The strange thing about Bach is that it doesn't at all fit our conception of the misunderstood genius who is years ahead of his time. He was certainly misunderstood, but not because he was ahead of his time, rather because according to the musical disposition of that day he was generations behind it. [...] And Bach as he grew older not only made no attempt of reconcile his thought with the temper of his times, but in fact withdrew into what must have seem to his contemporaries surely as a maddening nostalgia for the glories of ages past. For Bach, you see, was music's greatest nonconformist, and one of the supreme exemples of that independence of the artistic conscience that stands quite outside of the collective historical process.