A Close Encounter (of the 4th Kind) with J. S. Bach

I guess you have probably found yourself, at least once, in that rather awkward situation when you go to the restroom and, right then and there, you run into someone important—someone you very much wish to talk to and get to know better—but certainly not in *that* kind of place! Pretty embarrassing, isn’t it? When it happens, we never quite know what to do: whether to just say hello, smile, say something more, say nothing at all, or simply leave the restroom as quickly as possible—maybe even before doing what we were there to do.

Well, such encounters in restrooms—unexpected and embarrassing—I call “close encounters of the Fourth Kind.” Now, you may wonder what that has to do with Bach at all. Let me tell you about it.

One day, a friend of mine met me at the Roanoke, Virginia airport to drive me to Blacksburg. It was the middle of a hot summer, so we thought we might first have lunch in an air-conditioned restaurant that was part of a rather large and pretentious hotel nearby. It was so hot outdoors and so cold inside that the air conditioning made the place feel almost sterilized. The restaurant was large and nearly empty, with very few people around. And everywhere, piped-in music. A really unusual place, almost spooky—and little did I know what kind of experience I was about to have.

While waiting for the meal, I decided to visit the men’s room. And there it was: large, luxurious, spotless, with marble sinks and even gold-plated taps. That opulence made me feel slightly uncomfortable, but nonetheless I headed to the place where I could do what I had in mind to do. I was alone, and something felt strange. I knew it, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it—or at least it took me a few seconds to realize what it was. Exactly when I was about to… it dawned on me: the soft music reverberating from sink to sink and from stall to stall. Bach—the Prelude and Fugue No. IX from the *Well-Tempered Clavier*, the one in E major. You know, that kind of music is almost sacred for a Western musician. It wasn’t easy to go ahead and fulfil the purpose of my visit to the men’s room—with *that* sort of background! But somehow I did. Just think about it: at that moment of urgent physiological need, the accompaniment to my release was Bach’s *Well-Tempered Clavier*.

Surely, neither Felix Mendelssohn, when in 1829 he gave a strong impulse to the rediscovery of Bach by performing the *St. Matthew Passion*, nor Robert Schumann, when in 1850 he founded the Bach-Gesellschaft to promote the music of the Old Master, could ever have imagined how successful they were going to be. I am sure they never anticipated that their authority as opinion-makers would make Bach so popular that his music would eventually be heard even in restrooms—albeit in elegant hotels.

If you are a composer and your music is piped into elevators, hospitals, and supermarkets, I suppose that’s fine, that’s okay. But if it can be heard between the sounds of flushing toilets, then I guess—by today’s standards—that’s when you’ve really made it!