Thursday, April 18, 2013

A small thought....

My Pandora channel is currently playing a transcription of  the fourth movement of "Wachet Auf" (for anglophones: Sleepers Wake), by JS Bach.

It's one of my favorite pieces of music, not least for how it weaves the hymn-tune of "A Mighty Fortress" (or at least, it sounds like it does, to me; I guess it is actually a different hymn tune that is similar, but some of the harmonies sound like bits of "A Mighty Fortress") which is a favorite hymn of mine, and the words of which  - drawn from Psalm 46 for its text - have long given me comfort in difficult times.

A world that could produce a JS Bach can't be such an awful world after all. It just has people in it who sometimes do awful things. Would that there were more people doing things like composing like Bach (or would that the people who did those kinds of things were more noted and spoken about in the news; of late, it seems that the best way to get in the news is to do something really awful).

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