Re: GG: Bach & analytic/creative tasks

[Robert Clements <clemensr@mailhost.world.net>]

At 11:49 2/5/1997 -0500, Mark Williamson wrote:
>
>     Hmmm, that is a good question.  Like most of you, I like to 
>     listen to Bach anywhere and everywhere.  And a lot of other 
>     18th century music for that matter.  But it is certainly 
>     true that one can be distracted from the task at hand; all 
>     good music has that tendency to make you want to pay 
>     attention to it and not to something else.  That's what 
>     music is supposed to do (among other things).
>     
>     There are a few people in my office who listen to music 
>     while they work.  I tend to work in dead silence because my 
>     job is very hard and sometimes very boring, so I have to 
>     concentrate.  But I listen to music on the way to work and 
>     on the way home, and when I'm at home I'm usually either 
>     listening to music or playing music.  Listening to music 
>     goes very well with cooking, homebrewing, mathematics, and 
>     bouncing the kiddies on the knee, which are my other 
>     interests.
>     
>     Mark

My own taste in music (whether while working; or simply listening for
pleasure) tends towards 20th century eclectic - anyone else like Arnold;
Coleridge-Taylor; He Zhanhao; Hovhaness; Searle; Theodorakis & Zhu Jian'er?
- with JSB a long way down the list of possibilities. The choice is strictly
personal... while i can't say i actually _dislike_ Bach's music (whether
played by GG or the ubiquitous A N Other); i can't say it means much to me,
either.

When the _Voyager_ selection of recorded music was being put together, one
of the suggestions collected by Sagan et al was to include nothing but music
by JSB; even though the personal making the suggestion thought "this would
be bragging". Personally: i've always wondered why... i think i could make a
pretty fair case that any alien intelligence decoding such a disc would
suspect we were a race of aesthetic automatons. The style which JSB is most
associated with is, basically, mechanical (many of his scores could fairly
easily be changed into graphs); & the respect granted to him is due to the
subtle way he manipulated a less-than-subtle theory of musical
composition... while any assessment obviously depends on the actual pieces
selected; without a suitable grounded in baroque musical history, our
hypothetical aliens might wonder whether JSB was some kind of compositional
typewriter....

(Somewhere in this mess of a computer memory, i even have the list of 60+
discs i carted around China... like PDQ Bach's _Gross Fugue_, it's really
something. If anyone wants to be seriously amused by a deranged sense of
taste gone beserker, drop me a line)

Still recovering from the experience of walking the length of the Grand
Canyon - in three minutes flat - at the _Window of the World_ themepark in
Shenzhen; to the less-than-idiomatic strains of Bach's _Air on a G String_....

All the best,


Robert Clements
clemensr@mailhost.world.net