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Let's hear it for seriously joyful music!

You know, there is always SO much to love in this vastly entertaining, musically nerdy and very thick book. I think I could lose myself in its beauties indefinitely.

So much good stuff here, and I now have:

Such a wealth of appreciation for the music: music that’s pretty basic in form, but outrageously complex in feeling!

Such a breadth of admiration for this man Bach’s incredible achievements in - to take but one example - single-handedly developing Western music, without any help at all, to a limit necessitating a total discard of other ancient musical modes - still prevalent before his oeuvre became dominant!

Such an amazement at this single composer, who repeated so many subtle tricks with the diatonic scale - becoming an old Isaac Newton to modern music’s iconoclastic Einsteins - that he developed a plug-‘n-play point which today’s young pop composers are still picking up for their own present-day creations... right where he left off!

Such a humble bending of this knee to this one single, ingenious musical polymath whose capacious mind seemed always ready to transmute any random incident into a thundering monolith of pure stentorian sound!

(Say, who was this old guy anyway, who without making much biographical noise in his life, totally KNOCKS THE SOCKS OFF any one of his lucky listeners - luckier still, if we are blessed with enough of the rudiments of tonality and performance to GIVE VOICE to any one of this Olympian’s works?)

Just a quiet, pious, bargain-basement dull-type dude who minded his own business and ONLY DID MUSIC.

Johann Sebastian Bach is sorta like the dull guy in a corner who puzzles for hours over a grossly abstruse mathematical conundrum...

Or the kind of family guy who would rather play the same basic form of frisbee, with fancier and fancier loop-de-loops multiplying as the lazy Sunday afternoon turned to dusk, just himself - with his dogs and his laughing kids and in-laws around a warming barbecue...

Or like a puny choir boy who’s not afraid to sing “thanks be to God� at the top of his voice when his turn finally comes. And really mean it!

This guy was like - really, I mean REALLY, SQUARE.

And how many modern composers are gonna start off in one key - and digressing through endless meanderings, variations and permutations without number - return to the same old ordinary key in the end? And always respect the laws of tonality?

Not many, but if you’re dumb old Bach - practically ALWAYS.

Bach is predictable. But awe-inspiring.

Chromatic. But conservative with regard to never straying far from home (like a well-trained husband)?

Hideously complicated. But delightfully simple-hearted.

World, meet Bach.

A quiet, trustworthy chap who practises what he preaches. A guy you’d trust your grandkids with.

An unassuming nondescript man whose colossal compositions could rock the Pillars of Hercules off their foundations.

A nice, ordinary guy who wrote PHENOMENALLY superhuman music.

You know, John Dryden once said that music will eventually untune the skies.

When that final day ultimately comes, I hope the angels play from a universal soundtrack...

And I think they will choose Bach’s great Art of Fugue after the trumpet of Judgement peals out over humanity.’s lost, errant ways -

For, as the Scrolls containing our individual judgements are unsealed, and we cower in shame in the audience, those 21 sententious notes of Bach’s masterpiece will be ominously repeated -

Until the Blue Cerulean sky cracks wide open, leaving only Percy Byshe Shelley’s “White Radiance of Eternity!�

Forever and Ever.