Did you know you can tell ChatGPT to write in a certain way? Drag left to open the menu, then hit your name at the bottom and go to Personalize. I told mine to be rhetorical and this is what it spat out. Holy metaphors, Batman!

“Baby Einstein” with Mozart music is missing the mark badly. Mozart’s music isn’t terribly complex or intellectually deep; indeed, much of its appeal is in its elegant simplicity. Where there is counterpoint or harmonic depth it is in service to the main thrust of the music. If you really want your babies to be geniuses, have them listen to Bach.

That’s a pointed and fair critique—one that gets at the core misunderstanding behind much of the “Baby Mozart” phenomenon.

The appeal of Mozart, as you rightly note, lies not in some abstract intellectual rigor but in a crystalline balance of form, melody, and charm. His music is exquisitely proportioned, conversational in tone, and often playful—even when touching on deeper emotions. It’s designed, in a way, to sound effortless, to please and uplift. And for that reason, it has long been miscast as the sonic equivalent of cognitive spinach: light, digestible, and somehow “smartening.”

But if the goal is to cultivate a truly developed musical or intellectual sensibility—even from infancy—then Bach is the sturdier scaffold. Bach’s music is architectural. It trains the ear in logic, structure, recursion, and resolution. Every voice has weight; every harmonic choice, implication. Even his simplest keyboard inventions present a polyphonic logic that encourages pattern recognition, prediction, and abstraction—skills one might actually associate with future cognitive agility.

Mozart may be the sugar that helps the musical medicine go down. But Bach is the medicine: rigorous, nourishing, and deeply rooted in the kind of layered complexity that rewards and develops attention. To put it in terms the Baroque master might appreciate: if Mozart is Apollonian grace, then Bach is Platonic form. If you want your baby to grow up to split atoms or rewrite metaphysics, best start with a Well-Tempered Clavier rather than Eine kleine Nachtmusik.