this practice.

tgv2• 3 years ago

Rather trite cultural relativism.

But Bach didn't even write the history, did he? Wasn't considered that great in his time. Rather, he was almost forgotten.

And let's forget about the rest of the analogy by ignorance.

flenserboy• 3 years ago

History is very often written, & our understanding of it shaped, by the losers. Case in point: Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_W...).

noch3• 3 years ago

History is written by the victors. The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture.

I know you imagine that this is a profound observation but unfortunately it isn't. We all have it in our teens and twenties then we realise (decades later if we're unlucky) that it means much less than we thought.

We imagine that the work that reaches us now is so incomplete as to render present judgements about the past invalid or so inaccurate as to be misleading or useless. But culture and civilisation, are in a real sense, defined as what _endures_.

When it comes to the values that endure, it is more likely than not that humans pass along "the best things". Culture, after all, is downstream of genes and evolution.

There is no "better culture" hiding somewhere but hidden by our biases or by a conspiracy of victors. There are no better artists lost to the past who were so good that had they not been lost our knowledge and appreciation of art today would be far different and superior to what it is now.

"Acknowledging how biased is what we know" is similarly not as valuable an idea as it sounds because acknowledging bias doesn't actually reveal better information. The worst that bias can do is impede arriving at rational logical conclusions, and that is easily corrected by debate amongst enough people over a long enough period.

Another way to say this is we are always collectively evaluating stuff in the past based on the best information we have available now. To acknowledge a putative bias doesn't take you _outside_ of the sphere of our knowledge of the past in which we are making judgements because even the fact that you can think and utter that statement is a result of the cultural values that were given to you and are thus already a part of the culture.

There is nothing _outside_ of culture.

wbl• 3 years ago

The irony is you are posting this on an article about Bach. For about 200 years if people said Bach they meant C.P.E., not J.S. It wasn't until Mendelssohn performed the St. Matthew Passion that people began to reevaluate their attitudes and Bach assumed the place in the pantheon of composers.

How we evaluate music is deeply subjective. The complex harmonic and counterpunctal vocabulary of the Baroque was passe by the time Bach died, replaced by the simplicity of the Classical period. And then romanticism kept the harmony, but created sweeping emotion rather than deep craft. Then look at jazz where the relationships of chords are entirely changed. So yes, there are works that people overlook and reevaluate.

ekianjo• 3 years ago

Not just because how we select what we should focus on, but how partial is the information that managed to reach us today.

Maybe for some really old stuff, but musical production at the time of Bach's is something entirely different. There's no other genius like him out there, and that's a fact.

motoboi2• 3 years ago

A great achiever (much more than Bach IMHO) was Émile Littrè, the French author of several massive works but better known as the author of Dictionnaire de la langue française.

kleiba• 3 years ago

"much more than Bach" though??

motoboi2• 3 years ago

Not in geniality, but the article is not about that is about production achievements.

dudul• 3 years ago

Victor Hugo could be on the short list.

yannccc22• 3 years ago

Azimov also

yannccc22• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov_bibliography_(c...

mkl95• 3 years ago

It depends on your definition of greatness. Alexander the Great and Napoleon come to mind.

hobs• 3 years ago

It really does depend on your definition - "If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes." might be apocryphal but metrics of success are so weird to apply to an individual externally, everyone is going to have their own slightly different definition.

noch3• 3 years ago

It depends on your definition of greatness. Alexander the Great and Napoleon come to mind.

Obviously, "it depends". In fact, in the article, a comprehensive list of criteria is given.

wslh• 3 years ago

Yes, Alexander the Great died at 32 years old while Bach died at 65. Apples and organges but two great achievers.

danielvaughn2• 3 years ago

The comment thread on that page gets into Newton and Neumann, but I think artistic/scientific achievements are apples/oranges. Doesn't make sense to compare the two, because the standard of quality is so different.

Even within artistic disciplines, how would you compare Bach, Shakespeare, and DaVinci? Shakespeare alone added 1,700 new words to the English language (that we still use today). DaVinci painted so meticulously that his works have hundreds of layers of paint that are thinner than a strand of hair.

Comparison is the thief of joy - better to just envision a "hall of fame", where once reached, it doesn't matter where you place.

Jensson3• 3 years ago

Comparison is the thief of joy

Comparing others is a source of joy, people love gossiping or just talking about who is better etc. Comparison is only a thief of joy when you compare yourself to others, but comparing Newton to Einstein etc is an endless source of fun, many people have enjoyed these discussions over the years.

atoav2• 3 years ago

Yeah, but those are people who are nowhere near that level of excellence at all.

Gossip for those people is often just a mechanism to increase their self esteem in front of bigger than life artists who truly changed the world. It is a bit like music lovers who have strong opinions about everything, while not being able to play a single note on any instrument. For them comparing the great musicians on that level makes them feel important too – if they can't walk the walk they at least try to talk the talk. Meanwhile most actual musicians are usually far more tolerant about the types of music they would consider interesting, because for them everything new they hear is something that can be used as an influence for creation.

So if someone asks whether Bach or thee greates Jazz musicians on the height of their game were the greater artists, any musician with half a brain cell would reject the question, because the question doesn't even make sense. Both things are absolutely masterful within the ideas they tried to explore. And those were different ideas.

That would be like comparing a masterfully built modern bridge to gothic cathedral. They are from different times, have been created in different societies, with different goals in mind with a different knowledge base, etc. Any comparison that would be worth anything would have to account for all these different factors and then land at a result that would be highly subjective anyways (which is not a bad thing if you are interested in using that comparison to increase your own self worth in front of the architects who planned those – but futile otherwise).

drewcoo2• 3 years ago

comparing others is a source of joy

We are a social species. And a pattern-sensing species. Enjoying comparing things, especially people, combines our defining traits.

tesdinger• 3 years ago

How do we know Shakespeare added words and was not the first one to write them down? Or do you mean the latter?

danielvaughn2• 3 years ago

No idea, that’s just something I’ve heard repeated lots of times. I’d always assumed he coined them.

throw0101b3• 3 years ago

* https://gizmodo.com/no-william-shakespeare-did-not-really-in...

* https://theworld.org/stories/2013-08-19/did-william-shakespe...

amazingman• 3 years ago

Comparison is the thief of joy

I've never loved this aphorism. Comparison is a crucial component of knowledge discovery. It would be more apt to say that ranking is the thief of joy.

drewcoo2• 3 years ago

I think that competing to better define joy-stealing is the thief of joy.

riwsky• 3 years ago

Sounds like da Vinci wins, by dint of being both an apple and an orange

gyomu• 3 years ago

If earth suddenly had to be evacuated and I was limited to grabbing the ten best people to save, [Bill] Watterson would definitely be in there. There is a point where you stop rating people — you just rate them among the best. Can I say that Mozart is better than the Beatles? I can’t. I can just say that they both have gone above the cloud layer and are up there near the sun. They both are on that short list of things that are essential. Watterson is an essential.

— Brad Bird, Academy Award-winning director of Ratatouille and The Incredibles

AtlasBarfed2• 3 years ago

The Beatles are vastly overrated and will die off with the boomers.

legitster• 3 years ago

DaVinci painted so meticulously that his works have hundreds of layers of paint that are thinner than a strand of hair.

DaVinci had really bad technique and couldn't help but endlessly fiddle with his paintings. Many of his paintings never saw the light of day because he ruining them and never finished them.

The Last Supper that we know and love was actually a superior copy made by one of his proteges because his original fresco fell apart after a few years owing to his "innovative techniques" - he painted on dry plaster because he took way too long on it.

DaVinci was wonderfully imaginative and a very unique artist, but I don't think his reputation has been fully earned by his achievements.

justoreply• 3 years ago

he painted on dry plaster because he took way too long on it

that is not true: he new that he was not able to paint a normal fresco, so he tried a different technique, that didn't work out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo)#Med...

eviks• 3 years ago

Clearly not since neither the list of metrics nor theire relative importance nor even the assessment within a metric is anywhere close to being solid enough to allow measuring the known information (and then there is also a lot we don't know about the past).

Also, > 8. Ending up so great that he could learn only from himself.

how does greatness prevent you from learning from others? For example, don't greatest athletes continue to benefit from coaches?

j7ake• 3 years ago

Bach is definitely the greatest achiever in music of all time.

His fame also took a long time to establish. He was well known during his life but nothing like the mythical legend he is now today.

cesaref2• 3 years ago

I thought Bach was relatively obscure till Mendelssohn promoted his music to a new generation?

Anyhow, there are many many great composers from different genres, and if you consider the aim to be communication (rather than the quality of the music itself) who would argue against the Beatles, or Taylor Swift as the greatest achievers of all time in music?

Sharlin2• 3 years ago

Well, between Bach and Mendelssohn, baroque music had been out of fashion for a century. Mendelssohn revived interest in Bach's music. Doesn't mean Bach wasn't renowned in his own time.

meindnoch• 3 years ago

Only after Gödel and Escher.

psvv• 3 years ago

This feeling may have more to do with the nature of biographies than anything.

thih92• 3 years ago

How much better he was than his contemporaries.

Define better; Bach wasn’t appreciated that much when he was alive. Only later we decided that his works are the bees knees.

“Throughout the 18th century, Bach was primarily valued as an organist, while his keyboard music, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, was appreciated for its didactic qualities.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach

mistercheph2• 3 years ago

That is total BS. How would we even know that if it were true?

Do you remember being instructed not to cite wikipedia as a source?

spicymaki2• 3 years ago

Here is another story: https://saskatoonsymphony.org/the-nearly-lost-brandenburg-co...

The Brandenburg Concerti were ignored until around 1849 and nearly lost again during WWII. How ridiculous is that?

quonn• 3 years ago

This kind of „analysis“ also gets written i. sources that are not wikipedia. And that‘s better?

thih92• 3 years ago

Do you have a source? I.e. one that shows the Wikipedia quote is incorrect?

Allybag• 3 years ago

You could respond a little less aggressively.

This guy isn’t writing a thesis, he’s posting an internet comment.

whatever1• 3 years ago

What about the Bernoulli family?

kragen• 3 years ago

a surprising thing i learned about bach is that on november 6, 01717, he was imprisoned due to a dispute with the authorities, so i try to celebrate november 6 as bach day

https://derctuo.github.io/notes/hacker-calendar.html

possibly being among the greatest achievers of all time is not compatible with being perfectly obedient

i'm not sure how tyler cowen doesn't consider this a 'true defeat or setback', except in the sense that today only bach scholars remember the name of the guy who imprisoned him

orenlindsey• 3 years ago

Never experiencing true defeat or setback

Why is that a criteria? Most setbacks aren't really something the person can control (Although, in Napoleon's case, he probably could have).

Also, failure is going to happen in life. You just need to accept it.

yousif_123123• 3 years ago

He definitely achieved a lot, but its not useful to undermine others or say he achieved more (and therefore they are beneath him) since it's not really that kind of competition.

These people pushed forward human civilization. They are all an inspiration to us.

motohagiography• 3 years ago

Bach's work would have been lost to obscurity were it not for Mendelssohns rediscovery and promotion of his work about 50y after J.S. Bach's death, and causing a revival that kept the work alive. I'm trying to find good sources for the story as it's part of an example how someone trying to assimilate into european society (Mendelssohn was a jewish convert to christianity, likely to find work) was responsible for defnining one of its pillars just by appreciating it. J.S. Bach's son, J.C. apparently tutored a very young Mozart in London as well, so we can see how the seed of J.S. Bach's work propagated.

The piece I'm missing is that J.S. Bach's work contains several homages to Vivaldi, and there was something transmitted between them that is an understanding not just of counterpoint, but about symmetry and form that is fun to pursue in spare moments.

zozbot234• 3 years ago

The obscure Baroque composer Christoph Graupner possibly has more compositions surviving to the present day than his contemporary Bach, though admittedly a lot of Bach's work is now lost. Another notable composer from the same period was Georg Philip Telemann.

Aidevah• 3 years ago

This is partly true. Mendelssohn brought back the great religious works of Bach into the public consciousness (79 years after Bach's death, not 50 years). However, Bach was by no means unknown among the professional musicians, though his fame was of course eclipsed by his sons. If there was anyone who surveyed the breadth of music in the late 18th century, it was Burney, and he gave a very sympathetic treatment of Bach in his General History of Music. The young Beethoven was famous partly for being able to play the entire Well-Tempered Keyboard from memory, and his Op 120 variations were unmistakably composed with Bach's Goldberg variations in mind.

Mozart, who was himself a great master of counterpoint, was understandably delighted by the Bach fugues that Baron Van Swieten showed him. Mozart was of course very heavily indebted to Johann Christian, but several pieces were clearly homages to the elder Bach; the subject from the K. 394 fugue was clearly derived from the first of the WTK, and the K. 574 Gigue (composed in Leipzig, no less) is obviously Bachian pastiche. The armoured men chorus from the Magic Flute sets a protestant chorale (often used by Bach) in a Bachian setting. That's not to mention the string quartet arrangements of Bach's fugues that Mozart made.

flint• 3 years ago

Dolly Parton

justanotherjoe• 3 years ago

isn't jesus the obvious answer? or is religion cheating?

Tao33003• 3 years ago

Not cheating, but there isn't a good argument from the given criteria:

1. Quality of work.

2. How much better he was than his contemporaries.

3. How much he stayed the very best in subsequent centuries.

4. Quantity of work.

5. Peaks.

6. Consistency of work and achievement.

7. How many other problems he had to solve to succeed with his achievement.

8. Ending up so great that he could learn only from himself.

9. Never experiencing true defeat or setback.

There's a reasonable case to be made that Yeshua bin Yusuf was one of the more successful apocalyptic prophets in that time and place considering how much of his teaching comes down to us. I'd say there's a good case for checking off 1 and 2, but that's about it.

jll29• 3 years ago

I think I can agree with this. He was as prolific as Euler was in mathematics, but perhaps a tad more of a genius (hard to compare music and maths).

He seems to have been entirely internally driven by his genius and his commitment to the eternal and divine.

That's probably the only way to go strong for that long.

tomcam• 3 years ago

Bach played organ, harpsichord, flute, oboe, viola, violin, and bass. He probably played brass instruments too. He was so good he could sightread Bach but he could also improvise counterpoint in more than four voices simultaneously.

fortran77• 3 years ago

There was DiVinci, and in more modern times, Einstein.

smortaz• 3 years ago

Bach is the best proof we have that advanced aliens visited earth and took human shape :). like in that episode of star trek, The Traveler.

and based on the complexity of Fugues he was probably the world’s best multi-threaded programmer too :).

bluenose69• 3 years ago

See "Time Pressure", a novel by Spider Robinson.

Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?

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