Word: bachs
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Time: last week. Place: Lincoln Center. The same group, now flourishing, is sponsoring and performing in its own festival, called Basically Bach. Inspired by Lincoln Center's long established Mostly Mozart festival, the twelve-day event is complete with buttons, T shirts (I AM A BACH BACKER), lectures, concerts, organ recitals at various churches, and free open-air performances by brass ensembles. The conductor watches concertgoers stream into Avery Fisher Hall and happily ponders the leap from his dining room...
...years, "Loki." Their modest residence, situated on the Rhine within sight of the I Chancellery, is furnished in modern-functional style and decorated with expressionist and impressionist paintings. Bookcases are filled with volumes on history and economics. Schmidt occasionally relaxes with a mystery story, preferably by Agatha Christie, plays Bach or Mozart on a large electric organ, or challenges his wife at chess and double solitaire. He hates to lose at chess, as well as politics; when he does, he is apt to rail at his own "stupidity" for making the wrong move...
...things are conducted backward: "Instead of using what we can guess at about the nature of thought to explain the nature of music, start over again. Begin with music and see what this can tell us about the sensation of thinking." He recommends an experiment, enlisting Johann Sebastian Bach to support his hypothesis: "Put on The St. Matthew Passion and turn the volume up all the way. That is the sound of the whole central nervous system of human beings, all at once...
...that cell," he writes, "should be one of the greatest astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell." Thomas' pyrotechnic conclusion demands the accompaniment of Bach, with the volume turned way up: "No one has the ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in life can ever be so puzzling. If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send...
...nature as I can guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music. Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development-almost instantly after emerging on the earth by any evolutionary standard-the music of Johann Sebastian Bach cannot...