Kaya Oakes found her religion again, in Bach:
I hadn’t touched a cello in 15 years when I discovered the Mass in B Minor, by which time I was deeply into my thirties, married to a musician, my hands permanently bent and hurting from arthritis, and struggling to reconcile with the Catholic church, a protracted battle that continues to consume a rather large chunk of my days. One night when I was killing time before heading off to a catechism class, I found a copy of it at Amoeba Records and stuck it into my car CD slot. The Mass in B Minor begins with a burst from the chorus and orchestra together, the Kyrie: Lord, Have Mercy. Even sitting in the driver’s seat, it was like being knocked to the ground.
The thing about rock music, in all of the forms that I’ve worshipped, is that it’s not about thinking. You have your cerebral performers, but rock music is about the body: the corporeal sensations of fucking, moving, imbibing, ejecting. It is not about the caverns of the mind. And those caverns are where Bach spent his lifetime chasing the intricacies of forms, twisting the ideas of what music can do, wedding it to mathematical possibilities, but never forgetting that, as Keats wheezed, Beauty is Truth. Beauty is the best thing we can point at in order to say “God.”
The Dish 