Alright, for part two of Classical Week, we’re going way back to 1747, when a 62 year old Johann Sebastian Bach went to Potsdam to meet with King Frederic, the Great. You can read up on some of the details elsewhere, but the king basically set a near impossible task in front of the great composer, and the composer masterfully completed that task. One would say with flying colors.

Here is a taste of The Musical Offering:

J. S. Bach – RICERCAR a 3 voci[play] [buy]

When I was young, and more ambitious, I picked up a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid , and attempted to read it. I got about fifty pages in before giving up, but in those first fifty pages was the story of The Musical Offering.

It was amazing to me that someone could IMPROVISE something as mathematically complicated as a fugue, that Bach could do that with six part fugues, and three parts was a parlor trick to him. It reminds me how much we’ve crippled our mathematic instincts in this age of computers. I wonder if we’ll ever return to that knowledge again…

(By the way, RICERCAR stands for “Regis Iussu Cantio Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta.”)

Here are a few more pieces from the Offering:

J. S. Bach – Canon Perpetuus Super Thema Regium

J. S. Bach – Canon A2 (2 violins, continuo)