October 12, 2015

After more than a month away from this blog, with so much happening on a daily basis, I hardly know where to begin. The story of my life. For loyal readers curious to know how BWV 545 turned out, I'm pleased to report that it went over well at the service, with only a couple of hiccups.

I've since been asked to play again at the end of this month for a special All Hallows Eve service at the Episcopal church. This service is supposed to include some "scary organ music" at the end, so I'm preparing two of Bach's more chromatic preludes: BWV 535 and the great BWV 542. Probably I will only play the latter, but we'll see. I've been surprised to find that 542 is not particularly difficult to play.

Much of my time has recently been devoted to developing MIDI Tapper, preparing this software for its port to Windows and its commercial release. Much of the work has been directed at issues related to performance of organ music, for my own use. For almost a year now I have been intending to re-record the New Goldberg Variations using MIDI Tapper (the original recording which sold on bandcamp for a while was a simple mechanical MIDI rendering straight from the notation software), but have not made a new recording because the feature set needed to do it really well has not been fully implemented. Just a few things remain to be tweaked, and then I'll be able to do it, and hopefully the task will be completed within a week.

I've not forgotten about the suspended 4th against the 3rd which I said I would discuss on the blog at some point. I'm making notes in my mind about the best examples to use. There is a great example in the Goldberg Variations. I'm also paying close attention to this when I read through something new, because I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. It seems that Bach handles things very consistently, but there may be other instances I haven't taken a close look at yet.

I was excited to read through Christoph Wolff's beautiful book The Organs of J.S. Bach, and I learned a lot from it. The book of course includes details on the Wender organ in Arnstadt, which I had the honor to play for a few minutes last year. I had noticed then that this instrument has no low C-Sharp in the pedal. Having studied organ building, and been an aficionado of the organ for decades, one would think that I would have been aware that organs in Germany from Bach's time almost universally did not have a low C-Sharp in the pedal. The reason this fact surprised me so much is that Bach wrote plenty of low C-Sharps in his organ music. BWV 542, for example. This is a work Bach performed in Hamburg on the organ which had been installed originally some time before 1540, rebuilt many times, but in his day lacked this note in the pedals. Odd. And I would like to find out more about this. There is a two volume work by Peter Williams called The Organ Music of J.S. Bach which I'm hoping may shed some light. For now I conclude that Bach didn't apparently care that most instruments couldn't play his music exactly the way he wrote it. There were a few instruments in the general areas he lived and worked that did have low C-Sharps in the pedals (the Trost organ in the castle at Altenburg, for example) so maybe he wrote for these instruments, or simply hoped that more instruments would in the future have this note added. Do you have some insight to share about this mystery? Send me an email.