4 adventurebolt lessons from JS Bach: Try something new; you might like it!
Sitting here putting blogs together, I am listening to some classical music as I write. Interestingly, a unique version of Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor has come on, and I have never heard it played this way.
If you're not familiar with the tune by name, you would surely recognize it as the song that is played during scary graveyard scenes in old movies, or representative of Dracula or some otherworldly evil icon. From Boris Karloff to Captain Nemo to Phantom of the Opera, it is typically played on a grand pipe organ, broadly and loudly inviting the Devil himself to the occasion at hand. Well, at least that's what it's come to be caricaturized as. Wikipedia has this interesting note:"The exceptional number of fermatas and broken chords in the Toccata and Fugue BWV 565 has been explained by some on the supposition that Bach composed it as a work to test an organ, which he did regularly. The first thing Bach is said to have done when testing an organ is to pull out all the stops and play in the fullest possible texture, in order to see if the organ had good bellows to provide plenty of wind to the instrument: not enough, and the pitch would be unsteady, and tone quality would be inferior. The opening of BWV 565, with its three opening flourishes and massive rolled chord, would serve as a good test for an organ's winding system." What's interesting is that that this version of Bach's Toccata that I am currently listening to is not on a pipe organ, but on a solo piano. It changes the whole texture and tone of the piece, and quite honestly, could pass as another composition altogether. What I've learned from this little adventurebolt is:
- Firstly, our preconceived ideas have a lot to do with how we interpret the world. If we always think a certain way, it becomes comfortable, and we tend to become "locked in" to this way of thinking.
- Secondly, there are typically logical explanations for unusual circumstances that we don't understand (like the strange sounding chords in the Bach piece).
- Trying something a new way (even something as established as a classical piece of music), opens up new horizons of inspiration and achievement, and can be a way of introducing others into a whole different sphere of experience.
- And finally, "to pull out all the stops" is a phrase that comes from the organist opening up every pipe on the organ to experience the largest volume of sound possible; what a great metaphor for the adventurebolt lifestyle!
