Composer Spotlight: J.S. Bach

In the next few months, we will be focusing on different composers and their works. 

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 in the country of Germany. He is part of the Baroque period of music. 

Although the piano as we know it did not exist in that time, there were other keyboard instruments that Bach played on and composed music for. Bach composed many pieces for the organ and the harpsichord. In total, Bach wrote more than a thousand compositions. 

He is considered to be one of the greatest composers of all time, not just because of how many pieces he composed, but because of the musicianship that is required to play the pieces and how much people have enjoyed his music. Imagine if people were still enjoying and playing your music more than 200 years after you wrote it!

In the video below, you can watch organist Hans-Andre Stamm perform one of Bach's most famous pieces of music - the Toccata and Fugue in D minor. 

This is a huge organ, with hundreds of pipes that create high sounds, low sounds, trumpet sounds, reed sounds, and other sounds. The pipes are controlled by levers on the side of the keyboards called stops. The ones that are pulled out further than the others are the ones he is currently using. Look how many more stops there are! 

There are even stops that go with the keys that the feet play. Imagine if you pulled out all the stops...how loud and incredible a sound you would get! This is where the phrase "pull out all the stops" comes from.

The second video is Bach's Prelude and Fugue number 2 from a collection of preludes and fugues called The Well-Tempered Clavier. Anthony Newman is playing it on the harpsichord. You will notice that this instrument also has more than one keyboard. Like the piano, it has strings, but the harpsichord plucks the strings instead of hitting them, which creates a very different sound from the piano.