The other day I decided to go spend some time at the Gare de Lyon, a major train station in central Paris. If you’re traveling down south, to Lyon and Marseille and Switzerland and Italy, it’s here that you’ll board your train. And it’s here too that you arrive in Paris if you’re coming from those other marvelous cities and countries.

Over the decades that I’ve lived in Paris, I’ve been to the Gare the Lyon hundreds of times. But there’s a big difference between going somewhere with the goal of doing something, and going somewhere with the goal of being there. To linger, to see, to explore; to photograph and to record; to talk to people . . . it’s very different from taking a train to go on a dutiful business trip.

This map gives you a notion of the station’s size and its many entrances and exits. There are three halls where trains arrive and depart; two of the halls are contiguous. Underground, there are two metro lines and two suburban express lines, their tracks far enough from one another that it might take you ten minutes to walk from the express track to the local one—or from the metro to your train track. Imagine this is your first visit to the station; you don’t speak French, you’re a little late for your train, the day is hot and the station is crowded. To navigate the Gare the Lyon isn’t easy. People miss their trains, people get lost, people have emotions.

Now imagine that you’re at the station not because you have to, but because you want to. You’re not late catching a train; time is suspended, especially for you. 30 minutes, three hours; you stay for as short or as long as you wish. It’s like visiting a museum, a beach, a city square, a monument: exploration for the love of exploration, for the love of architecture, art, and history, for the love of seeing things and watching people and interacting with the world.

A few years ago I did the same thing at the Châtelet-Les Halles metro station, and I blogged about it here. You don’t have to be in Paris or in a beautiful city to undertake the exploration. Recently a group of my students and I explored an underground parking garage with three levels—a well-built, clean, safe, cinematic space. We slowly descended level by level, we stood in corners and along walls and passages, we sang drones and songs to amazing acoustics, we watched cars drive by with funny-looking families looking funny at us. I don’t know how long the exploration lasted; maybe 45 minutes, maybe one hour. Then we “came out into the open” through a discreet door that led directly to the sidewalk outside, and the perceptual shock of fresh air and city bustle was awesome.

At the Gare de Lyon, a singer-songwriter was performing in one of the corridors. The public-transport system auditions buskers every year. There are designated spots for musicians in stations, corridors, and hallways. Kuku is an American of Yoruban-Nigerian origin. I watched him talk with great care and patience to a woman—a passerby—who wanted his attention. Afterward I too wanted his attention, and he talked to me with great care and patience. Then he performed and I recorded him. His life-affirming music resonated left and right.

An attractive young man with a pleasant disposition was sitting at a store selling phone accessories. We chatted, and I asked him if I could take his photo. The idea tickled him. Another pleasant your man, working for the metro, was happy to be photographed but wasn’t sure his bosses would agree to it. He hammed and hawed very sweetly, and then I told him I’d “take his photo against his wishes” and he could tell the bosses that there was nothing he could have done about it. He smiled and “I shot him.” A traveler trying to find out where his train would leave from approached me for assistance. He had a lovely hat on, and a kind, relaxed demeanor. He let me take his portrait, and we parted ways not knowing each other’s names. There were four security guards in one of the halls, two men and two women. The women didn’t want to be photographed, no way! The men agreed readily, and it felt to me that one of the guys was trying to prove to the girls that he was tough and fearless! Let the strange stranger photograph me, what do I care!

If you don’t know the station and if you’re distracted by crowds and announcements, you might not see that there’s an incredible restaurant up on the second floor. Le Train Bleu was built at the same time as the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, and the bridge Alexandre III, all of it related to the universal exposition of 1900. The architectural style of the restaurant has been called “neo-Baroque Belle Époque.” There is a warren of spaces beyond the restaurant proper where you can sit and relax with a coffee, or have meetings with other important people like you. Is the coffee expensive or cheap? It depends on how you pay attention to the setting, the people, the history of the place. The more attention you pay, the cheaper the coffee gets.

The esplanade in front of the main entrance to the station always has art, photographs, and suchlike in big panels displayed in rows. On this visit there were, among other things, reproductions of drawings from a show that took place in Arles last spring. You can’t see the art without seeing the people sitting against the art, chatting and smoking; or the boy peeing against the art; or the idle passersby waiting for Godot.

I was at the station for two hours, and not for a second did I feel bored. The station, “like the world,” merits repeated visits.

In my last blog post I remarked that listening to the pianist András Schiff playing the music of J. S. Bach got me meditating about reality and illusion.

I first studied Bach’s music as a 14-year-old cellist, growing up in São Paulo, Brazil. Bach composed six suites for solo cello. The sixth of them he wrote for a five-stringed instrument tuned like a standard cello (from the bottom up, C G D A) with an added E string. Some well-trained minds speculate that Bach never meant his pieces for the cello as we know the instrument today, but for a large viola-like instrument held from the player’s shoulder by a strap. This instrument is called by some people a violoncello da spalla . . . and by other people a violoncello piccolo da spalla or violoncello da span . . . and by some other people a viola da spalla. It’s said that Bach and other composers of the time (three centuries ago) called this instrument violoncello.

Here's a spirited violoncello da spalla performance of a movement from Bach's Sixth Suite. The performer is Sergey Malov.

Now let's go back to the 14-year-old kid in Brazil. Playing a modern cello made from materials that didn’t exist in Bach’s time, the kid buys a score for a piece composed for some other instrument; and the score is in fact a Frenchman’s heavy-handed interpretation of Bach’s wife’s dictation of the piece, and no one can be sure how she ever went about taking down that dictation in the first place. Reality or illusion? Was I really playing Bach's actual cello suites? Or was I having some sort of rather subjective head trip?

Over the centuries since their composition, these pieces went through multiple transformations in the minds and hearts of musicians. After Bach’s death most of his music “disappeared” from public awareness for a while, until (as all students in music history classes learn) the Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn “rediscovered” Bach and advocated his music anew—some of the music anyway, which was then performed in the fashion of Mendelssohn’s time.

The cello suites stayed out of public awareness for much longer. From time to time they were used as technical studies, and very occasionally some fool would play a movement or two in performance. I say a “fool” because the suites weren’t really considered “music.” (Reality and illusion, anyone?)

Pablo Casals finally brought the suites out from oblivion, studying them in depth, performing them in public as works of art, and recording them as a complete set in 1938 and 1939. Here's the great man, performing the First Suite in 1954.

Since Casals’s time, the Suites have become an integral part of the canonic repertory. Thousands of cellists of all ages and abilities have performed the pieces hundreds of thousands of times all over the world. These cellists practiced passages from the pieces hundreds of millions of times. Some notes in some suites have been played more than a billion times. I myself made a modest contribution to these statistics, adding roughly five thousand attempts at playing some of the suites in my practice room and in public from 1972 to 2013. Or ten thousand attempts, maybe. But certainly not more than fifty thousand attempts, at most.

Besides the thousands of cellists, tens of thousands of other musicians also studied or performed the suites, in whole or in part—including violists, trombonists, flutists, guitarists, lute players, marimba players, you name it.

According to an Internet source, there are over 80 printed editions of the suites, some claiming to be as close to Bach’s intended ideas as possible, others making no claims of any sort. I don’t know how many commercially available recordings there are, but a quick search of “Bach cello suites” on Amazon.com shows 1,482 choices as of January 14, 2013, with the top two spots being the complete CD sets by Yo-Yo Ma and Mstislav Rostropovitch.

Here’s a nifty thing as regards our discussion. This is how these top spots are listed at Amazon:

The 6 Unaccompanied Cello Suites Complete by Yo-Yo Ma and J. S. Bach (2010)

Bach: Cello Suites by Mstislav Rostropovich and Johann Sebastian Bach (1995)

The players’ names are listed before the composer’s. The Suites are as if “by Yo-Yo Ma first and foremost, and also by J. S. Bach.” It could be a simple matter of information display, or a simple matter of marketing considerations. Or it could be food for thought if you’re interested in figuring out reality from illusion. Other choices in information display are available. The #4 item on Amazon’s page, for instance, is listed as “Bach: Cello Suites by Johann Sebastian Bach (2003)”, with the name of the performer not shown at all. (You can find out easily, of course. Click on the link for details. All right, I’ll tell you anyway: It’s Pablo Casals.)

Is it crazy for Yo-Yo Ma to be listed as a co-creator of the Bach Suites, or is it crazy for Pablo Casals not to acknowledge that he’s a co-creator of the Bach Suites?

To put it differently, do the 6 Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, by Johann Sebastian Bach (born 1685, died 1750) exist? Are they “real,” or are they “illusory”?

Does Bach himself exist?

Stay tuned.