Jan Morris Bach

Jan Bach looks at his fingers a lot. These are elegant working hands, strong and precious, able to strike or caress keys, to operate valves and drive pencils across clean white music staves. In conversation he doesn’t use his hands to gesticulate or punctuate. He examines his fingertips minutely to clarify his thoughts, as though words might lurking there, ready to be snatched up and presented to the listener to explain what must be, really, unexplainable: the creation of music.

Music has been at the core of Jan Bach’s life from the beginning. He was born December 11, 1937 (sharing a birthday with French composer Hector Berlioz). Growing up in the central Illinois town of Forrest south of Pontiac, he began his musical studies on the violin at the age of four and added the piano two years after that. His mother Anne encouraged him to practice piano “so he could have fun at parties” like the ones of her youth near Memphis. His father, J. N., a more pragmatic and practical sort, didn’t discourage Jan’s practice but assumed he eventually would take over the family lumberyard and hardware store. By the age of seven he began composing his own piano pieces, because, as he said, “I thought I could improve on what the teacher was giving me to play.” Perhaps then it is no surprise that he has devoted his years to the composition, playing and teaching of music, finding in those activities a way to make a living and a way to satisfy his soul at the same time.

Jan has no set pattern of composing. Any hour of the day or night, on deadline or not, he writes when the inspiration comes, and hopes that he will be alone in the house when it does, as complete isolation is his favorite creative state. He looks for inspiration in places like the visual arts, poetry, and drama, leading a thoughtful observer of the Hall of Fame to want to lock Jan Bach in a room with fellow-inductee Stan Jorstad’s richly spiritual photographs of America’s sacred natural places, just to see what would come out.

All talk of inspiration aside, composing is a lot of work, and Jan commented “I’m often overwhelmed at the beginning of a project when I know I have to come up with a fifteen-minute orchestra work and realize there are months and months of work ahead of me (particularly in the preparation of the score and extraction of parts, one grunt aspect of the composing process that is never featured in the movies about great composers.) But I am helped by a statement that John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charlie, that he doesn’t begin to write a full-length novel, but to write a single sentence, which is then preceded or followed by other sentences to make a paragraph ….”

The symphony of Jan Bach’s life began with the short and tentative phrases of the seven-year-old who thought he could improve on his own piano lessons. Those phrases were followed by the passages of the adolescent composer who wowed his friends in the German band and won prestigious competitions by the handful, and those passages were enlarged upon through his long and creative career as teacher and composer. More beauty will follow, for certain, and the Fox Valley and the world will be listening.

© Mary Clark Ormond