This makes sense to me as a musician, and also as an artist or craftsperson. I feel like I’ve done so many prior works, they deserve to be revisited and reworke

This makes sense to me as a musician, and also as an artist or craftsperson. I feel like I’ve done so many prior works, they deserve to be revisited and reworked and at some point, you might as well. I may feel like there’s certain elements of past work that could benefit from attention with my current, improved skill set, or that something that felt finished previously seems incomplete now. Another motivator could be that an older work feels underexposed. At other times I might pull out an old work because it contains elements of a current trend, or I think the style is ripe to come back into fashion. You see this with modern musicians, too - artists often remake songs from their early demos or first albums later on with better production, a different style or a new perspective. I would imagine that many people reading about Bach’s way of reusing rhythms and notes would think of coding. Parody as described in the article sounds like he was using his old rhythms like a template, or macro. This metaphor works great since it’s hardly even a metaphor. Musical notation, with its rigid and limited format, resembles a programming language much more closely than conversational language.