What We Learn, and What We Pass On

In 1705, Johann Sebastian Bach was twenty years old and already earning his living as an organist in Arnstadt, Germany.

Music had surrounded him all his life. He came from an extraordinary family of professional musicians who had worked across central Germany for generations. His father, uncles, elder brother and many members of the wider Bach family were musicians, and Bach had absorbed a remarkable musical education from an early age.

By twenty, he was already a highly accomplished musician. Yet what strikes me about the young Bach is that that wasn't enough for him. He had learned an enormous amount from the musical world around him, but he had a profound urge to know more.

Hundreds of kilometres away in Lübeck was Dietrich Buxtehude, by then an elderly man and one of the most admired organists and composers of his generation. Bach believed there was something he could learn from him that he couldn't find at home. So he asked his employers for four weeks' leave and set off for Lübeck, largely on foot.

There is something timeless in that part of the story. A gifted young man at the beginning of his career seeking out an older man who has spent a lifetime mastering the thing that mattered so much to him. And Buxtehude appears to have welcomed him into that world.

There was no formal development programme and no commercial mentoring arrangement. Bach had made the considerable effort to get there and Buxtehude, nearing the end of his own career, gave the young musician the opportunity to observe, listen and learn from what he had spent decades mastering.

I find that exchange between generations particularly appealing. The younger person brings energy, curiosity and the hunger to learn. The older person has knowledge that has taken a lifetime to acquire and is willing to let somebody else benefit from it.

Bach had asked for four weeks' leave. He stayed for four months. That fact probably tells us as much as anything about how important the experience became to him. He immersed himself in Buxtehude's musical world and, when he eventually returned to Arnstadt, his employers were understandably unimpressed.

Bach's recorded explanation was wonderfully understated. He had gone to understand "one thing and another" about Buxtehude's art. Apparently those few things were worth walking hundreds of kilometres for and turning four weeks into four months.

I have always loved this story, partly because Bach is probably my favourite composer. We know what he eventually became, which makes it tempting to imagine that his extraordinary ability somehow made his future inevitable. At twenty, none of that was known. He was a gifted young man who needed to find out how much further he could go.

I don't think Bach's story speaks to everyone in quite the same way, and nor should it. Some people, particularly when they are starting out, have an unusual creative, intellectual or entrepreneurial ability accompanied by an equally unusual drive to explore it. They don't simply think it would be nice to become better. Something in them needs expression.

If you recognise that feeling, Bach's story raises a fairly direct question.

What are you going to do with it?

Talent alone doesn't answer that. Developing an ability often means moving beyond what is familiar, seeking out people who know considerably more than you do and being willing to become the learner again. Sometimes we need to encounter excellence before we can imagine what our own version of it might become.

Bach's determination eventually produced an astonishing body of music. His passions and cantatas, concertos, keyboard works and music for organ still reveal the scale of his imagination and devotion to his craft. Yet after his death in 1750, musical tastes changed. His work remained known among musicians and specialists, but much of it disappeared from public performance and his wider reputation faded.

Nearly eighty years later, another gifted twenty-year-old helped change that. In 1829, Felix Mendelssohn conducted Bach's sublime St Matthew Passion in Berlin, an event that became an important moment in the revival of interest in his music. There is something rather lovely in the symmetry. The young Bach had travelled an extraordinary distance to learn from an older master. More than a century later, another young musician recognised something extraordinary in Bach and helped pass it to another generation.

Today Bach is regarded as one of the towering figures in the history of Western music. The young man walking towards Lübeck could have known none of that. He only knew there was more he needed to learn. Perhaps that is why this story has something to say at both ends of a career.

If you are starting out, the question may be whether you are curious and determined enough to seek out people who can take your thinking or ability further. That requires initiative, but also humility. You have to recognise that however talented you may be and whatever your potential, somebody else has spent decades learning things you haven't yet encountered.

Later in a career, the question changes. By then, you may have accumulated thirty or forty years of experience without giving much thought to how valuable some of it could be to somebody else. Things that now seem obvious to you may be anything but obvious to someone encountering them for the first time. There is a generosity in making that experience available.

It doesn't have to become a formal mentoring relationship. Sometimes it is a conversation, an introduction or taking somebody seriously when they approach you with genuine curiosity. It may simply be allowing a younger person to see how you think about something you have spent years learning to do well.

And for those of us who don't possess an extraordinary talent or feel Bach's intensity of purpose, there is still something useful here. Perhaps you are simply curious about what else you could do. You may have an interest you have never properly explored, wonder whether your abilities could take you somewhere different or feel ready to learn from somebody who has travelled further along a road that interests you. There doesn't have to be a grand ambition behind it.

At different stages of our lives, we may find ourselves on either side of this exchange. Sometimes we are the person looking for someone who can show us more. Sometimes we are the person who has travelled far enough to have something worth passing back. And, if we're fortunate, perhaps we remain a little of both.

Questions to Consider

• Who knows something you would genuinely like to understand?

• Is there an ability or ambition you haven't yet fully explored?

• What have you learned through experience that somebody earlier in their career might value?

• Who might benefit if you made more of that experience available?

Try This This Week

Think about which side of the story speaks to you most strongly at the moment.

Perhaps there is someone whose experience you would value and it is time to begin that conversation. Or perhaps you have reached the stage where somebody else could benefit from what you have learned…

[and if you have yet to know the joy of Bach or Buxtehude, check these out]