Unbeknownst to some music history examination preparers, it turns out that Johann Friedemann Bach was a son of Johann Sebastian after all though a very shadowy figure. And the father eventually disowned him. It appears that when poor Maria Barbara Bach passed away in her husband’s absence, the undertakers noticed some movement in her womb while dressing the body. There they discovered a baby which no one knew about. Then when Bach got home a couple months later and said, “Honey, I’m home!” only to be greeted by the rude reply that his honey was lying six feet under up on yonder hill, he then walked over to a strange cradle with a soiled baby screaming at the top of its lungs. And Sebastian was heard to mutter, “Muss es sein?” The child was quite precocious, but not in the way CPE or Wilhelm Friedemann was – he liked to bang objects on the side of the organ case. When Sebastian asked him what he was doing, he said, “I’m discovering primitivism, dad!” Later when he poured various liquids down pipes and affixed various objects to pipe mouths and valves, thus creating random noises coming out of the organ, Sebastian put his hands on his hips and yelled, “What do you think you are doing?” “Oh,” the boy replied, “I call it prepared organ. Isn’t it cool? It really allows chance to be a part of the compositional process.” Sebastian told him to stop it, muttering to himself that that kind of treatment was not necessary – many organ builders were already producing instruments that made objectionable noises… Finally the last straw was when Sebastian saw him with an abacus, a protractor and a straight-edge marking notes on the manuscript paper. “And just what kind of gibberish is that?” the distraught patrician roared. “I like to call it stochastic music, papa!” said the boy. “The pitches are determined by mathematical equations.” Sebastian, who was no stranger to math himself, finally had had enough. “I never want to hear of that again” he screamed, “and no one should be made to have to study about it!” And he disowned the child striking him from the Bach family rolls – thus reducing the number to only twenty. Poor Johann Friedemann eventually died in poverty and obscurity but not before he traveled the world and had some unique adventures. One of his best memories was boating with Japanese whalers off the coast of Alaska. They sighted some huge crabs climbing on the rocks and were told by the local Inuit that the crab legs were a delicacy. However the crabs were very large and quite dangerous and quick. So Johann Friedemann designed a rifle of sorts that launched projectiles which would hit the crabs and kill them – making it very easy then to harvest them. When his fellow whalers asked him what he would name such a device… Friedemann basically shrugged his shoulders and said he had no idea what to call it… …
Posted on: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 18:34:52 +0000
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