Rethinking Bach Codes

J. S. Bach has long attracted claims that his music is fundamentally a code to be broken. Interpreters count notes and measures, add up numbers derived from texts, refer to ancient writings, parse doodles, trace out shapes made by notes on the page, and make detailed calculations, all in search of ciphers that reveal hidden meaning. Traditions of scriptural interpretation in which every detail has significance and purpose often provide a model. The idea of “perfection” repeatedly surfaces, suggesting mathematical completeness, along with hypotheses that Bach’s abstract works are connected to other aspects of eighteenth-century culture. The symbolic and allegorical make frequent appearances. There are attempts to relate Bach’s works to elements of his biography that go beyond routine Romantic associations of musical works with personal expression. Many of these theories are amateur work, undertaken perhaps because treatments of Bach’s music are often technical, and because many aspects of the music are alien to the esthetics of the modern world. But the approach also surfaces in scholarly writings. All new claims start from the insufficiently examined premise that Bach worked in codes at all.