I’m developing a better appreciation for Bach.

When I was little, very young, my Father made disparaging remarks about Bach. “His music sounds like a one-legged man sawing away on one note on a violin.”

As I listened to more music, I was able to conclude that my Father was Old School in his taste, formed in the first quarter of the 20th Century. The popular music of the time included classical melodiousness like Fritz Kreisler, and the singable hummable tunes of Broadway musicals as our own version of operettas.

My Father was better educated than me. He spoke ancient Greek and Latin. He wrote songs, words and music, as good as the old chestnuts, like Gershwin and Irving Berlin and and Cole Porter and Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg and Jerome Kern.

But the more I listened, we had a growing list of long play records, the more I outgrew my Father in some ways. Listening and learning about Prokofiev, and Shostakovich early and late, the power of dissonance, the breaking of old barriers to the cultural future. I discovered Mahler (he would have loved Mahler except for the long long symphonies) and much of Richard Strauss (some he would have loved, those passages of Der Rosenkavalier, but he would have balked and pontificated, as he did with Wagner, “He takes too long to get to it.”

He even made that same criticism of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, saying about the love duet at the end, “Finally!”

But Bach. I was already infected by my Father’s negativity, so I didn’t listen enough to know. Shirley, now, my incredible wife who played the piano with both hands and could read music, sang in a choir that performed Bach, she was ahead of me, knew and loved Bach, was wild about Glenn Gould and the Goldberg Variations. And some of our friends knew Bach too, like the couple who sang acapella a Bach melody as they skipped together down the aisle at their wedding. And only now, at this later stage in my truncated life, thanks to the internet (I’m not too old to learn), am I now really discovering Bach in a fuller sense, and bowing with the rest of the musical world. I wish Shirley was here so we could listen to Bach together.