Today, we celebrate the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, born in the small German town of Eisenach on this day March 21 in 1685 (under the old Julian calendar; under the new calendar, his birthday falls on March 31).
Composing music at a prolific pace (sometimes at the rate of one cantata per week!), Bach was a humble man who attributed his success to divine inspiration and a strict work ethic. He lived to see only a handful of his works published, but more than 1,000 that survived in manuscript form are now published and performed all over the world.
The Bach Google Doodle
Google’s front page today features the first ever AI-powered Doodle! You can compose a two measure melody by entering a few notes and then letting the machine learning program harmonize the custom melody into Bach’s signature music style (or a Bach 80's rock style hybrid if you happen to find a very special Easter egg in the Doodle...:)).
The machine learning model was trained on 306 of Bach’s chorale harmonizations. His chorales always have four voices, each carrying their own melodic line, while creating a rich harmonic progression when played together. This concise structure made them good training data for a machine learning model.
Hop over to Google’s Doodle site to create your own melody and read more about the Doodle and the machine learning model. You can share your creations with your friends and even post them here!
Here is a video from Google about the making of the Doodle -
A Few Tributes to Bach
Some Music
Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major, BWV 1047: I. Allegro (by Munich Bach Orchestra/Karl Richter) was featured on the Golden Record sent on both of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft in 1977 and which are still exploring space beyond the Solar system.
We present a few different renderings of Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor - some traditional, some quite modern.
Epilogue
Please share your memories of Bach and his music. How has it touched your life? What are your favorites musical pieces? Any interesting tidbits of information about Bach’s life?