How Bach music was turned away by the changes in musical style taking place around him?
As I understand it, instruments were difficult to tune together in Bach’s time. Music was written in the contrapuntal style in order to render listening more tolerable. String instruments were easiest to bring in pitch together, so few wind instruments were used in the orchestra. The well-tempered system changed all this, so music became less contrapuntal. If you compare Bach’s music with that of his contemporaries, you may agree that his music was more contrapuntal than even that of his contemporaries. (Would you you believe that Alberti, father of the Alberti bass, lived at the same time as Bach? And have you ever heard a fugue in a Vivaldi concerto? And Gluck’s opera on the Orpheus myth could pass as Romantic music!) I imagine, then, that when musical tastes ventured away from counterpoint, it ventured away from Bach. From Johann Sebastian Bach, that is. If you mentioned the name Bach to a person living in the late Eighteenth Century, that person would think you meant Carl Phillip E
