Bach's most approachable music might be his cello suites.
But also, I think there are two camps of fans of "classical music" (by which I mean music in the styles: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, etc). There are those who listen to the music, and those who play it.
For the most part, those who only listen to music often prefer Romantic and Impressionist styles. From the moody and dramatic to the gentle and contemplative, these styles are very approachable to the untrained ear.
But those who play an instrument (or sing in a choir) spend lots of time practicing and rehearsing and interpreting the music as it's written on the page. This extra time makes all of the little nuances of Baroque music truly come to life. The classic example is Bach's Crab Canon, which is a fine little piece of music... but once you realize that the whole thing is a palindrome, and you can actively appreciate how the same parts work in a forward and backward context, it becomes really interesting and pleasant.
So if Bach doesn't do it for you, and you play an instrument, try diving into playing it yourself.
I think that's true about Bach's instrumental music, but his big sacred works like his Passions and the Mass in B minor are as "romantic" as the Baroque period gets. Like OP, I think of these works as basically the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. They somehow have all the nuance and complexity you're referring to -- while also telling a deeply emotional story, and just being heart-wrenchingly beautiful even if you don't know the story.
I think Bach's lute music is the most approachable because it sounds the most modern like guitar music. Even though the baroque lute is an alien instrument visually to the average person today, the sound is closer to what people have grown up on.
The whole question though is like what is the best David Bowie album to start with multiplied by 100.
The catalog is just so immense, the sounds are just so varied that one person's favorite might completely be wrong for someone else.
I think the most relatable after thinking about it more is Stephanie Jones playing lute music on classical guitar.
Funnily enough, I actually play the cello and have enjoyed playing some of his cello suites in the past. Yes, I certainly admire the famous Suite I and it has an incredible mood to it.
I most enjoy playing music as a social affair rather than in isolation though. That may have a fair amount to do with my impression of composers from each era (Baroque is fine in a group, Classical can be unforgiving, Romantic is a lot of fun, etc.).
Looking at many of the responses here though (which have been wonderful), there are quite a few pieces from Bach that I was not aware of, or had forgotten about. He really was incredible.
I cut my teeth on Bach on Cello when I was 7. By the time I was in high school I could play all the instruments. I still don’t consider Bach to be the genius everyone says he was. He was a nepo baby with a big purse. His brothers, his family, all musicians of note for prominent figures of society. However, his leaning on his long history of music within the family helped polish his work as structured which helped sell it. Now, Jean-Babtiste Lully was a character…
If you don't like it, that's fine, I won't argue over taste. But your other descriptions of Bach's life deserve to be fact-checked.
> He was a nepo baby with a big purse. His brothers, his family, all musicians of note for prominent figures of society. However, his leaning on his long history of music within the family helped polish his work as structured which helped sell it.
This interpretation is not particularly historically accurate. Let's investigate:
> He was a nepo baby with a big purse.
Musicians of the baroque era weren't particularly wealthy or notable. Musical fame wouldn't come until the Classical era. And yes, music was his family trade, but that's how most trades went in that time. His parents both died before he turned ten, so he was mostly raised by his older brother. By all accounts they were not wealthy. So I think the term "nepo baby" is misleading, and "and "with a big purse" is simply incorrect.
> His brothers, his family, all musicians of note for prominent figures of society.
This is highly overexaggerated. JS Bach had two brothers who survived childhood, and neither was particularly "prominent." Most of his "notable family" were his children, especially CPE Bach.
> However, his leaning on his long history of music within the family helped polish his work as structured which helped sell it.
Bach's career was one of slow and steady growth. It doesn't appear that he leaned on his connections or family name much.
Bach did get some widespread acclaim by the end of his life, but mostly as an organist, not as a composer. His compositions were mostly discarded and ignored for a whole century until Felix Mendelssohn revived interest in his compositions. The cello suites, for example, were lost for nearly two hundred years, and only re-discovered in the 1920's.
He was known as an organist until the 18th century when someone decided to lump him in with the greats. His works were polished. Yes, he dedicated his life to music - but that’s also where his tenure started. Baroque style borrowing from others and making “commercial” music of his day. He was a nepo baby by our standards. His older brother that raised him wasn’t a Duke, but wasn’t poor either. He went to the best schools. They all borrowed from each other in this age.
He wasn't so "commercial" because he was doing more complex and countrapuntal music after it was falling out of fashion, and he never did an opera, which was all the rage.
His father had lots of children, 4 of which became musicians, of which JSB was the last child, the baby. Barbara Margaretha tried to take the family purse (having already been twice widowed). JSB was “orphaned” but his older brothers were adults. Let’s be real.
At the time, many people. Death stalked the land, children were lucky to reach adulthood, women were lucky to survive childbirth, and almost everyone experienced grief and bereavement.
It's all in his music - the manic passion of trying to master a craft against that background, a burning faith in a better future, against constant reminders of the horrors of the present.
It's not just four part counterpoint. There's a lot more going on.
> I'm reading a strong implication that the French are the true holders of the history
I interpreted this more as "don't forget to check out the French-language Wikipedia articles too, since they might have contents that are absent from the English-language Wikipedia articles." This would likely be the case for anything concerning Québécois or Acadien culture, or the early settlements by the French; but not likely for most things west of Ottawa (aside from some pockets like Grande Prairie, Alberta or Saint Boniface, Manitoba).
It seems everyone outside of Ontario feels some kind of alienation or other. The west, as you mentioned, but also the maritimes, and especially the Québécois.
Historically speaking, it is the case for Manitoba. Manitoba was founded by French speakers and Winnipeg should be a majority Metis city today. The reason it isn't is because of repression from Ottawa and anglophones. See the Manitoba Schools question and the history of Louis Riel and the Metis treaties.
> It seems everyone outside of Ontario feels some kind of alienation or other. The west, as you mentioned, but also the maritimes, and especially the Québécois.
Yep, and then there's Newfoundland, which isn't even part of the maritimes. (No worries though, they're used to being excluded)
- A custom CPU with integrated GPU that's somewhere between an AMD 6600U and 6800U, underclocked for battery life and thermals
- 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM (6400 MT/s)
- 50 Wh battery
So, to make your own Steam Deck-like laptop, you should buy a USB or wireless controller and install the Holo ISO distro (for a UI like the Steam Deck) on a laptop with the following specs:
- 50+ Wh battery
- 16+ GB of RAM (preferably LPDDR5 for thermals)
- A sufficiently powerful CPU+GPU (most new 15W ones will do, especially if you set it to underclock when on battery power)
- A USB-C port with USB 3 Gen 2 speeds and DisplayPort support
- A sufficiently nice screen, speaker, trackpad, cooling fan
And, zooming out a bit: the reason Hyperbola wanted to modify Rust / Cargo was to prevent it from being used to compile non-free software ("[we wanted] to have Cargo removed as otherwise non-free packages could be used from projects being compiled").
This feels misguided. If you're in the position of adding limitations to software or stripping out features to keep the user from using it with nonfree software, you've lost track of why that software freedom mattered in the first place.
No? The point is to keep the user's system free of non-free dependencies. As a user, I don't want to audit the several hundred packages that a single Rust application might decide to pull in; I'd prefer if such a thing were enforced instead. Otherwise, you might as well go use any of the hundreds of non-free distributions out there.
The Rust/Cargo license is also terrible grounds on which to build a free system anyway.
Strawman, what is absurd is your own reduction. Hopefully you see the difference between running a build/install command that pulls 100+ dependencies from the network that may change any moment without notice versus downloading a standalone software package that is appropriately licensed.
(You should have no trouble peering at the depths of your own stupidity.)
... Not sure if such modification is not incompatible with GPL family of licenses, though, but I am not a lawyer (you're not allowed to combine GPL-licensed product, whether v2 or v3, in ways that create derivative works whose parts are licensed with more constraints than enforced by the GPL, with special carveouts for AGPL)
Whether one agrees with it or not, explicitly removing non-free software or the mere suggestion to install non-free software has consistently been a FSF litmus test for about twenty years in order for them to label an operating system as "truly free". Leading to exchanges such as the following in 2007 when Stallman remarked that he could not in good conscience recommend OpenBSD as their ports collection had wrappers that would allow the user to install non-free software more easily:
Key part: "Since I consider non-free software to be unethical and antisocial, I think it would be wrong for me to recommend it to others. Therefore, if a collection of software contains (or suggests installation of) some non-free program, I do not recommend it. The systems I recommend are therefore those that do not contain (or suggest installation of) non-free software."
Guix does the same per every Rust crate AND with Golang. You can support them by importing them with 'guix import' and checking the manifest.scm of every package for licensing reasons.
So do Trisquel and Parabola, but in a more radical way. No PIP, no Cargo, no nothing. You are on your own.
I want to second the recommendation of MyNoise.net. It's phenomenal. Especially at work, it's perfect for getting in the zone. I pay for it even though I mostly stick to the free ones.
If you're working at a computer, I recommend opening multiple tabs at the same time. For example, one with some relaxing white noise, one with a music-adjacent one like Mr Rhodes or 88 Keys, and maybe also a crackling fire for cozy vibes.
I have recently discovered a combo of white-noise + music, but I must tell you crackling fire noise makes me too relaxed, making me feel I need a quick nap! Rainfall sound works better for me :-)
Haven't come across myNosie before, will check it out, thank you for sharing!
> Vader: You're very good, Luke. But I'm twenty years older and stronger than you in the use of the Force. You haven't a chance with me... any more than your father had.
This draft was written before they came up with the idea that Vader could actually be Luke's father!
Honestly, what strikes me about this line isn't even that Vader isn't Luke's father, but how wordy he is. I imagine they didn't spend too much time on phrasing and instead just tried to capture the gist with the expectation of polishing later, but even with the James Earl Jones's trademark slow, menacing Vader drawl, this just feels like it would sound weirdly verbose coming from Vader, especially in the middle of a fight.
Much of what you actually see in Empire is written by entirely different people.
> George Lucas initially hired Leigh Brackett, the sci-fi novelist who also wrote screenplays for Howard Hawks—including The Big Sleep (1946)—to write the sequel to Star Wars (1977). Brackett died in March 1978 while the film was still in pre-production, though, and Lucas wasn't satisfied with her script. Lucas wrote the next draft himself, which established structure and twists close to the final film, but suffered from dialogue. When Kasdan delivered his script for Raiders, Lucas asked him to rewrite The Empire Strikes Back. Kasdan suggested he read Raiders first, but Lucas reportedly said: "If I hate Raiders, I'll call you up tomorrow and cancel this offer, but basically I get a feeling about people."[9]
Brackett was a sci-fi author, Kasdan was a screenwriter by trade.
Despite seeming like similar tasks, screenwriting and book-writing actually have pretty distinct skillsets in some ways.
That wasn't Brackett's fault, Chandler famously said he didn't know who killed the chauffeur. Like many of his novels The Big Sleep was made by combining two or more of his short stories, and sometimes things didn't make sense.
Yeah, it immediately stood out to me how the final film leans so much more toward “show, don’t tell”. Vader doesn’t have to tell you how powerful he is! He just quips “Impressive” and goes on give Luke a smackdown. “All too easy.”
As a writer it's not uncommon to have a separate person (sometimes an editor) trim down/punch up dialogue. Dialogue writing is basically a separate skill from prose or screenplay writing, though the best writers are good at it too.
I love that the Star Wars Holiday Special was probably written before this, making it even more canon than what The Empire Strikes Back eventually became.
I haven't read the script but, couldn't that be interpreted the same way it would be in the movies today? That is, the idea that Vader 'killed' Anakin by converting him to the dark side; Anakin is gone and now Vader exists - so different that the identity is different.
How much of an original script survives to filming? I assume that huge swaths of dialog gets reworked as more people can workshop the scene and get a sense of characters/timing/whatever.
It depends on the film. George Lucas was reworking dialogue and scenes daily while filming the original Star Wars but the overall movie should mostly be set in stone by that time. But big changes can happen. For example, Ben Kenobi was initially supposed to survive the battle with Vader. It wasn’t until filming was already underway that Lucas, at Marcia Lucas’s suggestion, decided to kill him off.
What was the relationship then? In a New Hope, it’s known that Anakin was Vader, right?
And they knew Luke was Anakin’s his son. Obi wan mentions Anakin being corrupted by Vader. And the fight at the end, Vader now the master, etc. Was it really still a question of Vader and Anakin were different people until the second movie came out?
Lucas only came up with the idea that Anakin = Vader after the original Star Wars was out, when he was revising the script for Empire. Before that we were supposed to take Ben Kenobi at face value when he said that Darth Vader betrayed and murdered Luke's father.
And if you think that's a big deal to introduce a change like that, let's not forget that Lucas' first draft for A New Hope had Luke Skywalker as an elderly general, "Annikin Starkiller" as the protagonist, Chewbacca as a leader of a tribe of Wookies behaving very much like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi (and a presumably-unrelated human pilot called Chewie!) and Han Solo as a giant green alien...
Taking place on a planet of Wookies would make the Empire losing the ground battle make significantly more sense. Legend has it that it was changed to Ewoks for the kid toy opportunities.
I don't doubt that for a moment, but I think I once heard an interview with Lucas where he explained that, by the time they got to the third movie, Chewbacca had 'become' more intelligent, and that he specifically wanted the empire to be defeated by a 'primitive' people.
I'd say the original already isn't ambiguous: Kenobi directly tells Luke that Vader murdered his Father. The "from a certain point of view" scene had to be added in ROTJ to explain away the retcon.
Ben Kenobi does pause in a pregnant way right before delivering the fateful line. In a way that almost looks like he's thinking about how to hide something. It works perfectly with the later revelation.
It's crazy that essentially the entire Star Wars canon is built on one piece of dialog by Alec Guinness. (Not just Anakin/Vader, but the Force and the events around Order 66)
This script is good evidence they made up the connection part way through Empire. Also, if Lucas already had it in mind for Star Wars, I doubt he'd have Obiwan straight up lie about it.
I don't even consider it a straight up lie. I know we have decades of this built into our culture, and its been basically ret-conned, but...
"A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights. He betrayed and murdered your father"
I could still see Ben making this metaphor for the internal struggle Anakin dealt with, not wanting to reveal the truth in that setting.
Pretty sure it was as much a part of planning the first episode as his later decision to have Anakin build C3PO. The early Star Wars scripts and materials are all over the map, there was no plan. This script just makes that all the more clear.
But the "I am your father" wasn't in the shooting script anyway. The script said "Obi-Wan killed your father", and it was changed to "I am your father when James Earl Jones" said the line for the voice of Vader. Maybe it is that way in subsequent published scripts but not the original.
Yes, and I’m struggling to imagine why you think it is even implied that they could be the same person, from the first film alone. Could you explain further?
I believe the actual shooting script for ESB omitted Vader’s admission that he was Luke’s father; the replacement line was “No, Obi-Wan killed your father”. The actual line, “No, I am your father” was kept secret and only shared with the actors on set when they filmed that specific scene.
Not all the actors. David Prowse, who played Darth Vader had no idea. Only Hamill knew. There were only four people who knew at that point. Lucas, Kasdan, Hamill and Kerschner.
But also, I think there are two camps of fans of "classical music" (by which I mean music in the styles: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, etc). There are those who listen to the music, and those who play it.
For the most part, those who only listen to music often prefer Romantic and Impressionist styles. From the moody and dramatic to the gentle and contemplative, these styles are very approachable to the untrained ear.
But those who play an instrument (or sing in a choir) spend lots of time practicing and rehearsing and interpreting the music as it's written on the page. This extra time makes all of the little nuances of Baroque music truly come to life. The classic example is Bach's Crab Canon, which is a fine little piece of music... but once you realize that the whole thing is a palindrome, and you can actively appreciate how the same parts work in a forward and backward context, it becomes really interesting and pleasant.
So if Bach doesn't do it for you, and you play an instrument, try diving into playing it yourself.