If you open any of the popular music streaming services, ask it to play Johann Sebastian Bach, there’s about a 100% chance that it’s going to start with the Bach unaccompanied cello Suite No. 1 performed by Yo-Yo Ma. It’s a great piece, of course, but not what I want to hear every time. If you skip forward through that piece, you’ll likely land on Glenn Gould mumbling along to his performance of The Goldberg Variations on piano.
To get around this, I started telling Siri or Alexa to play a random piece, using the Bach catalog number, such as “Alexa, play Bach’s BWV xxx” where xxx is a random number. (For example, the Goldberg Variations is BWV 988 and the six Cello Suites are BWV 1007–1012.)
The BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or Bach Works Catalog) numbering system, created by musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder in 1950, isn’t strictly chronological. Instead, it organizes Bach’s compositions thematically by genre—starting with cantatas, followed by choral works, keyboard music, and so forth.
It’s an imperfect system, though, as Bach pieces get discovered from time to time. If, for example, they discovered a seventh cello suite, it wouldn’t get to be BWV 989, as that number is occupied by his “Aria variata alla maniera italiana”, so it gets tacked on to the end of the catalog. (I’d prefer they go with something like BWV 988.001 to get the piece in the right spot, but whatever…)
Recently, I stumbled upon a Spotify playlist containing all known cataloged works by Johann Sebastian Bach, from BWV 1 to BWV 1128. Intrigued by this, I decided to embark on the arduous task of listening through them sequentially.
Anyway, here’s the playlist for the whole catalog. If you’re not up for a sequential run through the 136 hours of the whole lot, you can put it on random and play any of the 3,196 pieces.
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