Organs used to make us think of God.

With their towering pipes reflecting flickering candles,

they filled our cathedrals with both light and sound.

The great composers of the 1700s used the organ like a pulpit,

weaving harmony and dissonance into musical sermons both

frightening and uplifting. No one did this better, perhaps in all of history, than Johann

Sebastian Bach, whose command of the instrument drove his contemporaries mad. So deft was his imagination and so skillful his inventiveness

that he was, on more than one occasion, chastised for improvising too long during regular church

services. His complex and brooding melodies and motifs were a subject of confusion to his Lutheran leadership,

and fellow composer Johann Aldolf Schleib once stated that Bach's works were darkened by

an excess of art and marred by an unending mass of metaphors and figures.

And if you listen to Bach's music today, you kind of understand where

he was coming from. It's huge and complex and moving in a way that we can't quite describe.

Why does Box music, like the piece you're listening to right now titled Fantasia and Fugue

and G minor, elicit such an emotional response?

Well, one answer may be found in a quote from his son, composer Carl Philip Emmanuel,

about his father's understanding of how organs work.

He understood the whole building of organs in the highest degree. Organists were terrified

when he sat down to play on their organs and drew the stops in his own manner. For they thought

that the effect could not be good as he was planning it.

But then they heard an effect that astounded them.

The first thing he would do in trying an organ was this.

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