ome of the finest examples of the period, including the ubiquitous Brandenberg Concertos.
             JOHANN Sebastian Bach was a composer of extreme mathematical genius. "He and he alone perfected the system of keys and harmony that we have today after the Italian masters Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi first moved away from the system of modes that was employed before." (J.S. Bach Archive and Bibliography) He had great sense of form & structure, and saw music with insight from a broad perspective. A devoted Christian, he spent most of his life composing sacred music, and he believed that it was God who gave him the inspiration and his talent, and it was his duty to serve him.
             The last of six children, Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, a small town near Lepizig in Germany, on the 21st of March 1685, and christened locally at the historic Georgenkirche. His father Johann Ambrosius had married Maria Elisabetha Lammerhirt in 1668 and three years later they settled in Eisenach. At this time, Johann Christoph, who was later to become Johann Sebastian's guardian once their father had died in 1695, was born. Very little is known now about the first 8 years of Bach's life, except that he did not attend school until the age of 8, when he was admitted to the local Lateinschule in level 5. Not much music was taught at school, the primary curriculum being Latin grammar and Religious instructions. At school Johann Sebastian's Greek and logic would probably had been taught, but he did not have a strong interest in those subjects, and was showing a preference towards theology. Most of his early musical education probably came from home, where all of Johann Ambrosius's children learnt music - he was a town-musician, and he taught Johann Sebastian to play the violin. "The Bach family had always been musicians, and the first Bach can be traced back to Johann Bach of 1604, so they were by no means the first, but in Johann Seb...