What Does Punk Have to Do with Baroque?

   This essay accompanies an audio episode from iServalan and forms part of a wider approach to learning music through listening, movement, and attention.

Today, I'm Wondering, What Does Punk Have to Do with Baroque?

Let's think....Noise, Ornament, Rebellion, Control

At first glance, punk and Baroque music appear to be sworn enemies.

Baroque is ornate, structured, saturated with detail. Punk is stripped back, loud, suspicious of polish. One belongs to powdered wigs and cathedrals; the other to safety pins and squats.

But listen more closely — not to the surface, but to the function — and something curious emerges.

Both Baroque and punk were reactions to control.

The Sex Pistols would probably never have admitted it, but their power came not from chaos, but from compression. Short forms. Limited materials. A tight palette.

Much like Baroque composers working within strict harmonic and rhetorical frameworks, punk performances relied on intensity rather than sprawl. Songs were brief, gestures sharp, messages concentrated. Nothing wandered.

In both cases, the danger was contained. That containment is what made it volatile.

Baroque music did not emerge as polite background sound. It arrived during periods of religious, political, and social tension. It was accused of being excessive, indulgent, even morally corrupting. Critics worried it overwhelmed the senses. That it did too much. That it moved people too strongly.

Punk was accused of exactly the same thing.

Both styles used excess as defiance. Not because they lacked discipline, but because discipline had become a tool of power. Baroque composers understood the rules of counterpoint intimately — they stretched them until emotion leaked through the cracks. Punk musicians often knew the rules too; they simply refused to ask permission to use them.

This is where the myth collapses.

Punk was never anti-skill. It was anti-gatekeeping.
Baroque was never indulgent for indulgence’s sake. It was rhetorical, gestural, urgent.

Both privileged message over prettiness. Gesture over refinement. Impact over approval.

Even the economics rhyme. Punk’s DIY ethos — self-released records, zines, borrowed spaces — mirrors the hustle of Baroque composers navigating patrons, churches, and courts. Different centuries. Same survival instinct.

What scared people wasn’t the noise.
It was the loss of control.

Punk didn’t reject classical music.
It rejected permission.

And in that sense, it is far closer to Baroque than anyone likes to admit.

Why Hip-Hop Understands Bach Better Than Rock Ever Did

 

Why Hip-Hop Understands Bach Better Than Rock Ever Did

Counterpoint, Sampling, the Grid, and Music Built to Hold a Room

Bach is often described as a composer of melodies.

He wasn’t.

He was an architect.

His music is built from systems: interlocking lines, bass-led harmony, repetition under pressure. Voices operate independently but remain bound to a shared structure. Nothing is accidental. Everything is relational.

Hip-hop understands this instinctively.

Someone like Kendrick Lamar understands this instinctively. His work isn’t built on endless novelty, but on carefully managed repetition, variation, and return. Themes recur. Motifs evolve. The architecture holds while meaning deepens.

Bach worked the same way. He didn’t abandon material once it appeared — he tested it, turned it, placed it under pressure until it revealed something new.

MF DOOM understood structure the way Bach did — masks, constraints, recurring motifs, and rules that sharpened invention rather than limiting it.

At its core, hip-hop is architectural music. It respects the grid. It understands the loop not as limitation, but as foundation. Repetition is not laziness — it is hypnosis. Variation happens inside constraint, not outside it.

This is Bach thinking.

In Bach’s fugues and dance forms, tension comes from timing, placement, and expectation. In hip-hop, tension is created the same way — through flow, syncopation, drop-ins and drop-outs. The bass doesn’t decorate. It leads. Rhythm is not accompaniment; it is structure.

Performance culture makes the connection clearer.

Hip-hop was built for rooms. For bodies. For spaces where sound had to hold attention, command presence, and survive repetition. MCs understand pacing the way Baroque performers did — when to push, when to hold back, when to let silence work.

Think of someone like Kendrick Lamar, Rakim, or MF DOOM: control, architecture, restraint. Virtuosity not as speed, but as placement.

Bach would have recognised this immediately.

Not the surface sound — the thinking.
The discipline.
The respect for form as power.

Much of rock, by contrast, misunderstood rebellion as freedom from structure. The rejection of rules became the point. But without constraint, music often collapses into gesture without architecture. Loudness replaces tension. Expression floats free of form.

Hip-hop never made that mistake.

It understands that systems are not cages — they are engines. That creativity sharpens when pressure is applied. That repetition creates meaning through accumulation.

Sampling functions like counterpoint. Independent voices coexist, comment, collide. Past and present speak simultaneously. Bach did this with chorales. Hip-hop does it with records.

Which is why Bach survives remixing, looping, re-contextualising — while much of rock does not.

Systems endure.
Structures travel.
Architecture outlives fashion.

And Bach, quietly, has always been closer to the beat than people think.

  This essay accompanies an audio episode from iServalan and forms part of a wider approach to learning music through listening, movement, and attention. 

🎙️ The Double Bass: Naming the Structure, Standing in the Sound | iServalan™ | Continuum Approach

  This essay accompanies an audio episode from iServalan and forms part of a wider approach to learning music through listening, movement, and attention.

🎙️ The Double Bass: Naming the Structure, Standing in the Sound

Before we talk about difficulty,
before we talk about strength,
before we talk about whether this instrument is “too big” —

we meet it properly.

Because the double bass is not something you wrestle into submission.
It is something you learn to stand beside.

And to do that, we need shared language.

Not memorised.
Not tested.
Simply understood.

So when I name something,
you know where we are.

---

The Body of the Double Bass

Let’s begin at the top.

At the very top is the scroll,
often larger and more pronounced than on smaller string instruments.
Below it sit the tuning machines — metal gears rather than wooden pegs —
designed for the greater tension of thicker strings.

These sit in the pegbox,
which leads into the neck
and then into the fingerboard.

The fingerboard is long.
Unfretted.
There are no visual shortcuts.

This is an instrument that asks for listening,
orientation,
and trust in the body.

Where the fingerboard meets the body is the nut,
and below that the bass opens out into its wide, resonant form.

The front is the top plate,
carved to move a great volume of air.
The f-holes are larger here,
because the sound they release is larger.

The bridge stands beneath the strings,
taller than on a cello,
balanced — not glued —
holding immense tension through equilibrium alone.

The strings pass down to the tailpiece,
anchored by the tailgut,
and finally to the endpin,
which connects the bass to the floor
and to gravity itself.

Inside, unseen but essential,
are the bass bar and the soundpost,
shaping, supporting, and focusing the sound.

You don’t need to hold all of this in your head.
You only need to recognise the terrain.

That’s enough.

---

The Bow

The double bass bow may look different —
French or German grip —
but the principles are the same.

There is a stick.
There is horsehair.
There is a point where the hand meets the bow
and the arm transfers weight.

The bow is not about pressure.
It is about gravity,
released.

---

Standing or Sitting With the Bass

Unlike the cello,
the double bass asks you to stand —
or to sit high enough that standing logic still applies.

The bass leans into you.
You do not lean into it.

The endpin should be adjusted so the instrument feels present, not looming.
If you feel you are reaching upward constantly, something is wrong.

Your feet are grounded.
Your knees are free.
Your spine is upright but not rigid.

This is not an instrument for collapse.

---

Taking Up Space: The Vertical Orb

Just as with the cello,
string playing requires space.

But here, the space is vertical.

Imagine an orb around you —
taller now,
stretching from the floor beneath your feet
to the air above your head.

Your feet belong to this orb.
Your pelvis.
Your spine.
Your shoulders.
Your elbows.
Your hands.
The arc of the bow.

Nothing should feel pinned.
Nothing should feel apologetic.

The double bass does not reward shrinking.
It rewards presence.

If you make yourself small,
the sound struggles.

So you claim your space.

Calmly.
Quietly.
Without force.

You are allowed to stand here.

---

What Comes Next

Now — and only now —
do we have what we need.

Not repertoire.
Not technique drills.

But the tools.

A named structure.
A grounded stance.
Space to move.
Room to breathe.

Now we can make a noise.

Our noise.
Our sound.

And once that sound exists,
the world will listen.