How and why I listen to Bach
It's NOT for relaxation, fyi
A few weeks ago, I was chatting music with a friend. I listen to a lot of music. I tend to listen broadly, finding gems from a wide range of genres. Whenever someone asks me what kind of music I like I either freeze, unsure how to answer, or I say “good music.” It sounds dismissive, but that’s my honest answer.
Within this breadth, though, I have two home bases. These are the places on the musical map where I don’t just listen a bit; I go deep. So when my friend asked, I told her my home bases are (1) indie music from the 80s and beyond (Sonic Youth, their influences, and their successors), and (2) classical music.
She told me she hadn’t listened to much classical music but was interested and asked for recommendations. (Here you go, friend.)
First, a caveat
When I was younger and CDs were a thing, you’d walk past the music section at a Barnes & Noble and see CDs with names like “Classical music for bedtime,” “Classical music for relaxation,” or “Classical music for studying.” That’s not what classical music is for.
I love my mom’s pecan pie. She probably made it twice a year, every year, while I was growing up. My grandpa always asked for it on his birthday. He didn’t want presents; he wanted my mom’s pecan pie. To my palate, a good pecan pie—nutty, sweet but not over-sweet, flaky pie crust, fresh whipped cream on top—can’t be beat. I lost my grandpa about 15 years ago, and I lost my mom a few years back, but today when my wife makes a pecan pie, I’m transported back to my childhood, lingering on the front porch of our Minnesota lake cabin with family and friends on a warm August evening.
“Classical music for relaxation” is like saying “Mom’s pecan pie when you’re on-the-go and need to hit your macros.” Please don’t eat my mom’s pecan pie just for the macros. Have a Clif Bar and leave the pie for me.
Art doesn’t exist for relaxation. Art isn’t a tool. If it’s actually art, then it’s not worthwhile because it does something useful for you; it’s worthwhile because it’s good. It reveals truth in some way, or goodness, or beauty. If it doesn’t do that, then it isn’t art.1
OK: rant over. Here is the playlist (Spotify).
Bach
Start with Bach. You could honestly end with Bach if you wanted. I’m only exaggerating a little when I say that everything before Bach leads up to Bach, and nothing after Bach is better than Bach—just different.
Cello Suites
You might recognize the first one. I don’t know why this piece is so beautiful, but it is. If you look closely, it’s just one cello playing some chords or scales, but it’s beautiful and emotionally resonant. Bach’s music reveals something about the nature of reality, and how reality is, at its core, good. Or at least that’s what it does for me.
The first moment of the first suite is the most famous, but there are 35 more movements across six suites, and all are worthwhile.
Piano music
I love this album performed by Vikingur Olafsson. It’s a curation of a number of pieces by Bach that flow and cohere, despite being drawn from all across Bach’s corpus. His delivery of this 18th century music sounds like it belongs in the 21st century. He even has a moody Icelandic music video that would totally make MTV if MTV still showed music videos.
Violin concertos
My mom’s favorite piece of music was the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor. Check it out as live video—it’s fun to watch, not just hear.
Part of what makes Bach so great is this thing called counterpoint. A lot of music is “melody plus harmony”: one melody, plus some other bits of music that complement the melody. In much of Bach’s music, instead of 1 part melody + N parts harmony, you have N parts melody, all interacting with each other. Counterpoint creates musical depth, and is profound in other ways too: multiple voices that together create something greater than each individual voice, without collapsing into each other. (That’s kinda what we want in meaningful human relationships too, right?)
Choral music
When I first started listening to classical music, I found choral music inaccessible, but now I love it. Bach was a church musician first and foremost. He wrote over three hundred cantatas (narrative choral works), most of which were performed on normal Sunday mornings, during a Lutheran mass. Some of the most respected and studied music in history was whipped out by a church musician each week for Sunday worship.
Try Cantatas 140 and 147 as a starting point (they’re all numbered). This movement from 140 starts with a famous melody on violin, with cello and keys as counterpoint, and then...layers an entirely different song on top. Two songs, one sung and one played, starting and ending at different times, on top of each other. How does he do that?
Also check out another famous example from 147 that similarly assembles two different melodies into one. (Jump ahead to 16:09 for the specific movement.)
Beethoven
I’m skipping over Mozart and Haydn. They have some good stuff, but personally, I don’t connect with them as deeply as I connect with Bach and Beethoven.
If Bach reveals the goodness embedded in the structure of reality, Beethoven reveals something deep about the human soul. His music is passionate and dramatic, full of challenge and resolution.
Symphonies
As a starting point, listen to Symphony 7. The first three minutes are a little slow, a slow extended introduction, so keep listening—the next thirty-five minutes are worth it. Part of what makes this symphony so enjoyable and beloved is that all four movements are dances. It is rhythmic and driving and fun.
I once took my kids to the SF Symphony, and the program was some Schubert symphony first and Beethoven’s seventh symphony second. I’ll confess I find Schubert a little boring, which is probably on me and not on Schubert.2 Still: the contrast between Schubert and Beethoven was stark, like Schubert was “doing a symphony” and Beethoven was doing something transcendent, a master at work.
Here is the second movement. It’s a banger. All four are bangers, actually.
Next: Symphony 5. Get past the overplayed dum-dum-dum-DUM opening; it’s great from start to finish. Then Symphony 9, bigger and more complex, with its chorale finale. Then 2, 3, 6, 1, 8, 4. I guess they’re all good.
String Quartets
After Beethoven’s symphonies, take a risk with me and listen to the string quartets.
I adore his late quartets (numbers 12-16). Nos. 14 and 15 are my favorites. I wrote about them in an earlier post. Here is what I said.
The late quartets actually have an interesting story when it comes to taste. They’re pretty much the last things Beethoven composed, and most people hated them. They’re unusual, sometimes dissonant, exploring musical spaces and modes that had never been explored before. They were called “incomprehensible” and “indecipherable horrors” at the time. Even today, audiences struggle with them.
To others, they are some of the greatest music ever composed. Actually, that’s too small: they are amongst the greatest works of art in human history. Superlatives abound. Schubert: “After this, what is left for us to write.” Schumann: “on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination.” Stravinsky: “…will be contemporary forever.”
Start with number 15. Listen end-to-end, or just dip into the third movement. The whole work is great, but the third movement is remarkable for the emotional depth it reaches with a minimalist form. If you remember “Adagio for Strings” by Barber (the emotional music at the climax of the old movie Platoon) I’m reminded of that, but deeper, richer, better.
Sit with it a while. Listen to it a few times, until the contours become familiar. The strangeness will turn to beauty. Then, if you find yourself enjoying 15, spend time with 14. Equally good, more complex, more inaccessible, maybe my favorite piece of music ever. I’m sharing the fifth movement here, just to give a taste—it’s unique, and oddly funny—but you probably shouldn’t listen to just one movement apart from the rest of the quartet.
…and many more
This isn’t a History of Music essay; it’s a Where Should I Start essay. I’m going to resist the urge to pontificate on classical music history. I will put some more recommendations in a footnote, right here.3
Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt (“Option-u a” on your Mac keyboard) is my favorite composer since Beethoven. He’s composed good music since the 1960s, and is still alive, amazingly, 90 years old now. More than once, I’ve threatened to fly to Estonia to knock on his door before he dies. Imagine if you could meet one of the great artists of history? Wouldn’t you be tempted too?
I love Arvo P(-option-u-)ärt, mostly for the music, but for something else too.
He started as one of those weird, dissonant 20th century composers that critics loved. Like every great Soviet artist, he struggled with the tension between art and censorship. He bounced between being acclaimed and canceled more than once in his first few decades as a composer.
Meanwhile, he found himself drawn to earlier music sources, and especially Bach. In Soviet Russia, Bach was partly respected and partly considered retrograde, too religious, counter-revolutionary, not adequately socialist. Though long an atheist, Pärt found himself drawn to the Orthodox and Lutheran traditions of his pre-Soviet childhood in Estonia.
And so for almost a decade, after being censored and banned one more time by Soviet authorities, he stopped composing altogether. Instead, he immersed himself in art. He reached back to musical sources most people don’t listen to: Renaissance music, Gregorian chant, and ancient liturgical music. He wanted to find the deeper truth behind music.
After eight years, he started composing again, in a very different way. His first work was called Für Alina (Option-u u). Give it a listen.
It’s radically different from the dissonant music he wrote before. It is minimalist, spare, beautiful, deep.
Pärt composed dozens—hundreds?—of works in the decades that followed. They’re amazing, and they all follow this style. Try instrumental music like Spiegel im Spiegel, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Fratres, Tabula Rasa.
Keep pushing deeper and dig into the choral music next: Te Deum, Berliner Messe, Magnificat, I Am the True Vine.
Pärt was successful and acclaimed. His works were performed. He was a rising star in the Soviet classical music scene, and was starting to receive an international audience. Yes, he got censored; so did a lot of Soviet artists. He didn’t need to go silent for eight years. He could have apologized, written one or two State-friendly pieces, and continued on with his music. Many great Soviet artists did just that.
He went silent for eight years, he says, because he wanted to work on his soul.
Later in life, he said this: “The most sensitive musical instrument is the human soul.” He said the soul needed to “tuned” well in order to create.
I’m not getting mystical on you here. It doesn’t matter if the soul exists as some invisible metaphysical substance. “Soul” is a word we use to refer to the deepest core of someone. There is a reason Anthropic, when creating a prompt to define what Claude is at its deepest level, named the document SOUL.md.
We don’t create things from our brains or our fingers. We create from the soul. You spend your life developing who you are, and somehow what you create comes out of that. This is true if you’re an artist, and it’s also true if you’re a tech founder, an engineer, or a creative leader in any medium. If you’re a founder or an engineer or a leader, you are a creator.
If you want to be a better artist, don’t just work on technique. Work on becoming the kind of human, at a deep level, who might produce great art. If you want to be a better leader, don’t just work on the craft of leadership. Work on becoming the kind of human who might lead well.
I often forget this. Being a tech founder is demanding. You could spend every waking hour Getting Things Done: email, Slack, meetings, writing code, writing words. There is a constant temptation to jump into the things that feel urgent. Urgent work could occupy one hundred percent of my time.
I need to remember that my work doesn’t just reflect the tasks I do; it reflects who I am. If my “soul,” whatever that might be, is shallow or distracted or anxious, my work will be shallow, distracted, and anxious.
What do you want to create? What kind of soul would it take for that to happen?
Obviously, this isn’t only true of classical music.
I’m sure I’m missing something, because I think history rates him pretty highly.
A few 19th century Romantic concertos: Grieg Piano Concerto, Brahms Violin Concerto, Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. Advanced mode: Sibelius Violin Concerto.
A few random personal favorites from the 20th century: 24 Preludes and Fugues (Shostakovich), Symphony 5 (Shostakovich), Piano Trio 2 (Shostakovich), Rite of Spring (Stravinsky), Symphony 1 “Classical” (Prokofiev).