Take this example of Alan Mearn's interpretation of BWV 1007, this isn't mere ornamentation, he has filled out an entire exposition of implied counterpoint, where the alberti bass evolves into a completely new voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp98MRKrs2U I'm biased because I think Mearns' new Bach album is the most important interpretation since Gould's Goldberg Variations, and I'm working my way through his sheet music edition, but this idea that Bach's work was an artifact of a time whose importance is diminished by progress is farcical. It's a foundation without which there would be nothing approaching what we know today.
Bach himself "breaks" at least one rule in every piece, and I can think of one rule that was really due to technological limitations of the time - not modulating to more than 2 keys away, because they didn't have 12-TET and going more than a few keys away sounded more and more dissonant - keyboard instruments were tuned to a specific key.
The story I'm trying to tell is people arguing about the rules of music is no different than how composers/producers/song writers about music today with modern genres, and when some genre dies, the old guard tries to keep it "pure" by zeroing on a set of commonly used stylistic techniques and calling it "the rules" which makes the music more bland and uninteresting by smoothing out the rough edges.
I was taught counterpoint by one of Shostakovichs last students, and my opinion on rules is greatly influenced by him - it's good to learn the rules, even though they aren't really rules, and all the greatest music from that time was written decades before the rules were even codified.
Explaining existing music means creating new theory. Creating music and creating a theory about it are two different things.
I’m curious, which Bach contemporaries were considered less old fashioned?
Could very well had been so, who knows.
You don't cite anything on this. Why did DH include him in GEB?
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reception_of_Johann_Sebastian_... After his death, Bach's reputation as a composer at first declined: his work was regarded as old-fashioned compared to the emerging galant style.[a] Initially, he was remembered more as a virtuoso player of the organ and as a teacher. The bulk of the music that had been printed during the composer's lifetime, at least the part that was remembered, was for the organ and the harpsichord. Thus, his reputation as a composer was initially mostly limited to his keyboard music, and that even fairly limited to its value in music education.
Some supporting evidence might be:
1) He was basically forgotten after his death until being rediscovered by Mendelssohn (https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200156436/). Googling this "fact," I also found this somewhat dissenting post: https://notanothermusichistorycliche.blogspot.com/2016/06/ho....
2) I recall remarks from his sons somewhere about their father being old-fashioned, though I can't find them right now.
Re: GEB, I can't speak to hofstadter's psychology, sorry.
That was a time when many people wrote about music theory in one way or another: Corelli, Rameau, Telemann, Quantz, Handel, etc. My understanding is that they mostly tried to explain the existing tradition of baroque music, more than invent new theory. After Bach died, musical tastes changed, and music developed into a different direction.