And sure enough, this Sunday afternoon, these very experiments will take place. Jeffrey L. Goldberg '86, who will direct Sunday afternoon's Musical Offering explains his role: "What I'm doing may not satisfy purists who aren't used to hearing Bach on synthesizer, harp, trombone, or sax, but Bach can stand and transcend particular musical instruments." He added, "As the Musical Offering was Bach's response to the newest instrument of his day--the piano--we're applying it to the newest instruments of ours."

Goldberg said that unlike the music of some of the romantic composers, Bach's music is so strong that one can almost play it on any instrument, and it will stand out.

Part of this strength may come from Bach's ability to forces the direction music would take. "Bach could look into the future of music by thinking about his sons, who also were significant contributers to the music of their time. He could look into the future as he could look into the past," Wolff said.

And, said Goldberg, "Bach had the incredible ability to switch from the most learned to the most modern styles. It makes every generation learn something new from him. He can weather the fads of time."

One violinist who will be performing in three of next week's events explained Bach's sustained popularity. "He has an inner intensity that you can't get when you're falling away in more romantic pieces. It's purely--there's not a superfluous element in it," she said. "It's not so much that he makes the simple complex as the complex simple."

Bach's music is exceedingly complex, sometimes combining four or five melodies at once, and Andrei A. Molotin '88, a self-proclaimed Bach fanatic, said that this complexity may explain why Bach was not so popular in his own time. Molotin labelled Bach's music emotionless and pure, and said it should not be played in the more flowing romantic style, which would cause some of the structure to be lost.

"It was Bach's struggle to make music scientific and structured that is the basis for anything that came after him," Molotin said.

But viola player Chris Lee '88 said that it was a different facet of Bach's music that appealed to him: "Most people think of Bach as a structured, almost mathematical music, but I think its got a very powerful lyrical, emotional quality, almost like religion."

Goldberg saw this division as needless. "Bach's able to do these technical acrobatics with counterpoint, but that's not the point. It's music and it sounds beautiful. Sometimes people make an artificial dichotomy between this scientific aspect and the musical one. That isn't there," he said.

"The quantity of wonderful music that Bach produced is what amazes me," said pianist James E. Schwartz '88. "He produced cantatas the way we produced cantatas the way we produce Expos papers."

Bach Events at Harvard

Saturday April 13: Harvard University Choir

St. Matthew Passion

Memorial Church, 7:00 p.m., Free

Sunday April 14: Harvard-Radcliffe Ensemble Society and Harvard Electronic Music Studio