236 years ago today – on January 1, 1782 – Johann Christian Bach died in London at the age of 47. The youngest surviving son of the great Johann Sebastian Bach (who himself had died 32 years before, in 1750), J. C. Bach attained a level of fame and respect in his lifetime that was far beyond anything ever experienced by his old man. In the centuries since, the elder Bach has rightly been recognized as the singular genius that he was. But we will not denigrate the son as we elevate the father, and thus J.C. Bach must be recognized as one of the most important and influential composers of his time. The Fabulous Bach Boys You want to talk good genes, great genes, crazy-awesome genes, a geneticists dream come true? Let’s talk about the Bach family. From the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the Bach family of Thuringia and Saxony, states in what today is central Germany, produced over eighty professional musicians, from fiddlers and organists to town musicians and court musicians to Kantors and Kapellmeisters, culminating – of course – with Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). (For our information: entries on the Bach family take up […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for JC Bach
Among the top pick-up lines of my generation was the irksome “what’s your sign?”. I myself never used the line because one, I was too embarrassed to do so and two, I never gave much credence to the whole astrology trip, even as an ice-breaker. If you ask me (which you didn’t, but then you are reading this post), our actual birthdates are much less significant than the dates on which we were conceived. Now please, I am not venturing into the social/religious/emotional minefield of “when” life begins (although I would invoke the joke that has a priest declare that life begins at conception, a reverend assert that life begins at birth, and a rabbi proclaim that “life begins when the kids go to college and the dog is DEAD!”). Rather, I’m merely pointing out that if the heavens truly affect our spirits and reproductive urges and fluids, then conception (and the physical activity that leads to such) seems much more likely to be affected by unseen gravitational tides than the rather more straightforward, contraction-dominated acts of labor and birth. I will gladly acknowledge the advantages of celebrating “birthdays” rather than “days of conception”. First (and we’re all adults here, […]
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