Study, study and more study (JSB)

Greetings:

I have just written a rather lengthy blog on the woes and travails of the programmer trolls and mostly dealing with how hard are our lives. Then, leaving it for a while to incubate (as is my wont upon occasion) I continued my reading on "Bach" - a rather large compendium on the boy and the man, Johan Sebastian Bach (there were many Germans in his area named Bach), dealing in minute detail with his life, friends, studies and teachers. At just before the age of 15 he left his home in Thurengia (as well as Ohrdruf and Eisenach) and traveled 200 miles (mostly on foot) north with his close friend who was 18 years old (Georg Erdman) to Luneburg, a city much larger (10,000 residents) than his native home of the Bach family. This was also so that the could be close to the town of Hamburg that was home to the largest and most fabulous organs in the world at that time. His study at St. Michael's church was very prestigious and each class consisted of only 20 noblemen's sons as well as a few highly-gifted singers and musicians.

Students at this Ritter-Academie studied

• theology
• philosophy
• classics
• ethics
• politics
• history
• mathematics
• physics
• French
• riding
• fencing
• dancing

All designed to turn out a well-rounded person in a program in keeping with the civil, military and social obligations of the German aristocracy. The academic year began at Easter and, in addition to the normal classes, Johan Sebastian Bach also had to study (for the first two years at age 15):

• Leonhard Hutter's Compendium locorum theologicorum (Wittenberg , 1610) - a reference work that required a didactic memorization of questions and answers of a complex nature
• Chrstoph Reyher's Systema logicum (Gotha, 1691) who first volume (Prolegomena logica de natura logicae) focuses on the definitions of fundamental terms
• Heinrich Tolle's Rhetorica Gottingensis (Gottingen, 1680) - a concise summary of Aristotelian rhetoric
• Latin Classes included Virgil's Bucolica and Aeneid, Book IV and Cicero's De Catinlina.
• Further classes in Latin and Greek
• Monograph on Alexander the Great by Quitus Curtius Rufus
• Cicero's De officiis
• Selections from Cicero's Epistolae
• Horace's Carmina
• Kebes of Thebe (Cebetis Tabula)
• Phocylides
• Isocrates
• Theoginis
• German Hisory
• Geography
• German Poetry
• Mathematics (advanced)
• Physics (advanced)
• Modern History
• Modern Geography
• Modern Physics

And ALL is this was the "core" of their studies. In order to pay for this schooling they were members of (lowly paid) choirs - usually four or five - and played various parties and gatherings. In addition, they studied fencing, dancing and Sebastian taught himself Italian. All of this is contained in "Johan Sebastian BACH, The Learned Musician" by Christophf Wolff, ISBN 978-0-393-32256-9 ot 0-393-32256-4, depending on which ISBN numbering system is being used by the vendor. My copy was published by W. W. Norton, New York / London. They were very, very busy little boys (young men) who slept very little and ate whatever they could find in the up-scale courts and parties.

All of this to apologize for my earlier complaints that we lowly programming trolls might be overworked. Perhaps we are not worked hard enough and we are raised in a society that values the family and social groups more than one's own work and career. Whatever... I'm much too old to change now but perhaps this might inspire some younger folks to study more and play less? :-)

SDG

jco