Bach celebrates Obama's Nobel

Courtesy of "A Tiny Revolution," here's a YouTube of Bach's BWV 13, with the text going on about "groaning and weeping" and the Bass selling the idea. There's also a nice little essay from Bernard Chazelle on the improbability of a provincial German musician turning out to be such a towering genius whose greatest music was consciously written to glorify God. Whence comes such genius? A lot of us have some talent for music, and some composers (think of Schubert) must have had melodies running through their heads pretty much all the time. But somehow Bach towers over them all, as geniuses like Mozart and Beethoven acknowledged.