I’m not a professional musician, and in fact I can’t even read music. I come from a musical family and have played various instruments since I was a child, but I only learned to play the piano when I was about 20 (about 15 years ago). Although I had no musical training, I have always been fascinated by the complexity of Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions. I have also written a few compositions of my own, in which I try to imitate the contrapuntal complexity of Bach’s compositions.

Here are some of the compositions I have written over the years, mainly for my own pleasure. The first, Chaconne, about 12 minutes long, was largely inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s composition of the same name, of which Violinist Joshua Bell has said, “It’s not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It’s a spiritually powerful, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect piece.” My composition is mainly based on variations of the same chord progression.

Fugue is one of the most complex forms of composition, and its greatest master was J.S. Bach. Today, many conservatories require to write a fugue for a master degree. As a music enthusiast who can’t even read sheet music, composing a fugue is quite painful. That’s why most of my fugues are left unfinished. I managed to compose a four-voice fugue of over five minutes based on the motif B-A-C-H. I have also composed five other fugues on the same motif, but they have all been unfinished. In this video I published both the finished and the unfinished fugues.

Bach himself composed a fugue to his own name, which he also left unfinished as part of his late-period work The Art of Fugue (legend has it that Bach died in the middle of composing it, leaving it unfinished). A fugue is a form of composition that begins with a monophonic melody, and the same melody is repeated continuously in different keys with other voices playing harmonically interwoven melodies, gradually developing into a complex polyphony, usually in four voice.

Soli Deo Gloria, Glory to God Alone

My previous compositions