Bach to the Future

Way back when in 1968, the Cardinals got beat in the World Series by Mickey Lolich and Denny McClain. The Democratic convention got the best of Mayor Richard Daley. And the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey confounded anyone who saw it.

I didn’t see game seven of the World Series..it may have been a day game, I don’t know. I saw the newspaper coverage of the demonstrators and police in downtown Chicago. And I didn’t see the movie…..but I was curious enough about it to get Arthur Clarke’s book out of our school library.

Sitting here on my couch, typing on my iPad, it takes some imagination to recollect how very strange the date 2001 sounded back then. Men in spacesuits were part of our vernacular; my dad worked with the massive computers of the day; but the next century was farther in the future than Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman were in the past. The movie was rife with symbolism and ambiguity and I admit feeling so uncomfortable with the part of the book when HAL goes rogue that I skipped past it as quickly as I could.

It’s funny what the mind chooses to remember. Apes and aliens aside, it is the music that remains after all these years. 2001 made Richard Strauss popular for a season as his brooding and melodramatic tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra introduced the black monolith that is one motif of the film. But deep into the book, when Astronaut Bowman is rocketing deeper and deeper into the Solar System all alone, he talks about the music that has been his company: progressing from the Romanticism of Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Brahms to the Classicism of Haydn and Mozart.  Finally, he says, he settles almost exclusively on Bach, finding inspiration and comfort in his infinite variety.

It is only now in my musical journey that I’m beginning to appreciate that observation. I'd always felt aggrieved for my favorite geniuses, Beethoven and Brahms, not as much for the dismissal of their grand concertos and symphonies, but because Arthur Clarke seemed not to admire the almost modern dissonance and complexity of their later chamber works.  But these days, while I’m road tripping over familiar highways, a Bach cello suite, sonorous or sprightly, is the perfect companion for making the miles fly by. And if I’m practicing my clarinet and open the Bach book to an Allemande or Bouree with a bunch of accidentals and some tricky fingerings, it’s far better music than I deserve…..