Art & Creativity Quote by Johannes Sebastian Bach

Bach’s complaint has the snap of a working artist realizing he’s employed by people who don’t actually like the thing he’s hired to make. “My masters” isn’t abstract; it’s literal. In Bach’s world, patrons were bosses, not benefactors: town councils, princes, church authorities. They controlled pay, schedule, status, and the terms of what music was allowed to be. Calling them “strange folk” is a polite-era insult, a way of saying: these people run the show, and they don’t understand the show.

The sting is in the phrase “very little care for music in them.” Bach isn’t just griping about bad taste. He’s pointing to a cultural mismatch between music as craft, devotion, and intellectual labor, and music as mere utility: something to fill a service, decorate a court, keep citizens calm, or signal prestige. The line reads like professional despair dressed as courtesy, because direct defiance could cost him his position. So he frames the problem as their peculiarity, not his rebellion.

The subtext is also strategic: Bach is lobbying for autonomy. If your employers “have little care,” then they can’t meaningfully judge you; their authority becomes administrative rather than artistic. That’s a subtle power move from someone often cast as a purely sacred genius. Here he’s a sharp-eyed employee, arguing that art suffers when institutions treat it like clerical paperwork. The quote lands because it’s timeless: creators still know what it’s like to answer to managers who love the metrics, not the music.