As Commissioner of the FCC during the Clinton administration, Reed Hundt helped shape the modern internet. We speak about his attending the first Beatles concert in the USA (with his friend Al Gore), and the democratization of publishing and broadcasting wrought by the internet. Reed had many questions for me about Bach and my listening, so this is an episode to hear me talk more than I typically do.

Here’s the video on YouTube.

Transcript below.

[00:00:00]

Evan Goldfine: Welcome to the fourth episode of the podcast, A Year of Bach. My name is Evan Goldfine. Today we'll explore how policy helps shape who among us gets to hear Bach in the first place.

My guest is Reed Hundt, who was the chair of the FCC from 1993 to 1997 in the Clinton administration. Highlights from his tenure include the earliest days of digital television and satellite radio, the launch of spectrum auctions, a massive wiring of schools and libraries for internet access, and the opening of the five gigahertz band that became our modern Wi-Fi. He's a longtime public interest lawyer, an early champion of carbon taxation, and a great fan of Bach. And we'll talk about some of those things today. Reed, welcome.

Reed Hundt: Thank you, Evan. Thank you for that very nice introduction.

Evan Goldfine: My pleasure. So, over the past 30 years, the landscape of media reflects one of the biggest changes I think in American life, probably even bigger than the changes from the sixties through the start of your tenure in the [00:01:00] nineties.

Even this setup that we're doing right now seems unimaginable. We're on real time, high-definition video with automated captioning. My production budget is zero and the distribution is effectively free to everyone in the world. So  I'd like you to reflect on the scale of those changes and maybe some of the things that surprised you about how we got to today.

Reed Hundt: That's a great question. Almost everything that we imagined in the early nineties has come true. And then a lot of other things have also happened that we did not imagine. The things that we imagined were all good things. And the good things have mostly come true. And the things that we did not foresee that were not so good; they’ve happened also.

So those are my two big sets. So, with respect to the first, you've just mentioned a number of really important attributes. All through the first year of the Clinton [00:02:00] administration we had weekly meetings hosted by my ninth grade classmate Al Gore, to discuss the vision.

At the beginning of 1994,  in January , he gave the first speech ever given by elected official in an international forum about the internet of the future.

If you go back and look at those artifacts, you'll see the things that came true. What, specifically, we wanted to have is that creators like Bach or like you -- I see two guitars behind you on the Zoom screen.

Evan Goldfine: Humbly.

Reed Hundt: -- anyone of any talent, any capability anywhere in the world, at almost no cost could get a chance to see if anyone liked their product.

That came true. We envisioned that for a video. We envisioned it for, for auditory, for music. We envisioned it for typing and writing. and you see all of this everywhere now. We also [00:03:00] envisioned that it would be possible to gather an audience for output anywhere in the world, which you're doing right now.

You have very low cost. You still have to figure out how to market, but you have a chance. You don't have to go through a gatekeeper. We didn't sit there thinking we have these ideas, no one else does. The opposite. We had all kinds of people coming and telling us this is what's possible.

And then we adopted. We adopted these ideas as the vision for public policy. You might say, what were the public policies? Number one, we negotiated by the beginning of 1997 a treaty in which 69 countries said they would let the internet come in without taxation.

That's a big deal. Secondly, the spectrum auctions that you were kind enough to mention. Not only did we start the digital cellular industry in the United States, we started it worldwide [00:04:00] because in a variety of ways that I won't go into right now because of the shortness of human life, we had it those auctions and the rollout of the same digital technologies for wireless occurring  in every country in the world.

And that did actually happen. That is why when Jobs in 2007 got around to inventing the iPhone, there already was an infrastructure there to utilize the iPhone on a global basis, right? It is a chicken and egg story, and you needed to have both the chicken and the egg. so that was the infrastructure part of the story.

Aside from the foreign policy part, we had to make sure that all this connectivity would reach everybody in America at the same time. It wouldn't be, you have a lot of money and then your innovation would trickle down, which is the iPhone business model. It was the opposite.

We wanted to establish the lowest conceivable cost for the new access technologies. To [00:05:00] make a very complicated story, I will just summarize in one thing. At one point there were 6,000 internet access providers in the United States. Now you think of just the mega companies, and you're right, there are mega companies. But that's what happened over a 30-year story.

The start was an absolute cauldron of entrepreneurship, which is what we wanted to create. So here you are , you're the avatar, you're the manifestation of all these dreams come true. 

There are a lot of horrible things in this new world as well. It turns out you can lie easily. You can lie like a dog on the internet, and everybody believes that you are a human and not a dog.

You can lie at the highest levels of power and authority and get the lies heard all around the world. These things are also possible. We didn't think those things were impossible, but we trusted that ultimately public opinion, if it could be mobilized, would create a better world.

We, I guess we still have to see if that's true [00:06:00]

Evan Goldfine: To that end do the major TV and radio broadcasters still matter in this environment?

Reed Hundt: Somewhat, not that much. You asked about public broadcasting. This particular Congress wants to kill anything that has the word public in it. Killing public good as a concept seems to be very, very important to them.

We now are told we don't want the public good of messenger RNA. We don't want the public good of research. Apparently, the government does not want those things anymore. I don't think that's the opinion of most people in America or most people all around the world, but I think it is the animating spirit of this particular administration.

So, what is the case with public broadcasting? Public broadcasting goes back to the 1960s. My great predecessor, Newton Minow, is one of the fathers of the whole concept. The [00:07:00]  original mission was to have entertainment content that would be in some way enshrining family values, and wouldn't be subject to the constraints of advertising.

That does not actually make very much sense anymore. It's not all that powerful an idea now because again, the internet makes almost everything available to anybody. You can find that kind of content on the Net.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Reed Hundt: But what's needed in more volume is non-commercial news. News that isn't dependent on advertisers or beholden to major corporations as for-profit owners, because those corporations can be cowed, intimidated, arm-twisted by the government.

Well, that's been happening. So, there's more need than ever before, in my opinion, for nonprofit news. And I'm not alone in believing [00:08:00] that what's publicly broadcast should be reflected in every media. Publicly broadcast news is inquisitive news, investigation and reporting. It’s honesty and reality being presented, not contingent on the business goals of for-profit companies.So, where's that going to come from? This administration doesn't want that to exist. I mean, they've said that. I'm not accusing them of something they haven't admitted. They don't want that to exist. That's going to have to come from a redirection of philanthropic money. And if what we know as public broadcasting is no longer dependent on the government, that's good.

Meaning, now that the government's not a reliable partner, don't deal with them.

Evan Goldfine: Is the audience an issue to capture also in that kind of environment? I mean, you've got to cut through.

Reed Hundt: We do have a public broadcasting TV network that is intrinsically extremely valuable [00:09:00] and has stations all across the country.

They're now going to be cash starved. This is a job for philanthropy to do. There's a lot of people in philanthropy that have the wherewithal to step up. It's part of the battle for presenting reality. That's what's necessary. Don't go thinking, oh, we need to get the House of Representatives on our side to cut some deals.

That's not going to happen. And then introduce a modicum of advertising in order to have sustenance. What's important is that the ownership does not have a for-profit motive.

Evan Goldfine: So, you could argue that in a way YouTube's recommendation engine is the single biggest arts promoter in the world now.

Reed Hundt: It's a big deal. Yeah. It's a big deal. Among the many people that I met early on and somehow failed to have them adopt me were the creators of YouTube. And, I was like, what you guys are doing is totally great. It turned out to be really, really, [00:10:00] really true.

Evan Goldfine: Do you think that the ranking algorithms are like editorial or what, which would be First Amendment protected, or would they be subject to neutrality?

Reed Hundt: The First Amendment bedevils people in government, because it stops them from affecting the content. Until it doesn't anymore. Meaning, once you have an administration that uses other levers, like regulatory approvals to affect the content, then you have an administration that's found a way around the First Amendment, right?

So, what do you do about that? Well, the courts don't welcome the intrusion of people like you and me who still want to hear the material. They tell us, we don't have standing to complain. So, what do you do about that? Because the First Amendment has been evaded by the use of regulatory approvals as the mechanism for affecting the content.

I think what you have to address is the structure of these markets. And so again, it’s going to be necessary to have people that are not in it for the money to be involved. Like yourself. You're not charging for this podcast.

Evan Goldfine: Nope.

Reed Hundt: It's going to be necessary for people who aren't in it for the money to decide , that they can give meaning to their life and the lives of others by generating the content, that is real or that is or that is whatever you want to describe your friend Bach.

Right? Which is, I don't think you want to use the word real, but you want to use some other words.

Evan Goldfine: Transcendent in a way. I mean, there you are creating meaning. What I find amazing about all of these great artists of the past is that they're providing meaning to our lives, even though they could have no real conception about how our lives have been led.

We're utterly foreign to them just as they're utterly foreign to us, especially when you go back to his time. So, tell me about how you've got the Bach bug. When was your first experience with it? [00:12:00] How did you realize it was important to you?

Reed Hundt: Just a couple of things. I did take a history of music class my first year in college and that caused me to realize that I didn't really know what was going on in the music.

And I remember vividly, the professor who was speaking about Debussy. He said, if I remember correctly, he played like a hallucinated organist. I think he was actually not talking about Bach, but he might've been talking about Bach. And it was just a revelation to see what was behind the music. And of course , I'm part of a generation that believed that a whole genre was invented for us.

My ninth-grade friend, Al Gore and I, went to the first Beatles concert in the United States.

Evan Goldfine: Oh. Lucky you.

Reed Hundt: We were, we were lucky. We were 15. And so, we had to have a classmate, Stocky Clark, who had a driver's license because he was 16. and [00:13:00] he drove us to the place in Washington DC where they had their very first American concert.

As you have evoked yourself, once you hear the very first chord in, it's A Hard Day's Night, it's epiphanic. 

Evan Goldfine: Could you hear anything at the concert?

Reed Hundt: We were really close, so yeah. The jellybeans soared over our head and banged off of the cymbal. You could hear it right in front of you. And off the drums.

For those that don't know, the fans, particularly the girls, brought jellybeans and threw them at the stage to show their appreciation. I'm told from history books that Bach's audiences were equally demonstrative. The past is a foreign country. They did things differently there.

But apparently, they swooned and wailed and howled out. So, I guess people there [00:14:00] appreciated his music in the same way that we did The Beatles. 

And then the third thing that I'll mention really briefly is , I took a date once to hear St. Matthew's Passion. And that convinced her that she really liked me and I'll just leave it at that. Who knew that Bach was erotic?

Evan Goldfine: They're called the passion plays for a reason. I don't know.

Reed Hundt: That seems sinful to say, but it was.

Evan Goldfine: So that the connection started early.

And, and how did that run through your professional career and, and into your adult life?

Reed Hundt: Oh, I'm just a casual listener, on and off. Every so often with typing. Now, one of my topics, for you, is what is in your experience. Well,, I don't know if I can get into my topics now, Evan,

Evan Goldfine: Please.

Reed Hundt: One of them is, what is your method of hearing? Do you sit with earphones and concentrate? Do you stare out the window and dream? Is everything [00:15:00] permissible or is there only one right way?

Evan Goldfine: It depends on what I'm listening to and what my goals are for it. And sometimes my behavior changes depending on what I'm listening to.

So, I'll often walk while listening, which allows me to think. If I concentrate more, I will find that I'm able to concentrate more while walking than just sitting and closing my eyes in a room. Sometimes it's not in the background while I'm typing, depending on what I'm listening to. And there have been a few treasured moments in my life when I thought I was listening to something in the background, and I had to stop because of what I was hearing.

It was like, what is this? And I'll even say, one of the moments that I had was with a pop singer, which I don't listen to much  in recent years. But there's a young pop rock singer named Madison Cunningham who I listened to in big first major release, and I just was [00:16:00] working in the background and I just stopped and I listened to the first half of that album, plugged in completely.

I couldn't believe she was like 22 or 23 when it came out. Really just off the charts talent. But that happened also with a number of the pieces in my Bach year as well, especially when it came to some of the singers, I think had a really meaningful experience, I just found it touching and it hits the heart in a way that you can't explain.

And that's the beauty of the music that is beyond words and I think connects the people who were really interested in this. So, I listen in all sorts of ways. If I'm listening to a Beatles album, I've heard it so much before, or some of my favorite recorded rock music and pop from the sixties and seventies, I don't need to focus really so closely on because it's all sort of internal.

It's just reminding me,

Reed Hundt: Well, because you're so much younger, you had access to the entire Beatles [00:17:00] corpus, years after it came out.

Evan Goldfine: Absolutely,

yeah.

Reed Hundt: Our experience was different, meaning…

Evan Goldfine: You listened to the sequence, you had to.

Reed Hundt: The songs would come out typically as two on a disc or an album a little bit later.

And you'd hang on waiting, and then you'd hear one or two on the radio. And we would wait for the event of the release to see what fabulous new creation was coming that would speak directly to our generation, to our moment. So do we suppose that these, I think typically very small audiences that Bach would have, I doubt that they were big.

We don't know very much, but there might have been 50 or a hundred, or 200 at the most, right? Mm-hmm.

Evan Goldfine: Yep. In the church.

Reed Hundt: Do we suppose that these groups of people go to church thinking, gosh, what has he got for us now? Or how, how do we react [00:18:00] and what do we know about what we just heard?

Evan Goldfine: I mean, Bach was in demand. He was, he went from place to place over four or five different jobs.

There's a famous story of him getting thrown in jail by one of the local royals because he was threatening to go to another.

Reed Hundt: Four weeks in jail, supposedly. Yeah, and he composed during those four weeks.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. So, I think he recognized the scope of his talent. I mean, he obviously had an incredible drive to create and to achieve despite the probably mediocre musicians he had with him. and the frustrations with the climate and the instruments and the feckless nobles that he had to deal with. But he just kept going and going and managing through, wading through all the BS to be able to continue to create. And I think that some people probably really recognized the specialness of who he was, which is shown by the market demand that was there for his work.

He composed for weddings. He composed [00:19:00] for some secular things, but mostly it was church music. Because I think he was legitimately a pious man. And I think he thought he was channeling his gifts for the glory of God with every note that he played.

Reed Hundt: So, the way you're describing it, and I'm not challenging it, he didn't have much of a commercial audience.

Isn't that right? He wrote the Brandenburg concertos for Ludwig, who apparently never played them or had them ever played, and lost the manuscript. It wasn't found until a librarian found it in an attic in 1849, which is a lot later than when it was written in 1721.

He sends the Musical Offering to Frederick the Great who also never plays it. This is not the definition of an audience. It certainly wasn't like us with the Beatles or you with Madison Cunningham. He didn't publicize; he didn't get his material printed and circulated.

But Haydn was born in the same year. [00:20:00] He used the printing press, and he had his scores printed all over Europe. He ended up being a favorite in the royal court in London. So, when you compare Bach to either our modern experience or even to Haydn, his contemporary, it seems like he was a reclusive,

Evan Goldfine: I guess compared to someone with wider commercial ambitions.

I think also probably where he was in Germany at the time may have provided fewer of those opportunities. I can't say I'm an expert in all of that, but I would say that he benefited greatly from the revival of the interest in his work by Mendelsohn, who promoted him endlessly and led to this revival where he became the new touchstone for everyone after that.

Reed Hundt: Yeah, that's right. 79 years after his death. See, I buffed myself up by reading about and for your excellent podcast. So, it still seems to me to be [00:21:00] strange and weird and a bit enchanting that you have Haydn, who's commercially very, very successful, becomes extremely well known, who's living in Hungary and under the patronage of a rich nobleman.

And he gets frustrated because he wishes he was in Vienna. Mozart is born while Bach is still alive, and Mozart hangs around with the glitterati. But Bach is just Mr. Stay at home. Occasionally he walks a hundred or 200 miles to look for a new gig, but he doesn't do that very often in his life either.

He stays at home and has two wives and 20 children and buries 12 of them. It’s a completely different life than Haydn or Telemann or Scarlatti, other contemporaries. So how do we -- or maybe this is completely illegitimate-- [00:22:00] think about his life and see that reflected in his music?

Or is that not a legitimate inquiry?

Evan Goldfine: I think it's too hard. We don't really have enough color on, there's no letters of his. We don't really have accounts of what his sons thought about him., We’re about a hundred years too early. Later you would've seen a lot more personal letters to people crying their feelings.

Reed Hundt: Too early to get the psychodrama. Is that what you mean?

Evan Goldfine: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and I think it might even be a fallacy to project the psychodrama onto him. I think that their psychology in that era was just different from what we may be able to understand.

Reed Hundt: Well maybe, but I want to take a crack at it anyhow.Transposing any medium into another is a work of translation. And like any work of translation, it's going to produce something that only resembles the [00:23:00] original.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Reed Hundt:Whether it's translating Nabokov's Russian novels into English, or whether from one medium to another, but nevertheless using words to describe music, what are the adjectives that come to your mind to describe his music. Bach’s?Evan Goldfine: I mean, at its crudest, you can call it mathematical. But I kind of reject that also because I find it to be extremely moving and he was an underrated tunesmith. I think there's a lot of beautiful melodies. I think he's the king of structure. Whereas one small idea can play out over minutes and everything is preordained.

It's almost as every note, even if there's surprises, as the keys are modulating from measure to measure, it's where you're going to wind up. You're going to wind up either into a new era and a new key, or you're going to pass through that and back to your original key. [00:24:00] He's going to continue to surprise you, but there's an inevitability to how the pieces are structured that is enormously satisfying to a listener.

And there's a magic to that. And I think it's, he's unsurpassed with that talent.

Reed Hundt: So, I like a lot of those adjectives, although I do think it's that mystical. You and I have to agree on mystical.

Evan Goldfine: Yes. I think that's part of the magic. It's like there's this very highly structured mathematical king of the counterpoint, but it turns into something ineffable.

There is something really mystical and beautiful about it that is inexplicable. That's why I think so many of us over the past 300 years have been so drawn to this music.

Reed Hundt: I don't think Taylor Swift is mystical. But I think she's really cool. But I don't think that I don't think her songs are mystical, and I don't think that they are mathematical.

So [00:25:00] I think that these adjectives are different and for sure, they need to be different.

Evan Goldfine: Well, I read this beautiful book of criticism that was music criticism that became famous about 15, 20 years ago, called Let's Talk About Love by a writer named Carl Wilson, which I highly recommend.

The premise of the book is that he's this great fan of Elliot Smith, a brilliant, dark, Canadian singer-songwriter who took his own life. Elliot lost an award in Canada to Celine Dion. And Carl was so mad about this because Celine Dion was this kind of pappy schlocky thing, and the book is an exploration of him trying to understand why people love Celine.

And he said that they're after it for different reasons from why he was into Elliot. So, it was this real broadening of taste for him, people were looking at it as a way to connect with the lyrics. They found a connection with Celine herself. So, in a way, that the mystic [00:26:00] connection that they had with the performer still existed.

It's not intrinsic to the music itself in a way.

Reed Hundt: That part of the connection you mentioned.

Evan Goldfine: I think people are after the same sorts of things. No matter what kind of music they're listening to, they're looking for connection. And they're looking to be moved.

Reed Hundt: That's a great perception. And leads to my next topic, and I did threaten that I had multiple topics.

Evan Goldfine: I'm here for it.

Reed Hundt: So, people even in Bach's era wrote a lot about keys. It was generally believed that keys evoked emotions.

So, I have a couple of questions for you because you listened to the whole thing. First of all, do you hear the keys? Can you do that, or did you have to learn to do that? Or do you have to read the score to see it?

Evan Goldfine: I don't have perfect pitch, but when I play through some of the pieces on the piano, you find yourself in the key that you're in.[00:27:00]

And I read more about Beethoven actually, where I think this might've postdated Bach a little bit, about the evocation of keys with certain emotions. It was very important for Beethoven. C minor was like a huge Beethoven key. Because it evoked, I mean like pages and pages of this about certain things that it evoked in him.

It helps when you have perfect pitch. I have pretty good relative pitch, like, but I can’t sing you like an F sharp right now.

Reed Hundt: Since I looked all this up, C minor supposedly evokes innocence, sadness, heartbreak, and yearning.

Evan Goldfine: Those are very post Bach kind of feelings, right?

Like, that's romantic. Those are post-Bach feelings.

Reed Hundt: But the internet tells you -- thank you Mr. Internet -- it tells you for all the keys the set of adjectives. I think maybe the descriptions much more fulsome and worked out after Bach, but I [00:28:00] wonder if they're not, I wonder if they're not still a little bit accurate for his music.

Evan Goldfine: I'll tell you when, when I'm playing guitar, a guitar feels different because of certain shapes that you put your fingers in, where, how the strings are related to one another. C chord in the first position feels very different from the C chord in the second position, just the way that the notes are stacked on top of each other, where the first thirds and fifths are of that and the timbre of each of the strings as you're playing them.

You can kind of hear when it's just like an open C it's kind of like a Woody Guthrie kind of open position. And then the open G in the very beginning, you can hear these things over the, like the root D chord in first position is like a very James Taylorish sound.

So, you can hear those sorts of things. Although you can change the key by using a, a trusty capo like I have on my desk. So, you can still play in the first position, but change your key up by moving, effectively using this to move up the nut on the guitar. You can evoke those same sorts of feelings even while shifting the key.

And I, I'm not, [00:29:00] go ahead.

Reed Hundt: Well, I was just going to say, so during your listening-- it was 200 hours. Is that what it was --?

Evan Goldfine: Thereabout? Yeah.

Reed Hundt: During your listening, did you change your perception and capability of hearing keys?

Evan Goldfine: I don't think about hearing keys. I think I got better at hearing how the keys shifted, and especially when I would watch with the score.

I got better at reading music. Because the scores are freely available online, which is amazing talking about what the internet can do for us public domain. Every score is available for all of these pieces. You can just print it right out. Okay.

Reed Hundt: See, what did I tell you?

Evan Goldfine: You did it.

Reed Hundt: That's what we wanted, right?

Evan Goldfine: I know. Yeah. No, this is perfect. So, I got to just, when I was listening to something, all I had to do was like, I could bring up the music immediately and then creators have gone out to YouTube and you can listen live along with the score. So, you'll have like a pianist going along and then the score trails on along with it, which can be enormously [00:30:00] edifying.

But sometimes, it can move faster than you want it to. Of course, you can slow down the video now. It's really amazing. My brother-in-law is a VP at Apple. So, he's been thinking about tech and media for a long time, and he's in the video division and he said the most interesting thing about the internet is that you can go on YouTube and learn anything in the world.

Reed Hundt: Absolutely. And do thank him for Apple Music, which, through Sonos is how I listen to Bach.

Evan Goldfine: Same with me.

Reed Hundt: I want to go back to history just for a second. The times make the opportunity for the person. That's a maxim. You don't have to believe it. But I do believe it.

Evan Goldfine: Sure.

Reed Hundt: That was true for some of the great horrors of history. For Hitler. For him it  is certainly true. It's certainly true for Trump. Trump is not a figure who was possible in American [00:31:00] politics until recently.

Evan Goldfine: Yep.

Reed Hundt: Neither is Mamdani. The idea that a socialist Muslim can run for mayor in New York and maybe win.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Reed Hundt: That's something that comes from our times and wouldn't have been possible even 10, 15 years ago.

Evan Goldfine: Yep.

Reed Hundt: So, in what way can we think that the times may have created an opportunity for Bach to be so incredibly creative?

Or do we think that he somehow stands apart from the era? Maybe because he didn't have great and famous patrons? His son works for Frederick the Great, but he doesn't. What do we think about that? How did the times relate to Bach?

Evan Goldfine: There wasn't as much music before Bach until him. There was so much for him to get, and he ordered scores from all over Europe to be able to study them. And he adapted a lot [00:32:00] of Vivaldi's concerti for, I think there's the four harpsichord concerto has adapted from Vivaldi.

So, he was interested in what was there, so he pretty much had the ability to absorb everything that had happened before, and he transmuted it. Like I think now it's impossible given the breadth of music that's out there for someone to condense everything that has ever been created in Western music and come up with their own thing.

You can, of course, have individual artists that are affected by what they've listened to, but it's not complete. It feels like Bach really got everything and he was in that moment. I'm reminded when I took a philosophy class in college, I was reminded of Rene Descartes. Wrote a book called The World, which was like everything that was known to time, At that time it could fit in a book.

Now you can't do that. So, I think Bach kind of fit music in one volume and then reshaped everything from there and utterly changed it. And so, he really took advantage of the moment that he [00:33:00] had just like many of the people afterwards. And there couldn't have been Beethoven before or after him.

Same thing with Mozart. Any of the great ones. I mean, Schoenberg could not have written 12 tone rows unless everything that happened before in the music had happened. And I think some of the stuff of most contemporary music, especially in the formerly composed world, maybe has sort of stagnated since minimalism and serialism, Steve Reich and Philip Glass I think are, are great composers, but I haven't heard anything really after that. I mean, there's some people playing around with electronics, but it's not, these are people of their moment, but it's not, I think anything terribly breakthrough. I mean, I think the greatest art that we've created in America was jazz music that was, from like the twenties to the seventies, of the last century.

And that those people were of their time as well and just continually iterating on each other while also kind of grabbing everything [00:34:00] they could from the broader American culture and filtering it through their own experiences.

Reed Hundt: So this taking it all in and synthesizing and creating something new -- I think you say it very well -- leads me to a question, why didn't Bach do the same thing with respect to the piano?

So, he knew about the piano, the piano forte. It is invented when he was just 19, 20 years old if I have my dates right, in Italy. And then, he gets a version of it later in his life. But he doesn't like it, and he criticizes it. He doesn't become an inventor.

He doesn't say this thing could be really cool. And history tells us that when in 1847, he has this famous meeting with Frederick the Great, ,   king ( let's put it in the best light), has [00:35:00] about a baker's dozen of these piano forte all over the palace and rudely and arrogantly forces old Bach to walk from one to the other and play on them.

And then he tells him here's 21 notes that I've cunningly contrived, just to show you what a jerk I am.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Reed Hundt: And why don't you create a three-part, counterpoint piece right away. Which of course, Bach does on this instrument, but this is  an amazing instrument that he doesn't actually have all that much interest in.

Why is that?

Evan Goldfine: I'm going to say that this is highly speculative right now. I'm not a Bach scholar, but I am going to say that those instruments were probably not very good, especially compared to the pianos that came after them. Even Beethoven a hundred years later was kind of frustrated by the quality of the pianos that he had.

He was always trying to get the next better ones. I would say that Bach had very, very sophisticated, really good sounding organs to play on, and he [00:36:00] composed on those and he had fantastic sounding harpsichords, and he had some pretty good clavichords. I don't know about that one for sure. But I've found through my listening, one of the things that changed for me is that I actually enjoy listening to a lot of these pieces on harpsichord now.

And before it was a kind of sound that grated on me, but there's something about the way that the works can be played on the harpsichord that feels almost more correct than on the piano in certain pieces. And so, I prefer listening to the Goldbergs on the piano, but I love a lot of it on the harpsichord now also.

So, I think he probably was exploiting the technology that was strongest for him, which was the organ or the harpsichord.

Reed Hundt: Well,  I'm just going to say back to you what you just said very well. He took what was as a given. His mind was somewhere else. This is not the Steve Jobs story of [00:37:00] creativity about creating the ecosystem and the infrastructure. That is the Steve Jobs story. I just made a short list of the things that came along just a little bit later. The modern piano, the clarinet, the tuba, and maybe most importantly, valved brass instruments.

We don't really have to strain our imagination too much to imagine how it would be to have Bach play with these instruments, because people do play Bach with these instruments. And I don't know if it's better with these instruments for the reason you just said.

But part of the experience of listening to Bach on the original instruments is that it enhances the mystical nature of the experience.

Evan Goldfine: It can.

Reed Hundt: I think that's fair.

Would you agree with that?

Evan Goldfine: I think it can. And I think that if you're playing it on a piano in a way, it's sort of like the translation [00:38:00] that you're speaking about beforehand, it's being translated.

Reed Hundt: I have two other weird topics just to wrap it up.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah, let's do it.

Reed Hundt: So, here's the first. You said earlier that it is hard to resist using the word mathematical to describe the music because it is so susceptible to mathematical analysis and construction. Does that mean that artificial intelligence almost certainly can recreate Bach and then give us infinite production of Bach material?

Evan Goldfine: Possibly. I'm becoming more open to it, but I have not heard any compelling AI developed music as of yet.

Reed Hundt: I haven't either, but Evan, in addition to other things that are on your website, you’re an experienced financial investor, a successful real estate investor and a great Bach aficionado and explainer.

You also could [00:39:00] be Bach AI.

Evan Goldfine: No thanks. I just want to be Evan.

Reed Hundt: It's just hanging out there ready to be created.

Evan Goldfine: Um, oh goodness.

I just, there's so much richness is what that's there. Look, it's 200 hours of music. I think part of the novelty of my project was that not a lot of people have really dug through all of it, and it's all there for you.

And it's being interpreted by other real people channeling this music that they could not have heard originally through the scores, through their own bodies and their own modern experiences, sometimes historically informed and sometimes rejecting that historical information and just coming up with whatever's there today in, 2025, almost 300 years after Bach time.

I don't need it. I'm curious as to what's going to come up with the AI Bach, but that's not my game.

Reed Hundt: Well, it could be some amazing material. It seems like it is a real possibility because of the mathematical, [00:40:00] nature.

That gets to my very last topic.

Evan Goldfine: I, I do want to add one, one more thing about why it's not just math. I think harmony can be taught mathematically, and rhythm can be taught mathematically, but I think that there's been no good mathematically composed melodies. And there's some mystical thing about melody. There are some rules that you can follow.

I took a music theory course when I was in high school also. It was a little bit on melody, but it was mostly harmony and rhythm. And then you can kind of tell the story of what the melody is doing with that underpinning. But the melody is mysterious and very, very hard to explain. And if AI can start writing great melodies, then we're all going to whistle.

Great. I don't know. I still have to get sold that it's going to happen.

Reed Hundt: Well, that reminds me of Haydn who suffered eye surgery from the same guy who killed Bach.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Reed Hundt: But he, Haydn, survived that and lived [00:41:00] six or eight long, painful years of decline.

And he said, I have all these melodies in my head. I don't have the capability anymore to put them into real musical creations, but I still have the melodies in my head.

Evan Goldfine: And we all do. We all can. You can start to whistle down the road and you don't know where it comes from.

Reed Hundt: So, there you go. That's the human-centric version of AI that we hope is possible. I want to thank you, but I want to end by evoking something you said earlier about your project, your all of Bach project. So, I made a list of some "all of’s".

Evan Goldfine: Okay.

Reed Hundt: That I've that I've done in my life.

Evan Goldfine: I love “all of.” It's great.

Reed Hundt: You made me think about them. So, I've read all of Anthony Powell’s novels, including the [00:42:00] 12, in Dance to the Music of Time, and his non-novel, John Aubrey and his friends. I've read all of Proust's 1.26 million words about a cookie. I've read 16 of the 20 Nabokov works. All of Dashiel Hammett, all of Patrick O'Brien'sJack Aubrey books. But most importantly, in terms of contemporaneous news, my wife and I have watched all of the episodes of ER. We just finished. They were aired over 15 seasons between September 19th, 1994, and April 2nd, 2009.They went from Clinton to Obama.

There are 331 episodes. It took us approximately four and a half months.

Evan Goldfine: What did you gain from watching 331 hours of ER?

Reed Hundt: It was completely and totally engrossing. [00:43:00] First of all, in the early years the showrunners and the writers were one to two decades ahead of the rest of America on social issues.

They were ahead on gay marriage. They were ahead on AIDS, they were ahead on public health. They were ahead on numerous issues. They had huge audiences in the nineties. and ultimately, they were canceled because the show fell below number 50 in the ranking of the most watched shows.

But in the early years when they were at the absolute top it makes you think that that medium was very much a way in which the social agenda was advanced because they weren't wrong about where the country would ultimately be on these topics. [00:44:00]

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Reed Hundt: The second thing is what the historian Maitland said, we must always remember: what is now in the past was once in the future. Okay. When you watch these early shows, partly because you know what happened in their lives, but partly because you can just see it, you just go like, that person is going to be a big star.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Reed Hundt: And as soon as you see George Clooney in show number one, you're like, that guy is going to be huge. That's fun. And it is really kind of cool , with hindsight helping you a lot, that you can also appreciate the talent. And then the third thing is the methodology, the way that the art is made.

At the very beginning it has a breakthrough quality. It’s an incredible step, and I [00:45:00] think that it does relate to your appreciation of Bach, right? This breakthrough quality. The breakthrough quality with ER was long, long tracking shots , sequences where the camera would follow people from the intake across the hall into the trauma room.

People would come into the room. The emergency nature of the ER was clearly demonstrated in a gripping manner by the method in which the camera was showing it all, which is very, very different from the way TV was presented on other shows in that time period.

And then by the end they're struggling to find anything new, anything new in terms of the method. I don't think Bach had that problem of struggling to find anything new. Those are some of my “all of’s” that I hope you don't mind.

Evan Goldfine: I'm glad to hear them.

I'm imagining it was more pleasurable without the commercial breaks also. [00:46:00]

Reed Hundt: Oh. That's totally cool. Otherwise it would've taken us forever. But who wants to watch any ads? Not to mention ads on products that were discontinued three decades ago.

Evan Goldfine: Let's wind it up there. Reed, this has been terrific. Thank you for pressing me on a number of things too.

And, and great to hear about your perspectives on both Bach listening, and how art has moved you in your life.

Reed Hundt: Thanks for having me, Evan. And I will wait to find out what other podcasts you have on this theme and also what your next "all of" is going to be.

Evan Goldfine: I don't know. That's up for grabs right now. Thank you, Reed.

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