Wealth & Money Quote by Michael Torke

It lands like a punchline, but it’s really a love letter to the old argument that art doesn’t just entertain; it stabilizes. Michael Torke, a contemporary composer who makes a living inside the very ecosystem of “serious music,” frames Bach’s B Minor Mass as a rival product to modern self-care culture. The joke is the provocation: if you’re anxious, alienated, or stuck, why pay hourly for analysis when a single, towering work can reorganize your inner weather?

The intent isn’t to dunk on therapy so much as to assert music’s power in the most current terms possible: money, consumption, optimization. Psychotherapy is presented as a transaction; Bach as an abundant, already-built cathedral you can walk into whenever you want. That contrast flatters classical music’s devotees (we’re not just listeners, we’re initiates) while also critiquing how neatly we’ve professionalized emotional life. Torke’s line implies that some forms of meaning-making can’t be itemized, diagnosed, or solved; they have to be experienced.

Subtext matters here: the B Minor Mass isn’t “relaxing background.” It’s dense, rigorous, spiritually charged music that asks for attention and rewards it with structure - not answers, but a sense that chaos can be shaped. In a secular age, Torke is smuggling transcendence back in under the guise of thrift. It’s witty because it’s slightly unfair, and it works because the exaggeration points at a real hunger: not for treatment, exactly, but for awe.