Contrapunctus aka The Art of Fugue is Bach's crowning and final achievement as a composer. A simple short seed
melody gets blown out of the water every which way - oberse, inverse, upside down, inside out, crunched inward, stretched
out - all in 4 voice counterpoint. In any given piece, critically, no single line of melody takes precedence over any
other.
The work as a whole puts me in the mind of computer punch card patterns, or fractals,
or an alien insect intelligence. A work of utter brilliance as the summit of the baroque age faded and gave way to new
musical forms.
This collection includes all of the Art of Fugue compositions, including
the final unfinished one.
All sounds are sampled from the Korg Monotron.
Bach was a revelation. The tempo of the pieces did not change; nevertheless they went on for centuries, and they were
a manifestation, on the plane of art, of perpetual creation, a demonstration of the necessity of death and the self-evidence
of immortality, an expression of the essential all-rightness of the universe - for the music was far beyond tragedy, but included
death and suffering with everything else in the divine impartiality which is the One, which is Love, which is Being or Istigkeit.
Who on earth was John Sebastian? Certainly not the old gent with sixteen children in a stuffy Protestant environment. Rather,
an enormous manifestation of the Other - but the Other canalized, controlled, made available through the intervention of the
intellect and the senses and the emotions.
