Episode Details

Johann Sebastian Bach spent his career as a church employee in provincial German towns, writing music for Sunday services that his employers often considered too complicated. He died in near-obscurity and remained largely forgotten for eighty years. Yet his music anticipated computer programming, fractal mathematics, and artificial intelligence — structured with a logic so precise that computer scientists now consider him the first algorithmic thinker.

This episode traces Bach from his orphaned childhood through his feuds with church authorities, the towering works composed for weekly deadlines, and the modern rediscovery that revealed his music as a bridge between art and computation.

• Bach's musical family, his orphaned youth, and his early career as a church organist
• The feuds with employers who found his music too complex for congregational worship
• The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Art of Fugue, and the mathematical structures hidden in his compositions
• Why computer scientists and AI researchers consider Bach's counterpoint a form of programming