I never get tired of Bach. As I drive around I listen to an old CD of his music and, every time, it works its magic.

I love almost all music, it’s probably why I became a dancer, but I especially love Baroque music. When I was an undergrad I had to take Music Appreciation. I was already a professional ballet dancer at the time, taking college classes when I could, so I started the class with a bit of an attitude. An attitude that was quickly dispelled by both the course load and the course content.

The professor started the semester with Gregorian chants and ended with an opera by the Expressionist, Austrian composer, Alban Berg. I had never heard either kind of music.

Ballet training consists of very simple rhythms and melodies that enable the dancer to focus on the steps rather than the driving idea, principle, or emotion behind the music. Dancers know a good ¾ waltz like they know a good plié (knee bend) but they miss out on an awful lot of great music, at least, when they’re young.

Another thing dancers miss out on as kids is the history behind the dance they love. The only thing I knew about the history of ballet came from a book about a dancer named Anna Pavlova that had been my mother’s when she was a girl. I pored over that book. Everything about it fascinated me. I can still remember the black and white faded picture of Anna Pavlova as a little girl with her extremely poor mother in czarist Russia. I didn’t know what "czarist Russia" meant (or what it felt like to spend all your sparse savings on two ballet tickets, as her mother had) but I knew it mattered.

When you combine the arts with history, you get a lesson on mankind. You see that chaos and difficulties don’t belong to this age alone. In fact, vast amounts of the best art has been created during terrible chaos, both personal and societal. Either in spite of it, or because of it.

Ultimately, what the Bach concertos and cantatas are trying to tell me, with their gorgeous harmonies, is that order is not sameness. Harmony is actually the combination of different sounds and pitches not, like my Gregorian chants which have no harmony, sameness. The word harmony actually has roots in the Latin articulas or joint (of the body). I like that definition, maybe because I’m a dancer. In dance, the joints allow for movement and flexibility, but they also need to be strong and able to withstand powerful forces without giving way.

Maybe harmony in music can teach us the universal lesson that disparate sounds and pitches can come together under the hands of a master like J.S. Bach.

It’s a pretty metaphor. What makes it relevant and sobering for me is a music theory class I audited during my graduate work. The music professor was a colleague and friend, and I started off with high hopes that I would finally understand how music worked. The first few weeks went well, and then I hit the hard stuff. My friend tried to help me but, frankly, I floundered. By the end of the course I was just going to class when he would play examples of the music the other students were learning how to compose. That was enough for me at the time, but I knew I could never write music with my small amount of theory. I needed to understand the principles behind harmony.

What Mr. Bach (who did understand those principles) tells me as I drive around the back woods of Maine, is to remember that there is a natural order to the universe, an order that is good. It also reminds me that to understand anything as big as universal harmony I need to work at it, not just stop into class on the easy days.

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Below I share Bach’s Air on G string:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMkmQlfOJDk

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