Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Is there such thing as a Bach rabbit hole?

Bear with me for a moment as I try to puzzle this one out... It seems like there are certain artists who get totally plugged into Bach and go into a sort of Bach mania, to a much greater extent than people seem to over other artists. For example, I think you could probably call Martha Argerich a Ravel specialist for her great Ravel interpretations, but she also plays tons of other artists. Most people who play Chopin greatly, or Mozart greatly, also play lots of other composers greatly. However, with others, like Glenn Gould or Angela Hewitt or Simone Dinnerstein, and really lots of them, it sort of seems like it's ALL Bach and I feel like you can detect this sort of mad Bach fervor coming through when you watch interviews.

Is this a thing? What is it about Bach that make people go hog wild for his music to the point of playing it exclusively? Have you ever had this through-the-looking-glass experience with Bach's music?

Part of the reason I ask is current personal experience. It's like there's something about his music that's slightly outside my grasp or comprehension and it's like an itch right now to keep playing his music. I'm on my fourth Bach piece consecutively and suddenly seem to have forgotten the other stuff I wanted to pla. Is this some weird established piano phenomenon? I was just curious, really...

Dan Brown should write a book about Bach's music. I'm convinced it contains portals to other dimensions. Chopin went down the Bach rabbit hole to soothe his nerves before the ordeal of a concert. I did the same thing in between hospital visits when my husband had heart surgery.

Actually, I think there's rather more of a Chopin mania among pianists than Bach mania .

Can anyone name any winner of the Bach Competition, or even know of its existence, or where it's held?

But everyone here knows of the Chopin Competition. And it's one of the biggest and most prestigious piano competitions in the world, despite the fact that only one composer's music is allowed through all the rounds. Whereas the Tchaikovsky Competition isn't primarily about Tchaikovsky's music, and there're also other categories apart from the piano.

If it hadn't been for one Glenn Gould, I doubt that Bach would be quite as popular with pianists today. Harpsichordists have become completely sidelined because of him......

While a large number of Hewitt's and Gould's recordings are devoted to Bach; it's a little bit mislead to state that they played Bach exclusively. Here is a list of the number of available recordings that each of the two performers you mention have made :

Hewitt has made almost as many recordings (25) of other composers than she has made recordings of J.S. Bach :
. Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach (1)
• Johann Sebastian Bach (27)
• Ludwig van Beethoven (6)
• Emmanuel Chabrier (1)
• Frédéric Chopin (2)
• François Couperin (3)
• Claude Debussy (1)
• George Frideric Handel (1)
• Franz Joseph Haydn (1)
• Olivier Messiaen (1)
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1)
• Jean-Philippe Rameau (1)
• Maurice Ravel (1)
• Robert Schumann (4)

Gould made more recordings (240, total) of other composers than he did of J.S. Bach (122), in spite of the impression you have :

• Istvan Anhalt (1)
• Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach (6)
• Johann Sebastian Bach (122)
• Ludwig van Beethoven (44)
• Alban Berg (8)
• Georges Bizet (5)
• Johannes Brahms (16)
• William Byrd (2)
• Frédéric Chopin (2)
• Claude Debussy (1)
• Orlando Gibbons (8)
• Glenn Gould (3)
• Edvard Grieg (4)
• George Frideric Handel (3)
• Franz Joseph Haydn (9)
• Jacques Hétu (1)
• Paul Hindemith (8)
• Ernst Krenek (5)
• Franz Liszt (7)
• Felix Mendelssohn (4)
• Oskar Morawetz (2)
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (23)
• Barbara Pentland (1)
• Francis Poulenc (1)
• Sergei Prokofiev (7)
• Maurice Ravel (1)
• Domenico Scarlatti (8)
• Arnold Schoenberg (14)
• Franz Schubert (1)
• Robert Schumann (1)
• Alexander Scriabin (12)
• Dmitri Shostakovich (2)
• Jean Sibelius (10)
• Michael Stegemann (1)
• Richard Strauss (15)
• Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (3)
• Sergei Taneyev (1)
• Fartein Valen (1)
• Various (2)
• Richard Wagner (5)
• Anton Webern (1)
• Anton von Webern (4)

Source : Arkiv Music

Regards,

I would still argue that Gould was infected with the Bach-mania.

Many if not most musicians do not like his recordings of other composers, particularly the Romantics like Chopin which he tended to butcher.

Right, I get your point. I think I wasn't intending to say that they exclusively and only played Bach. Gould certainly plays other composers' music, some of it a bit weirdly. I went to an Angela Hewitt concert and there was a bit of Debussy spliced inbetween all the Bach stuff. Interestingly enough, she wrote in the liner notes for the concert that Debussy's "Pour Le Piano" is also a "French suite" in the style of Bach. I think she might be the only one who thinks that :P It was like there was a Bach spin on all her other interpretations... Sorry if I'm taking this a bit too far, I'm just a bit fascinated.

I wonder if that data actually proves the point though? Are there any other artists who have made 27 recordings of composer A but only a scant handful of recordings for composers B through Z? Or 122 separate recordings of, say, Schumann but 5 to 10 of all the other composers? Does that happen?

I'm curious to know what you mean by "a Bach rabbit hole."

The only definitions I've found, so far :

Rabbit hole may refer to:
- a rabbit burrow
- "down the rabbit hole", a metaphor for adventure into the unknown, from its use in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland a slang expression for a psychedelic experience, from the same usage

- an initial page or clue that brings the player of an alternate reality game into its fictional world
- Rabbit Hole, a 2005 play by David Lindsay-Abaire
- Rabbit Hole (film), a 2010 drama film based on the 2005 play, starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart

None of this seems to line up with anything in your initial post. Perhaps you can explain.

Regards,

I think I know what you are trying to say, and yes, for me, Bach can become an obsession. Several things I have noticed about myself:

The only music that seems to calm me when flying is Bach.

I cannot remember ever, once I got to a certain level, not studying/practicing/performing something by Bach.

A simple Aesthetics project last semester about the Goldbergs got completely out of hand and almost became a doctoral level dissertation.

Wow. Pounce! Look, you can disagree with the notion of it, and that is really fine. I wasn't trying to inflict any particular concept of Bach on you personally. The bit with the Nicole Kidman movie drama options, etc. is a bit much, isn't it? Incidentally, I meant it in the Alice in Wonderland sense, but it was really just silly figurative language. I'm sorry that you took exception.

I don't know, but there's a ragtime rabbit hole. It's kind of like being the Big Goofy Golden Retriever of musicians.

I think Bach had a great ear for melody, above and beyond everything else. And his use of sequences made those great melodies even more enjoyable the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time around.

And there's something satisfying about all those V-I resolutions and modulations around the circle of fifths.

BruceD's post sounded to me not like an objection but rather a request for clarification from someone unfamiliar with the metaphor. Under that assumption, here's an attempt at a definition. To go down a rabbit hole is to take a detour down a path that turns out to so fascinating one forgets or stops caring about the original destination.

I wasn't disagreeing with anything, I was quoting definitions from Wikipedia, which, admittedly, I ought to have put in quotes, but which I turned to as a source of definitions to understand the context of your expression. Since the "Urban Dictionary" didn't give me any explanation of the term, I used what I got from Wikipedia. As I implied, I had not heard the term used before outside of the traditional "Alice" and was just hoping for an explanation.

Now, I'm sorry I asked!

Thanks for your polite clarification.

Regards,

I just had a horrific flashforward to a world in which this were the case.

HAHA - but would it be so terrible? It did wonders revitalizing large public interest in DaVinci's artwork.

And I'm sure the great man would have been delighted. But the culture of today would pay a dear price.

" The world of publishing is in crisis. It's no coincidence that the worst published writer in the world today is also one of the world's most successful writers... Dan Brown. Now, Dan Brown is not a good writer, The Da Vinci Code is not literature. Dan Brown writes sentences like "The famous man looked at the red cup." ...and it's only to be hoped that Dan Brown never gets a job where he's required to break bad news. "Doctor is he going to be alright?" "The seventy five year old man died of painful death on the large green table... it was sad." "
- Stewart Lee

There is something that makes his music have a profound effect on us. I am relatively new to Baroque music. 3-4 years ago I never really knew about Bach. I heard of him as much as any other average person who loves music but I never played anything by him.

Let me tell you what happened. I got hooked! I had to listen to more so I started doing that and I came upon Glen Gould and I watched documentaries about him not so much because of him but because of his playing of Bach and the level of technical ability he had. I admire that.

Even now when I am playing Debussy and Brahms for the first time I am still looking back to the period when I studied some Bach pieces and I wish to learn another one.

I haven't played enough to have found out what I like best but playing Bach is very enjoyable and rewarding. I remember playing my first 3 part invention and at some point after I mastered it a little bit I would play it at home all alone and I'd play it over and over again and I'd be in sort of a trance state, I was trying to follow all the lines that the voices create and I got totally lost in it, it was a great moment for me. I haven't been able to experience that level of connection with any other composer just yet.

Did anybody here read "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams? It has its own theory about Bach's music, mentioned at the end. Unfortunately I can't tell much more about it without spoiling the book. But it's an entertaining read.

I haven't really worked this out as a theory, but I think there's a sort of "game" or "puzzle" aspect in much of Bach's music that is a relatively unusual experience for most pianists, and it can become quite absorbing.