I introduced Johann Sebastian Bach in my introduction to classical music. He composed a vast number of musical works using every form known to him.* The Goldberg Variations showed us how thoroughly he explored the various possibilities that a musical form offered. Today we consider another musical form, the orchestral suite, by highlighting a beloved piece of music whose origins are unfamiliar to most casual listeners: Air on a G String.

Bach composed four orchestral suites. Each of them comprises between five and seven movements. Like the Goldberg Variations, they were written when Bach was older and had more personal liberty to compose as he saw fit. These are stately works, fit for a king. When I hear them, my mind conjures up images of a royal ballroom, with lords and ladies dressed in their finest clothing and dancing before the king and queen. Indeed, the movements of the orchestral suites are, after an opening overture, modeled after well-known Baroque dance forms.

The second movement of Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major is titled simply Air. It might be Bach’s most popular work. It is inexpressibly beautiful, and a must-learn piece for all young violin students. It received its popular nickname, Air on a G String, after the nineteenth-century violinist August Wilhelmj transposed it into C major and performed the entire movement using only the G string on his violin (the lowest string).

Today’s performance uses original instruments from Bach’s time. For centuries, instrument strings were made out of catgut, a natural fiber from animal intestines. (This uses livestock animals like cattle and pigs, not actual cats.) The method is ancient – in Greek mythology, Hermes strung his first lyre using the entrails of slaughtered cows, which mildly annoyed his brother Apollo, who owned the cows. Catgut strings give a quiet, dark, rich, somewhat nasal sound, and reveal the individuality of each instrument. Modern orchestras use stainless steel strings, which are louder, brighter, clearer, and produce a more homogeneous sound. This enables hundreds of string players to play in beautiful harmony. But ensembles in Bach’s time were of necessity much smaller and more intimate, and we see that here.

I love the sound of a Baroque ensemble, and as with Clementi last week, I believe that listening to Bach performed on period instruments is the way to go. If you would like to hear all four of his orchestral suites performed on period instruments, click here.

*Actually, Bach never composed an opera. But his cantatas, his most prolific output, use the musical forms that opera popularized, including recitative, aria, and chorale, with stylistic differences to render them appropriate for church services.