Johann Sebastian Bach Research Paper

Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21st, 1685 and died on July 28th, 1750 at the age of 61. He is one of the most well-known and greatest composers in history that took place in the Baroque period. Bach has had multiple famous compositions such as: Bradenburg Concertos, Goldberg Variations, Mass in B minor, two Passions and along with over three hundred other cantatas. Johann was also very talented with multiple keyboard instruments including the organ, a two keyboard instrument that produced sound by driving pressurized air through organ pipes, which was a high difficulty instrument to play. Johann was also widely known from his talent with the organ. Bach was born in Eisenach Germany and also into a family that was greatly involved

Toward Bach’s death his health started to decline and was becoming blind, and had been operated on twice to fix his eyes. However, Johann had become blind and died of a stroke after the failed eye surgery. Before his death he was working on a new composition that he was unable to complete due to his death. The composition he was working on just before his death was “The Art of Fugue”. One of Bach’s famous works that was a collection of six instrumental pieces was known as the Brandenburg Concertos. Through these concertos Bach incorporated a wide spectrum of instruments. Each concerto consisted of three movements besides the first, which consisted of four movements. Additionally each concerto had different instruments played throughout, with all the different instruments Bach was able to create the wide variety of music. Johann was able to make an outstanding balance with the different groups of soloists and the orchestra, this style of music is called concerto grosso, where the two groups of musicians played together. The Bradenburg Concertos were composed in the early 1700’s and were then dedicated to Christian Ludwig in 1721, who was the margrave of Bradenburg and the younger brother to King

During a five month period in which music making was suspended in 1733 because of the death and morning of Augustus II, King of Poland; consequently, Bach began to work on the Missa of his Mass in B minor. His intentions with making this was to become the court composer to Augustus III. Initially he did not give Mass in

B minor a name, instead there were four folders for the four different movements that each had different titles. The first was called Missa, second was the Symbolum Nicenum, third was the Sanctus, lastly the four was called Osanna. Bach was also widely known for being an amazing keyboard player. Some of the keyboard instruments that he played very well consisted of the: harpsicord, organ, clavichord and the lute-harpsichord. Johann had also written the “Little Organ Book” that contained forty-six chorale preludes for the organ, that were composed from 1708 – 1717 from when Bach was the court organist in Weimar. However, three of them were not composed until sometime later around