Johann Sebastian Bach is one of those amazing people who are so amazing, that the more you learn about them, you become more and more amazed at how amazing they are, and you realize that, at first, you didn’t truly know the depth of their amazingness.

I’m guessing that Bach is the second-most-written-about composer (first would be Beethoven) – but this is largely because Beethoven was a wild personality, while Bach was a very normal person. The worst things Bach did was not show up for work for a couple months (after a self-extended vacation in Lubeck), and pull a sword on a bassoonist (and really, who hasn’t done that?) He had a job, and children, and drank coffee and beer. This is not the stuff of scathing biographies.

But his music is insanely amazing (I’m sorry to say, way beyond anything Beethoven wrote). It’s lovable at every level. The untrained ear will enjoy rich harmony, florid melodies, and an expressive depth of emotion. The moderately trained ear will notice intricate repeating patterns – how he could take a single four-note-idea and develop it into a massive work – like making a life-sized cathedral out of just 5 different types of Lego blocks. The trained ear starts to find deeper layers of complexity in his music, hidden messages, numerology, key symbolism, among other things. And all the while, it just sounds great.

Here is his Orchestral Suite in b minor, for flute and strings.