Against that contentious backdrop, the music-- Bach's work-- speaks, again like that of Shakespeare, with a thousand voices, from delight to despair. Without falling into idiotic adoration, one can listen and wonder: What pleasure produced these notes? What pain produced those?

Whatever our thoughts, the music only speaks.

In a time of cultural contagion, when our consciousness is constantly assaulted, jerked this way and that, fractured, and fractured again, such speaking can be tritely consoling, a kind of higher-order Muzak. But to the attentive, attuned ear, it can be shocking, subversive even.

The money-driven forces behind the massive, flibertigibbet momentum of social expedience resist clarity. We, the conditioned products of noise and alarum, are brought up short when suddenly the static focuses into deeply structured sound, when the shifting shards of light made audible merge into translucent colors of insistent infinitude.

Such music can heal. Unlike the miracle drugs of allopathic medicine, which require only that you swallow them, this palliative requires more: your best, unattenuated attention.

Here, then, 12 minutes for attending
to the Bach Passacaglia and Fugue in c minor.*

*In a time of greater bandwidth affluence, we would've paid the copyright fee and given you the profligate Stokowski orchestration in full, transcendent color. Primitive times limit us to the best that midi can do.

END

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