Bach for a Buddhist

Classical music has many Buddhist tendencies. In his recently published memoir Tibetan Buddhist monk, author and "the world's happiest man" Matthieu Ricard attributes his love of Bach's music to hearing recordings by Helmut Walcha. The photo above shows Matthieu Ricard participating in a filmed Concert-méditation which included Preludes and Fugues from J.S. Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier, and in an RTS podcast he included excerpts from recordings by Helmut Walcha of the English Suite no 2 and the French Suite no 2.

Helmut Walcha (1907-1991), who lost his sight as a teenager, was a professor at the Hochschule für Musik in Frankfurt 1938 to 1972. His Bach inspired an older generation, just as more historically informed interpretations inspire a younger cohort today. Tastes and fashion have moved on and to contemporary ears the sound of Walcha's factory-made leather-quilled Ammer harpsichord with its piano action may sound anachronistic. But his ability to combine technical perfection with sublime musicality transcends fashion; as, of course, does Bach's music. Fortunately Walcha's recorded legacy remains available in Warner's budget-priced 13 CD box of Bach keyboard works. These stereo recordings were made for EMI Electrola between 1958 and 1962 in the Hamburg studio of tonmeister pioneer Erich Thienhaus - Thienhaus was the brother in-law of Hugo Distler.

Matthieu Ricard is a compelling advocate of Buddhism as a science of the mind, explaining that the brain's intrinsic neuroplasticity means we all have the potential to evolve towards higher and better states of consciousness. As William James explains in The Varieties of Religious Experience  "Our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are all there in all their completeness”.

Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks has proposed that today people go to concert halls looking for answers, and Helmut Walcha's Bach provides some of the answers to 'the happiest man alive'. Listening to Bach, or meditating, or taking psychotropic substances, or even taking psychotropics while listening to Bach. are among the ways of accessing higher states of consciousness and finding answers. Today classical music is blundering from one quick fix to another in its futile search for a new and bigger audience. Nobody is asking what is the purpose of classical music? Nobody is asking what answers does classical music offer with its its current strategy of re-inventing itself as just another entertainment genre?  
 

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