Special Guest Blogger: Johan Sebastian Bach

Being famously hired to make music that sends people to sleep isn't the greatest achievement to boast about but that was how i got my break, Count Kaiserling, a Russian diplomat living in Germany and suffered from insomnia and commissioned me to create something to help him fall to sleep so i wrote the Goldberg Variations.
All my family were musical and when my parents died when i was 10, i went to live with my brother who was working as a church organist and taught me how to play the organ.
I heard that one of my favorite composers, a man named Dieterich Buxtehude, was living in the northern German city of Lubeck and i was so interested in meeting the man and hearing his music that i walked 280 miles to get there.
At the time, Buxtehude was serving as the organist of St. Mary’s Church in Lubeck, and i had ambitions of taking over when Buxtehude retired. However, there was a condition attached to the job position, i would have to marry one of Buxtehude’s daughters to secure the position of organist. Putting it politely, they were not lookers, so i decided organist was not what i wanted to be and walked the 280 miles back for home.
I was hired by Prince Leopold, a German prince, as his director of music but he was a real religious type, any music i wrote had to be religious so i write 'In The Name of Jesus' on each bit and he was happy with that.
I landed a job as the choir leader for two churches in Leipzig, teaching music and giving private lessons and i wrote probably the tune i am most famous for, the The Brandenburg Concertos.
To hear it you would think i spent months perfecting it but actually it was a mix of six pieces of music i had previously written running into each other.
It wasn't that great a hit at the time but my son went on to teach piano, one of his prodigies was young boy whose father said he had great potential, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or something, i do wonder sometimes what ever happened to him.
My health was declining and i lost the use of his eyes due to cataracts and had surgery to try and cure it but the surgeon was a fraud and actually made my eyesight worse.
I did hear that i had three piece of music put onto the Voyager Golden Record and launched into space as an introduction for any intelligent life out there which would be nice because if they ever make it to Earth, they will notice there isn't too much intelligence down here.