Recently I have come to consider the amazing fact of the taste of my shift in music. I have gone a long way since I was in high school, started to addict to Mendelssohn's violin concerto in e minor and Beethoven piano sonatas by Kempff(of course before that there was Chinese traditional music carried down by my father). I then favored the Romanticism over everything else, immersed in Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Schubert, etc., for a long time. Then maybe Bach came along with Mozart, which I was ok with in general but adored some of their works.
Then I moved to the US and suddenly the world music started to take over classical for the most part--some of my favorite include the Indian classical Hindustani music, Indonesian gamelan music, the Irish gigs and reels, and the Brazilian Bossa Nova. Many of those music I also had an opportunity to play. Then I spent some time in China and was really into French Jazz and Chanson. Popular music, I was never preoccupied with them, but liked some pieces here and there over the years, such as MJ, Jay Chou, Taylor Swift, Such Great Heights, and some others. What amazes my is that now I am in a place that I have so much variety to select from in all these, but I keep coming back to one composer--J.S.Bach. There is no doubt that Western art music is still the most close to my heart, but it seems a little puzzling that I keep coming back to Bach: with all other varieties just with in that tradition, why Bach? I am not sure. Maybe it has to do with my taste--favoring pure instrumental music over vocal music, and intellectually, Bach's polyphony can never fail to keep my brain activity at a rather satisfying and exciting level musically/sonically/auditorily, maybe just for the mere reason that there is always a lot of structures going on in any moment with his keyboard polyphonic music. The other reason may be that although often perceived as having little variation of rhythm and meter, Bach's keyboard music actually is very catchy and very motivating in terms of moving my body. Some one might mistaken me while I engage with Bach for some rock song. There is no surprise there actually since a lot of his style did come from dance music at that time. Finally, Glenn Gould's re-creation really made it more intriguing. So, in any case, salute to J.S. Bach, and his brilliant keyboard music: English Suites, French Suite, Partitas, Toccatas, Prelude and Fugue, Inventions, Goldberg Variations, Harpsichord Concertos, Italian concertos, the art of fugue, etc. And thank you to Glenn Gould, whom I have listened to for over a decade and still excites me over anything else.
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