Ohren und Augen

January 10, 2016

Some lively discussion followed last week's inaugural installment of Passages That Bother Me. Analyses and alternate revisions of the passage in question were shared by a few other composers on Facebook. The solution I ultimately prefer was suggested by Stephen Malinowski; that is, to leave the passage the way Bach wrote it, except for the doubled A 7th, which should be changed to a B. As far as I'm concerned, that A might as well be a copyist's error. It's possible that Bach really wanted it to be weird and awkward, but I bet he would change that note to a B if he ever revised the work (of course, for him the note I'm calling B would be called H). Bach always made improvements to his own works if he ever revisited them; we see such revisions in his composing in almost every genre. There are other examples in Bach's works where his choice of notes seems somewhat less than ideal. Maybe in the future we'll take a look at some of those passages here.

I received a really nice surprise last week from my friend Wolf Peuker, in the form of a performance on upright piano and recording, made informally in his home in Berlin, of the Prelude in G-Sharp Minor from 24 Preludes and Fugues. Wolf posted his rendition to SoundCloud and you can hear it there or listen via the embedded player below.

Wolf also brought to my attention a notation error in the fugue which follows this prelude. Somehow a few C-Doublesharps were notated as D-naturals (ugh)! All such notation errors are immediately corrected for each next printing of the book (it is printed on-demand, so when you order it you always get the latest printing), and the list of errata for existing print copies is maintained online at the Zwillinge 24 Preludes and Fugues Errata page.

Today I spent about four hours practicing the first half of Clavierübung III (all except the opening prelude, which I had already focused on last week). Some good progress was made with Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist, after taking some time to renotate the suspensions and long note values in inner voices. Here's an example problematic measure from this piece:

The meter is cut time, in this case 2/1, the stile antico practice during the Baroque era, writing polyphony in the "old style" using the open-head note values (twice as long as otherwise customary), hearkening back to the Renaissance era. While the visual impression seems very clean, there are several things I don't like about this kind of notation. For me it all boils down to ease-of-use. If I have to struggle to keep track of where the voices are on the page, I don't enjoy reading through the music. Especially when the note head symbols for the whole notes look the same as half notes (technically wrong by modern notation standards) and stem directions often aren't well chosen to separate the voices visually. This is exactly what I was looking at, the Dover edition of this score, which is a reprint of the Bach Gesellschaft edition from the mid 19th century.

So I spent time editing the notation, resulting in something like this.

Mind you, I'm not changing anything about the actual resulting music; all the pitches and rhythms are the same. I'm just making it easier for myself to read. After doing this kind of editing, the piece is much more enjoyable to play, because I can always easily see what each voice is doing, and how all the voices fit together.

Last time I mentioned something about Bach's deliberate parallel octaves. I'll save it for another time. In fact, think I'll stop trying to predict what I'll write about in the next blog entry, because so far I have never followed through on any of these kinds of teasers. In any case, I do appreciate you tuning in to see what's going on here. Drop me a line if something I write about here interests you too. Until next time.

Regards,
Aaron