Some might say that the only good thing about Christmas is that one can bask in Bach. Whatever your reasons for exploring this blog, I can’t help regarding his music as an essential basis of our cultural experience!

Apart from all the musical riches to be found elsewhere online (not lest Radio 3, like here), I’m revisiting my blogposts, so here are some highlights from the extensive Bach tag in the sidebar—mediated by my, um, eccentric take:

• A good place to start, with context, is Bach—and Daoist ritual—followed by
• The ritual calendar: cycles and seasons
• The Annunciation in art and music
• O ewiges feuer
• Lukewarm Laodiceans and puffed-up Pharisees
• Bach in an empty forest
• Obviously I feel personally committed to The Feuchtwang variations, following this experiment
• Easter Passions, saeta in Andalucia, and concurrent Chinese rituals—including Erbarme Dich (also here and here)
• The Matthew Passion staged
• More on the John Passion
• The Christmas oratorio, in a disturbing article on Nazism
• The stunning keyboard break in Brandenburg 5, and this related post
• Bach’s organ works!
• The double violin concerto, cello suites, and violin suites in world context
• Playing the cello suites on violin, with more on the 5th suite
• The orchestral suites
• A mere smattering of the most sumptuous oboe solos ever
• Alternative Bach, including Christ lag in Todesbanden
• Bach on film
• Bach, um, marches towards the world
• Less reverently, impertinent fantasies on the Matthew Passion and the B minor Mass, and even this
• Hosanna—J.S. Bach!, one of Nicolas Robertson’s finest anagram tales, benefitting from his own Bach scholarship.

But as with Indian raga or Daoist vocal liturgy and shengguan suites, Bach’s ouevre is an inexhaustible treasury… For us now, I mean—not that’s it’s “universal” or “eternal”…