Today's Burning Question, What would Bach have thought of Electronic Music?
An essay for the Digital Conservatoire Continuum Approach
When we imagine Bach, we often imagine an older orchestral and possibly even limited canvas.
After all, he didn't have AI, Logic Pro, advanced DAW, in a snazy studio.
Quills.
Harpsichords.
Pipe organs.
A world of wood, strings, and air.
But Bach himself was not interested in limitation.
He was interested in possibility.
He worked obsessively with whatever tools were available to him — tuning systems, keyboard mechanisms, the physics of sound in large spaces.
The organ, after all, was the most technologically complex instrument of its time.
In many ways, it was an early machine.
Bach was fascinated by systems that could generate complexity from simple rules.
Give him a theme, and he would stretch it, invert it, mirror it, slow it down, speed it up — testing how far it could go before it broke.
This is very close to how electronic music works.
A loop.
A sequence.
A modulation.
Small instructions, repeated and transformed, creating something vast.
It’s easy to imagine Bach being less shocked by electronics than we might assume.
He might not have been impressed by novelty alone — but he would have listened carefully.
What can this system do?
How does it behave?
Where are its limits?
He would likely have been drawn to synthesis not as sound effect, but as structure.
Waveforms instead of strings.
Filters instead of stops.
Counterpoint expressed through layers of frequency rather than melody alone.
And perhaps most intriguingly, Bach understood that music doesn’t need to sound emotional to be deeply moving.
Order can move us.
Balance can move us.
Pattern can move us.
Electronic music, at its best, does exactly this.
It creates meaning through repetition, variation, and architecture — not sentiment.
Bach might have seen electronics not as a threat to music, but as an extension of its grammar.
Another keyboard.
Another system.
Another way to explore how sound thinks.
And if he had lived now, with access to everything from modular synthesis to digital notation, one suspects he would have done what he always did.
He would have gone very, very deep.
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