🎹Goldberg Variations

Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, published in 1741. An aria, thirty variations on its bass line, and the aria again. No audio file here: it lives in the 💳 Music streaming account, in the half that is mine.

What it is for. The aria is the starting gun for 🔹 Write 300 words. Back from the walk, kettle on, coat off, sit down at ☕ The kitchen table, press play. By the time the aria has gone round once I am usually a paragraph in. Every issue of 📂 Slack in the System - 2025 issues began under it, including the ones I am not proud of.

Why this and not something else:

• No words, so nothing competes with the sentence.
• I know it well enough to stop hearing it and not well enough to hum along.
• It runs to well over an hour with the repeats, so it outlasts any morning I have.
• The return of the aria at the end is the best you may stop now I know. I almost never get that far, and when I do I close the laptop.

Things I have learned about it without trying:

1. Every third variation is a canon, and the gap between the two voices widens by one step each time.
2. Only three of the thirty are in the minor. Number 25 is the one that makes me stop typing.
3. The last variation is a joke: two popular tunes of the day stacked on top of the bass. After an hour of rigour he ends with a singalong.

Mornings in 2025: 243. That is the habit's count for the year, not a claim that I listened properly 243 times.

For the second pass, the cutting, I change to 🎵 Canopy Light. Bach is too interesting to delete sentences under.