Bach never met Shakespeare. Sorry about the clickbait title. Stick around though, because as always with this site we’re probing the creative process and what inspires it. In the past few weeks I’ve personally been going down a deep well with Johann Sebastian Bach, father of western music, and how his mind worked. I’m finding useful lessons there that I thought you might find helpful if you’re a creator yourself. Special focus here is on writing, hence the Shakespeare reference.

And you don’t have to know a thing in the world about music.

Join me?

(There are loads of Youtube videos about what makes Bach great, but two excellent books from which I’ve drawn heavily here are Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner and Why Bach? An Audiovisual Presentation by Daniel Brown.)

Bach composed music primarily for Sunday church services and often wrote the music for existing hymns or verses written by someone else. It was an aesthetic puzzle for him to solve, and sometimes a difficult one. Certain notes clash with one another and can sound harsh. We (somehow) almost universally feel kind of sad with certain notes and sequences and kind of happy with others. We (again, somehow) expect certain notes to show up after others or else it feels weird and lacking closure. For whatever reason, western ears generally agree on quite a bit about how musical notes should string together into music. Strange, but true.

Bach knew his craft well, understood these basic principles and expectations, and steered his listeners like a sailing ship by leveraging them in his works. He didn’t settle for just solving these aesthetic puzzles but broke every rule and went to places with his imagination that suited his own dazzling, soaring intellect in the process. That helped lay the foundations for western music as we know it today.

I noticed the more I read about Bach’s compositional tactics that those who were analyzing the music would very often say things along the lines of “you expect this, but he does that”. Once you get your head around these fundamental expectations I’m talking about above, it gets a bit clearer what Bach was doing, and what it can mean for a writer or creator in different fields than his.

Here’s an example: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. This (in my opinion) is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. Bach fit this masterpiece on top of some stanzas written over 60 years earlier by a minister and musician named Martin Janus in 1661. It opens with Bach’s melody, followed by the first phrase of Janus’ chorale, then shortly thereafter the 2nd phrases of both works coincide flawlessly. The freedom with which he went gonzo with his own melody yet managed to fit without seams over the hymn is my point.

Bach was dancing.

Another example is particularly moving and gets to the heart of the spirituality and emotions that moved him when he was composing.

Sleepers Awake, a Voice Is Calling: An obscure 16th century pastor named Philipp Nicolai had just taken the job in the town of Unna when plague struck and killed half its people. His parsonage overlooked the cemetery. Suffering deeply, yet wishing to record his meditations to encourage the survivors, Nicolai wrote a collection he called “Mirror of Joy” which emphasized shining your own light in expectation of great things, not terrible ones. Bach built his own work on top of Nicolai’s hymn in a masterclass of weaving musical compositions.

In his piece, Bach presents his new melody entirely, then repeats the first three phrases (with 2nd and 3rd swapped) but with Nicolai’s melody in the choral part underneath. Again, separately they sound nothing alike, yet together they are flawless. At one point, Bach’s melody repeats its first phrase over Nicolai’s phrase that does not.

Did you catch that?

Bach wrote something that can repeat its melody and match perfectly in two different places on another melody. In this perfect weave, he was also weaving Nicolai’s times and his own – for Bach’s audience too was being encouraged to shine their own lights into a world that needed hope.

Last example, and another gorgeous one:

Air from the 2nd movement of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major. Click the link and listen to the incredibly talented Evangelina Mascardi (who has said she spent up to 6 months at a time learning Bach’s songs). You can stop after the first half when she pauses and moves on to ‘Gavotte’ to see my point here.

Listen closely for the melody – you’ll catch it right away. It’s really beautiful and poignant. People tend to describe this as, not sad…not happy…but something rather that reminds them of happy times, good memories, good friends. Keep listening though. You want him to repeat it. He doesn’t, not exactly. He adds all manner of embellishments and hesitations and dances around the melody he knows you want to hear again.

He gives you what you want, but embroiders it.

So what’s all this got to do with writing?

Recently, I came across a thorough article describing 49 effects possible in literature. At the time I first read it, I was just starting to examine Bach’s approach to composition and his freedom to innovate with tuning, different instruments, and other elements. I was seeing him play with his listener’s expectations, creating tension and dissonance and delaying resolution till it suited his dramatic purposes.

And I was seeing the same possibilities in this list of literary effects, such as pathos, irony, comedy, and others. Readers most certainly have common expectations and tropes, which can be similarly placed in opposition to each other. Bach mastered the elements of his craft and innovated wildly, though always staying in close view of what he knew were his listener’s expectations of resolution.

Maybe some principles apply here:

1. Consider your characters and their dynamics. Anticipate the readers’ expectations and play with that. Don’t shortcut and focus on “subverting”, which is obnoxious and unpleasant.
2. Innovate, but stay in view of the compelling engine driving the story…the central character dynamics. Don’t mess that up in your desire to make the plot happen.
3. Break the attention barrier with something energetic and wild. Bach’s church audience was rude, reading papers, talking loudly, ogling women, endlessly walking in late and leaving early. He demanded their attention with his craft. We should do the same.
4. Know the elements of your own craft. Be a professional – no obvious mistakes with grammar or plot holes, terrible dialogue or vague character motivations. It breaks the magic.
5. Feel it. Bach felt it in his soul. He was talking to God. If we’re going to try and make something new for the world, at least we could try and feel it as we do so.

Anyway, I hoped you enjoyed a layman’s take on Bach. Impressive genius, even if you don’t really understand all the nuances of what he was doing.

Till next time,