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.

Stereotypes are as rampant in music as they are in the rest of human interactions. So when you’re a French Horn, everybody expects you to act like a French Horn.

So, berets, striped shirts, croissants, escargot et vin, oui oui? Nein – lederhosen und bier. The common French horn is actually German. (The English Horn is the French instrument, you silly billy.)

Brass instruments have been around for millennia, and because they have the capacity to be LOUD, they were used to communicate over long distances, either in war (charge! or, retreat!) or in the hunt (we’ve managed to catch a single fox/boar with no less than 20 men and 100 dogs!) To make matters worse, valves (keys) on brass instruments are a relatively new invention (late 19th century); without valves, they are somewhat limited in the number of notes they could play. If you think about the pitches heard in a typical brass fanfare (eg, the theme to Masterpiece Theater), that’s pretty much what brass could do before valves were added. Modern brass instruments are able to play any pitch, and are capable of a huge pallet of tone colors – but it’s hard to shake old stereotypes. They still get more than their fair share of “ta-das” and “too-ta-ti-toos.”

But despite all the negative effects of this musical stereotype, the brass do what they do really well. Fanfare for the Common Man wasn’t written for the glass harmonica, after all. So, here is a rondo from a Mozart horn concerto which makes me want to go and chase foxes. Not boars, though. They’re scary.

If you like this, may I recommend this funny song by Flanders & Swann. It requires a very specific sense of humor, and an acute understanding of British pronunciation – namely, that the English consider “horn” and “gone” to rhyme (not to mention “burglar” & “pergola”)

Well howdy pardner! What’s saying you and me git us a couple bottles of sarsaparilly and head on down to yonder ballet and watch them bally dancers dance all purdy like?

Iconic American composer Aaron Copland wrote a number of ballets based on iconic American themes – Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, and Rodeo. Today’s piece is the opening movement of Rodeo, titled “Buckaroo Holiday.” May it bring out the inner cowboy in you.