Robert Peters responds to me:

>>Seriously, I'd wager that Bach could have written great music to just
>>about any stimuli.
>
>Probably but the crucial point is that he did not.

I don't see anything crucial about it, and there is also no evidence
that Robert's statement is correct.  Robert has no special insight into
Bach's inner mind anymore than I or anyone else does.

>No, Bach did not choose "just about any stimuli", he was a Christian and
>wrote highly Christian music.

That's it?  We're going to take perhaps the greatest composer in history
and just identify him as a Christian who wrote Christian music.  By the
way, it isn't Christian music, it's Bach's music and it has universal
appeal.

Robert paints Bach as a one-dimensional composer when he has no idea
what other stimuli Bach used when composing his works.  So much of Bach's
music clearly had nothing to do with religion.  Even for those works
connected to religious inspiration, we have no reason to assume that
*only* religious inspiration was the source.  Bach knows the truth, and
he's not talking these days.

Bach is one of the greatest composers of all time.  His music tells
me that he was a complicated individual likely deriving inspiration
from an almost inexhaustible supply of sources including the world of
mathematics.  To say that Bach wrote highly Christian music and leave
it at that reduces Bach to a 'middle-man' between God and Bach's audience.
I think too highly of Bach to attach such limitations to his genius.

Don Satz
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