Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a German composer and organist whose music brought Baroque counterpoint, sacred vocal writing, and instrumental forms to exceptional refinement.

Brandenburg Concertos: A set of six concertos by Bach, each combining instruments in distinctive ways. These concertos display his inventive handling of contrasting instrumental groups.
Fugue: A contrapuntal composition in which a subject is introduced and developed through interweaving voices. Bach used fugue as both a self-contained form and a technique within larger works.
Eisenach: A city in Thuringia, Germany, where Bach was born in 1685. Bach's birth in this musical town placed him within a regional tradition of church music.
Maria Barbara Bach: Bach's first wife and a member of the musical Bach family. Their marriage connected Bach's household life with an established family of musicians.
Bach Revival: The nineteenth-century renewal of public and scholarly interest in Bach's music. This movement transformed a once-specialized repertory into a central part of concert life.
Goldberg Variations: A keyboard work by Bach consisting of an aria followed by thirty variations. The work turns a simple bass pattern into a large-scale study of variation.
Counterpoint: The combination of independent melodic lines into a coherent musical texture. His music is renowned for making simultaneous lines distinct yet harmonically integrated.
Bach family: A German family whose members included generations of professional musicians and composers. Bach inherited a musical vocation from a family active across central Germany.
Anna Magdalena Bach: Bach's second wife, a singer who copied and preserved some of his music. Her surviving manuscripts provide evidence of music-making within the Bach household.
Ludwig van Beethoven: A German composer whose music helped define the transition from Classical to Romantic styles. Beethoven studied Bach's keyboard works and admired their contrapuntal command.

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