JS Bach: where to start with his music

• Bach’s shifting to a cosmopolitan city in Germany resulted in a sort of serendipity that helped him compose his finest music like Magnificat, and about 200 cantata.
• He composed gems like Christmas Oratorio and two great gospel compositions for Good Friday: St John and St Matthew.
• Bach left incomplete a final collection called The Art of Fugue when he died in 1750.

For many musicians, Bach is the ‘alpha’, a shared point of reference, a starting language of how music can be made, and how it can sound. His work is timeless and covered by countless composers, jazz players and patrons. In his instrumental works, his music had a sense of balance and harmony which is found in nature, in the trees, the moon and the sky.

Pieces like the Six Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin and The Well-Tempered Clavier provide a glimpse of the other shore of the universe. The works are precise, complete, and mathematically balanced. They feel satisfying after hundreds of years as they carry a theme where each repetition and transformation fits like a jigsaw puzzle. This was never repeated or fully emulated by any other musician ever since.