httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5Mv3T3ANjY

Glenn Gould playing Fugue of Praeludium No.22 in B flat minor (BWV 891) from “The Well-Tempered Clavier”

Today is Bach‘s birthday (1685-1750).

Frye in “The Teacher’s Source of Authority”:

It is only when we get to the point of having some sense of having the total subject in our minds that we begin to recognize a source of authority beyond that, of the poet or the creative artist whose work we are studying. If we are listening to music, let us say, on the level of Bach or Mozart, the response keeps shifting from the personal to the impersonal. On the one hand we feel this is Bach, that it couldn’t possibly be anyone else. On the other hand, there are moments when Bach disappears, and what we feel is; this is the voice of music itself; this is what music was created to say. At that level, we are not so much hearing the music as recognizing it. (CW 7, 503)