Composed first as a dialogue, I decided to make this more stream of consciousness, as today is Bloomsday (though this is not the least bit Joycean.) With which Evan will you sympathize? I imagine many of my colleagues have experienced similar thoughts… or am I the worst…?

Are musicians, ‘artists?’ Or perhaps, are artists that make music, musicians?
Is taste merely a matter of class?
Where does preference stop and ‘snobbery’ begin?
Do you agree with Pierre Bourdieu’s judgment of taste?
Do you like Sibelius?

Yeah.
Evan.
Likewise.
What I…? Oh what I do…

Right, well, if you ask me what I do, I’m going to tell you: I breathe, I walk, I sit, I sleep, just like you! Just like you. What I do.

I might venture that I’m an inventor, or no longer need to work, because, right out of university, you see, I came up with a really clever patent for trampolines that has prevented the paralysis of hundreds of bouncing children— if not thousands.

Yes, yes, every month, every month checks. …for all the new trampolines in the world that have my… device somewhere on the side of the, trampo—
Yes, it is odd being rich from trampolines. But, I’ll take what I can get.

That’s a good line, ‘odd being rich from trampolines.’

I’m also a professor of 18th century German religion at an online University in …sssSingapore!
Singapore? You ask. Yes, yes, Singapore.
Do you, lecture online, what with the time change and all that?
Yes, yes, with the, with the time change.

Truth hurts: I play the piano and harpsichord and organ. You’ll ask, ‘Is that all you do.’

Is that all I do. Is that all I do. Let’s say I were the 17th best flamenco dancer in the world, but I had to supplement this with bus driving.

‘Hey! There’s Evan the bus driver’ not ‘Hey, there’s Evan, the 17th best flamenco dancer in the world.’ You might consider me a fairly good dancer, best dancer in the village even— but I’d still be, ‘Hey, there goes Evan the bus driver.’ But if suddenly, suddenly, flamenco paid well enough where I could stop driving the bus,
‘Hey! There’s Evan the flamenco dancer.’

I wouldn’t have gotten any better or worse at dancing the whole time.

I hate these parties where people ask you what you do. I want parties where that’s not allowed, where you lead with, what is your favorite color? The no small talk party. You guys going to the no small talk party? It’s actually going to be enjoyable.

Somewhat vibrant green bordering on blueish… what’s yours? Oh did you meet Sheila? She also likes the greenish blues!

What’s your main fault? Hey Dave, nice to meet you, what’s your main fault. You ever cheated on someone, Dave? Who is your favorite heroine in fiction?

Yes, that’s all I do. All I do is play the piano. Oh, it must be so nice to be able to make a living with your passion.

I hate it when people say that. Passion. Overused word.

Yes, it is. It’s a good life. I’m healthy I’m happy. I am healthy and I am happy. What did that guy say on Instragram? ‘every day, wake up, sip lemon stare into the sun and say, today is going to be a great day, today is going to be a great day…’

Yes, I should say this to myself more often. I am grateful.

But sometimes— sometimes!— I wonder if I had given it all up to be the snowplow man, I wouldn’t have to remind myself to remind myself to be grateful. Just— pkcchhhh— plow the roads, up at at ‘em before even the well-employed! Thermos full of coffee, heater blasting, 20 below out, but I’m in a T-Shirt in here… pkchhhhh— plow the snow, plow the roads— what’s on the radio? Not my colleagues and thank god for that. Who’s got time to remind themselves to be grateful now? Snowplow man! Honk Honk!

Do you have any idea what it’s like to not be accountable to anybody but yourself, to make your own deadlines, to create your own goals, make your own structure? If suddenly people woke up and had to create their own work, no one would get out of bed! When robots replace everything, no one will know what to do, but I’ll carry on exactly as I always have. I got fugues to learn man! Let the robot sweep my house, do my laundry, but unless the robot’s gonna write in useful fingering, I’m busy! No one will ever pay to hear robot pianists.

Oh …my god. Robot Pianists.

These parties. These parties. This vapid socializing! Look, if 95% percent of success is showing up, I’ll take 5% of my potential fame, thank you— You’re a pianist? Oh, I heard this fantastic pianist play the most incredible Schumann — or was it Schubert…’

Was it me? Oh, wasn’t me?! As if they were any good, I wouldn’t be overcome with jealousy, and if they were mediocre, I wouldn’t abhor them for destroying our profession with mediocrity!

Don’t talk to a musician about musicians. Unless you’re drinking buddies with Leo van Doeselaar, I have no interest whatsoever in your anecdotes.

But shouldn’t I be glad to speak to someone who goes to the symphony— who even goes to the symphony?

I should! I’m not! Last thing you do when you meet a working actor is talk about all the movies you’ve seen. Wasn’t Brad Pitt great?! Get a life.

This thinly disguised sacred— sacred humility placed upon us by none other than Beethoven, of course, and the fact that we may no longer enjoy music for the reasons we once fell in love with it… likely a classical musician. You guessed it. I must look it. Over qualified. Underpaid. Bitter. Do I have the posture of a classical musician? You bet.

And then, I don’t know what’s worse, ‘do you like Sibelius? I used to take music lessons as a kid I never learned how to read do you ever listen to Eric Clapton?’ Did you know that actually Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney don’t know how to read music’ Well it’s about f***** time they did! If they’re such geniuses, have ‘em solve a treble clef.

Doesn’t read music. This kills me. It’s like talking about your favorite author who doesn’t read. No really, he doesn’t know how to read! He just talks into a microphone!
And you enjoy that?
Yes, yes, now would be a bad time to mention your nephew is a DJ. Is there a defibrillator nearby, because I’m going to need to revive the part of me that just died.

Also a musician. Also! a musician. What because he makes sound? There, did you count that glass that just fell off the table a musician, also a musician? I’d rather listen to broken glass than your nephew. Ha! What you think about that?!

Lots of people took music lessons, lots of people can pick up an instrument and play a little something, and a lot of these people, especially the men, fancy themselves ‘good at music.’ Hence, I’m gonna put musician in my bio. Art lover, coffee historian, dog walker, musician.

So...?

Well, so a lot of people know how to play ping-pong too. And I feel like the olympic ping-pong player.

Is… that a phrase?

You remember the olympic ping-pong player who once explained, ‘there is no other sport where, if you tell someone you’re a professional, people respond by saying… ‘I dunno! I’m pretty good…’

So I’m out to prove I’m an olympic musician, and I’m better at music than this party of non-professional musicians. Exactly.

Exactly. Okay. This is where we are. Measuring yourself against non-professionals… Oy. I need a drink. Where is the bar.

It was only recently pointed out to me that feeling like an imposter is a good sign, really, because real imposters never have imposter syndrome. Turns out the real imposters think they’re ‘pretty good!’

So… I want people to know, that even though I’m a professional, and the world thinks I’m really good. I still think I’m really bad, at music.

Okay.

Do I really think that I’m bad at music? Well, I didn’t practice enough today… Didn’t practice enough the last seven years really. Oh well, I never had the dreaded 9-5…

The dreaded… the dread— This is exactly what I’m talking about! this is the 9-5 man!
What, writing dialogues featuring split personalities.
Indeed! Hear, hear!

Everything is research, even the way I’m going to order this drink is a performance.

‘Negroni please. No garnish.’

Ha ha, no garnish. Bet that threw him off. He wasn’t expecting that little bit of flare. that was my improvised cadenza. Being an artist is crazy work.

Ugh, did I say artist? Artist! I hate that word artist.

Are we not an artist?

Not for us to say.

Musician. Musician, now this is fine. I can go over to that piano and entertain this whole party. Can your DJ nephew do that? Schmuck.

Sit down and play a little Scott Joplin, Evan.
Coming right up.
Got any Schubert in there?
I dunno, Johnny, does a bear crap in the woods?
Hahaha.

They’d be so charmed.

Only a musician can do that. An artist —why they need curation. They need their tools handy or they can’t create. I can make music on a bottle cap. Musicians don’t just sit around waiting for the muse to whisper…

Do people think that?

Everybody thinks that! That’s the Cliche! For most people music is American Idol. It’s a lucky break. That’s all success is: a lucky break— everyone wants to know how I can make ends meet if they couldn’t. Can’t be hard work, couldn’t possibly be hours of grueling hard work, what did I have a good manager or something?

Author, director, educator, socialite, content creator, cat mom, musician…

Puke! Vomit creator. Can you add that one please? Vomit creator.

What do you do?
I’m a Vomit creator.
Accurate, accurate!

Maybe like, entertainer… Something demeaning. You’re in the entertainment business— but I’m on the quest for truth.

Well, I mean… some pop musicians do understand harmony… yes, yes, I did learn a lot from playing rock music, some classical musicians, actually a lot of classical musicians are more like gymnasts… like robot gymnasts.

Oh my god. Robot Pianists. Robot pianists doing flips!

Snob.

Oh, fine. I’m a snob. At least it’s an anagram of Boss… Ha!

Wait, no it’s not. It’s an anagram of …No BS, there you go. Yes! Fine! I don’t tolerate BS.

Call the person a snob who spends his life studying something— when he declares it more rewarding than your pop culture—
’he’s a snob— he’s locked in the library working on things that have been studied for centuries— what a snob!’

Please, please. Give a man a computer, he’s a DJ for a day. Teach a man to strum, he’s in a band for life.

Did… Did I just make that up? Someone should make that a phrase.

Sorry, once you’ve read the complete poetry of John Keats, Rupi Kaur just ain’t doin’ it for ya.

It’s about the personal voice, though—

Oh— please! Quoth the vomit creator!

But isn’t taste just a matter of social class, that any judgement about art you make is a matter of your social positioning?

So, am I just good at music because my parents could afford to buy a piano? Stupid Pierre Bourdieu. Go away.

Yeah, you know, I read Bourdieu because I was trying to figure out why people like you make me feel dumb for going to see rock orchestras or thinking Elton John is the best living piano player…

So, is aesthetic judgment just exclusion dressed up?

You’ve spent your entire life behind a piano, and a DJ can threaten you by just enjoying the very thing you claim to love? So what if the DJ enjoys music all his life, onto his deathbed, that it gives him spiritual sustenance and lasting happiness? The IV is drippin’ in the morphine, he’s writing out his will, grinning, still listening to the faint BMPP BMPP BMMP four on the floor, carrying him unto the Pearly Gates. What, you want him to collapse into intellectual poverty because he doesn’t know the notes of a B-flat minor scale?

Yes! Yes! Collapse. Collapse! Writhe!
Ugh. So predictable. I’m such a bore.

Oh there he is! Honey, you’d better buy this ‘artist’ his next drink— you know how eating and drinking is quite a financial burden for them… Haha ha. Ahaha haha.”

—

If you or someone you know is suffering from self-employment, call the emergency number on the bottom of your screen. Harpsichord is not recommended for people who are estranged from a wealthy distant relative worth less than 2.1 million dollars. Self-employment may not be right for you. If you are suffering with the need for external validation or the ability to blame others for your problems, consult an employer. To send WTF Bach a care package, become a paid subscriber on Substack. WTF Bach may need staples of food and clothing to make it through the rest of the year. For his appropriate shoe size, visit WTF Bach dot com. Side effects of WTF Bach may include: anxiety about irregular income, compulsive email-checking and the inability to explain what you do at dinner parties. Ask your accountant if WTF Bach is right for you.

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Q: Is there something that surprises you when reading a piece with scholarly intent vs. hearing it?
A: What you can’t predict is how deeply it will go to your heart.

—

It can easily be said that there is something in the autograph that conveys something about a personality from the past, and it may be true, but it’s very risky because you can end up looking for something that is in your own head but not included in the manuscript.

—

This past summer I started a series of photographs trying to figure out the population of wild bees in our garden, and actually I identified a species of bees that was believed to be extinct in Saxony since 1930.

The two new chaconnes! Available for download:

BWV 1178, in d minor
BWV 1179, in g minor

(Outro music is a choir of yours truly singing from Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, BWV 21.)

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Concepts Covered:

‘Confirmation Bias’ in musicology, J.S. Bach Toccatas BWV 914, BWV 913, the new Johann Martin Schubart sources. The attribution to Johann Christoph Graff in the new discovery of Bach’s early Chaconnes. Independent fascicles sewn into larger books, the process of fascicles copied from page 4, page 1, then pages 2-3. Peter Wollny’s discovery of new works by J.S. Bach. Bach’s early interest in ostinato pieces, Bach’s copies of chaconne’s by Buxtehude.

Having written a prelude and fugue in every possible key, having created a single temperament for all of those pieces, having stretched the thematic growth from a 6-note fugal subject to one with all 12 possible notes, Bach achieves a victory that would become the very foundations of music. At the very end, in one of his layerings from the 1730s, he adds, S.D.G., Soli Deo Gloria, glory to God alone:

While all pieces in this collection may suggest images, no single piece in the collection is as evocative as this one. For the first and only time in this volume, we get tempo markings for the set: andante and largo.

The andante is indeed a walk— toward Golgotha. Two voices in imitation trade the weight of dissonances struggling against the fateful steps up to Mount Calvary:

This prelude is the only binary piece in the collection, divided in half by repeat signs (whereas roughly half of ‘Book Two’ are binary preludes.)

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Finally we get to the fugue. Often called the first 12-tone row in history, the fugue’s subject makes use of every single chromatic note. If C=1 in this diagram (it is usually 0 in Schönbergian theory) you will find all 12 pitches accounted for:

Sighs in the slurred notes, the theme bursts with musical ‘crosses.’ Those witnessing the crucifixion weep in four voices. Bach’s burden was tone— he carries all twelve of them. Equally striking in the subject is his own name, crossing upon itself dozens of times in this finale. Every other slur spells his name (in transposition.) A twelve-tone row, crosses, weeping, this theme has everything:

It has been a great joy to work on all these pieces over the past 10 months. Thanks for all your support. ‘Book Two’ will also be studied in depth on the show, but not quite yet. There are guest interviews to be released and I will be turning my attention to Bach’s earliest vocal works in the coming months.

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Concepts Covered:

A long discussion on religion in 18th and 17th century Germany, re: the seriousness of Bach’s own faith. The Well-Tempered Clavier finale, in h moll is today’s subject, conjuring images of Golgotha, crucifixion music, Bach’s own signature, musical crosses, Simon bearing the weight of the cross in the prelude et cetera. The fugal subject is a twelve-tone row, a theory not fully realized until some 200 years after J.S. Bach.

There are few revisions between the earliest and latest copies, the most striking is the inner voice at measure 11 in the prelude. Which do you prefer:

or,

The two tuning schemes used in today’s episode are 1/4 Comma Meantone, and Kellner’s Bach. N.B. This Kellner is not J.P. Kellner, the important Bach scribe, but rather, Herbert Anton Kellner, an important 20th century musicologist.

The fugue, in four voices, features two inverted entrances. (I inverted, vertically, the word ‘theme,’ which is visually more correct than spinning it 180 degrees— I know you’re here for such details.)

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Concepts Covered:

J.S. Bach’s BWV 868, the B major Prelude and Fugue from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, his compositional revisions between the early version and final fair copy. An analysis of large-scale harmonic progressions, such as the move from the tonic to dominant, and a similar movement, from sub-dominant to tonic. The prelude is played in two temperaments, Kellner’s Bach and quarter-comma meantone.

Things most precious, indeed. We might well wrap up this dark pearl of b-flat minor and guard it in the ‘side-chapel vaults’ of our hearts. What noble suffering, what secret anguish, what quiet pain is here! To know this music is to be changed, to expand one’s emotional capacity.

Notice how, in Bach’s calligraphy, each note in this nine (!) note chord has its own stem:

Such detail is sadly missing from any printed edition:

The fugue, in five voices, appears to be almost entirely in stretto, each voice interrupting the former. Notice the overlapping colors:

This culminates in what I imagine to be a personal victory for Bach, ‘stretto-ing the stretto,’ making the entrances as close as possible, where the second note of one voice becomes the first note of the next, from top to bottom, all five voices in a masterful technical display:

(Looks a bit crowded, yes, but that’s the idea!)

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Concepts Covered: We study the B-flat minor prelude, BWV 867, the Well-Tempered Clavier Book One, both five voice fugues in the second and penultimate minor positions, early manuscript and earliest version alongside P. 415, Bach’s revision of one extra measure. The fugue as a stretto fugue, possible connections between prelude and fugue, a complete stretto in five voices, a five-voice stretto, as well as the Busoni edition’s poetic description of this pair.

Some 12 years ago I holed up in a little shack near the Canada/USA border with nothing but his poetry to keep me sane— but he began unraveling my mind in a beautiful way that left an indelible mark on me as a reader. Please enjoy my anecdote as well as the profound memoir by Clayton Eshleman, the acclaimed translator of Vallejo’s poetry. Book details below:

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Vallejo, César. The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman, foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa, introduction by Efrain Kristal, contributions by Stephen Hart, translated by José R. Barcia, University of California Press, 2009.

ISBN: 9780520261730

A link to the University of California Press where you can buy the book.

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Bach tossed the trick into his bag for later deployment:

Notice the ending: subtle, elegant, humble. Czerny didn’t think it was enough:

Be on the lookout for the extra measure in your own edition! Tovey calls Czerny’s added bar, “perhaps the most Philistine single printed chord in the whole history of music.” Ouch!

The fugue, one of my all-time favorites, makes strict use of two countersubjects. Together, they form a three-part wonder. I’ve tried to illustrate them:

Bach, contrapuntist juggler, will juggle. Watch the orders switch:

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Concepts Covered:

The Prelude in B-flat Major BWV 866 from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier Book I in the North German toccata style, influenced by Buxtehude's toccatas and prelude. The fugue is a perfect example of Bach's mastery of triple counterpoint with two countersubjects.

From the beginning of the piece to the end, the combinations of themes become more complex, from entries one by one, to a three-voice stretto and finally all four voices simultaneously.

The prelude, meanwhile, is much simpler. Between the earliest version and the revisions found in P.415, we see Bach lacquering in his workshop. Notice the right hand:

Bach finds more movement in revision:

The detail I miss from the earliest version is the beautiful B-flat in the left hand:

Although I do like Bach’s longer pedal point in the revision:

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Concepts Covered:

We study J.S. Bach Well Tempered Clavier, the history, lessons and analysis. Performance practice and contrapuntal structure, especially the complicated stretto fugue in a minor BWV 865 with its inverted stretti, its triple strettos and finally a four-voice stretto half inverted.

Bach does it once more in today’s episode. We’ve arrived at the other double fugue in this collection, BWV 864 in A major. Bach begins the prelude by juggling three ideas:

The ordering of these ideas will switch. A few bars later we see the same three ideas shifted around:

Bach presents the same ideas a total of six times in the prelude. Whereas we logicians would love to see all six combinations (ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CBA, CAB,) Bach gives us four of the possible orderings. The final one with the syncopation on bottom is particularly nice:

Now the fugue: This is the correction I got all excited about. This is from Anna Magdalena’s copy (called the Müller Manuscript) where we clearly see a revision that may improve on P 415. Look closely at the note which is whited out, this is the G-sharp that is found in Bach’s autograph, here, corrected to an E.

After playing this measure as we know it, I can’t help but feel that this little gem hidden within Anna Magdalena’s copy reflects the latest thinking of the composer.

You can view the Müller Manuscript here: https://www.bach-digital.de/receive/BachDigitalSource_source_00001076

Interesting how the shapes in the first of the subjects in the double fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier have similar rising perfect fourths:

Similar shapes in the E-flat major pair:

And finally, here is the charming work of the young WF, copying out one of his father’s cantatas at a young age. See the little attempt at making a mirror monogram, WFB? Wonderful! Schweitzer beautifully recounts this scene.

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Concepts Covered:

J.S. Bach’s A major, book one, Well-Tempered Clavier, Anna Magdalena’s copy, also known as the Müller Manuscript (not to be confused with the Möller Manuscript,) Double fugue writing, juggling three contrapuntal ideas in the prelude. We also paint the scene for how Bach’s cantatas were assembled. A beautiful picture of WF Bach, CPE Bach and Bach’s nephew, JH Bach.

Sans Eyes, Sans Books, Sans Everything

If you go home with somebody and they don’t have any books, don’t f*** ‘em!
-Not so old aphorism

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
-As You Like It, 2:7

-for Marie Kondo (and Rachel)

At eighteen years old, I moved to New York City with five books: a Mozart biography, a Bach biography, a Beethoven biography, a book about Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and a Bible. My sheet music library (which was already massive) and any other books (which were insubstantial) I left with my parents. All I valued at that time was playing the piano and any reading dealing with that. After a year, my personal Pentateuch had grown four times in size, but was humble still.

Eleven years later I had one-thousand nine hundred and thirty two books.

Books bought, books found, books stolen, books given, books I printed: any way one could get a book, I got books. I dreamed of creating a library that resembled my teacher Lowenthal’s: wall to wall books, books falling out of books, books used as bookshelves themselves, pages on the ground from who knows which books, books with missing covers, covers with missing books, books rapidly-read-horizontally-stacked-under-coffee-cups books, books under-the-piano-to-muffle-the sound books, books piled-on-top-of-the-piano-to-complete-a-cliche books, the divine image of the godhead seen in books spinning endlessly out from the library walls.

“I always imagined heaven to be a kind of library.”

That was the first sentence by Borges I ever read, and Lowenthal’s study was the closest to paradise I had been.

—

I lived in seven different apartments in New York, and with each move at least 75% of the boxes were books, and with books come their doomed counterparts: bookcases (so help us god.) Many a reader may commiserate. Once the first small white case was filled, (Ikea, 2007) there needed to be a match (Ikea, 2008.) By 2009, I had two crumbling, completely useless, bookcases.

I called the poet Ron Price, who, though he owned less books than Lowenthal, seemed to have given more thought to their casing. I discussed a sleek white Ikea bookshelf I had seen online:

“Oh! Don’t buy a f***ing BILLY!” he shouted.

He knew the make. …Everybody knew the make. Little did I know, the crumbling pieces of piecemeal that already housed my books bore the same name.

“Buy some nice wood. Make some sturdy shelves.”
“Hmm… You’ve been down this road it seems.”
He chuckled.
“The… shelves are even more important than the books?” I went so far as suggesting
“I don’t know about that.” he muttered.

In a month, I had, at only a few times the cost of escaping Billy’s curse, three black bookcases, two inches thick per shelf. Unbendable.

My East Harlem studio was immensely stylish: I dreamed I would see reconstructions of it in museums as I had seen reconstructions of Proust’s bedroom. Two tall cases stood side by side, and a third half-case, tastefully empty, was stacked horizontally on the other two. It created one giant fifteen foot wide wall, ten feet tall. It was like a tree for inanimate objects.

And then, many a reader may commiserate, I tasted the rainbow: a design magazine with a bookshelf arranged by color. I didn’t do anything else for two weeks.

I spent every day agonizing over the color of books and where on the new color coordinated shelves they would go. I grouped by color, but then realized my groupings were random. I needed the spectrum: a clean sweep from infrared to ultraviolet. I needed a circle? No, but, this was disastrous. Is color a circle? No, color is a triangle, right? The primary colors are only three… After two months of switching books around, I hit upon the solution: Primary colors would outline a triangle marking the top and the lowest corners. Then, the secondary colors would form the inverted triangle pointed at the bottom. It was so obvious. The only choice then was which of the primary colors to put at the top. In my collection, it made sense that blue should be the crown. Hence: orange went to the bottom, green and purple at the shoulders, therefore yellow and red at the... damn! That looks amazing!

But what of all these books without color? Whereas I had previously banished them to the edges, now the black and white spines fit brilliantly into the middle. A zero in the middle of all the brilliance. Quickly, no matter how beloved the content, brown, tan, and off-white, gray books, these were imposters. I stuffed them here or there where they wouldn’t stick out. Eventually I put them with the dishes: behind the cabinets. The bookshelf, now made of only resplendent spines, became a centerpiece. It had eye gravity. It never escaped comments from guests.

Any difficulties one might imagine, like two different colors on a spine, for example, were surprisingly rare. And when they did occur, each book somehow fit into only one section. There was one book though, (three novels by DH Lawrence) that had an obtuse, subtle, yet obvious, but odorous! an obnoxious color. It could not be placed: was it pinkish orange, bluish pink…? I know of nothing in the universe colored the same. I tried him in the reds, in the near pinks, in the center of the oranges, on the fringes of the oranges, with the near yellows, no luck. I banished him to the basement.

“Look at all these orange books!” That’s what most people said after being sucked into the shelf for some time. (Penguin fiction, bottom center.) Schirmer sheet music publishes in bright yellow, which held down a sunny corner, whereas Henle publishes in matte blue. Dover —many a musician has cringed— seems to publish only in the most carefully selected distasteful colors, but when searching for the perfect transition from reddish-orange to orangish-red, Dover somehow prints an accurate Pantone 17-1464.

Now, perhaps you reading will join in with the main criticism, which was, “how can you find anything now?!” But this was ridiculous, I knew all my books of course: the color of every spine, the height, width, the feel, the smell… besides, I had actually read most of these! (That oh-so-memorable moment my illiterate aunt visited and accused me of ‘collecting them,’ that there was no way a person could read so many books.)

Rachel would quiz me:
“Ancient China?”
“In the off green.”
“Nonsense of Edward Lear?”
“Is dark red.”
“Baghavad Gita?”
“Purple!”

Never could she stump me. She started switching books to see if I would notice. At first she tried the obvious: swapping a blue with a yellow, as if to test if I so much as glanced toward the shelf once a day. Then, sneakily, she tried switching a dark red with an off red. Finally she took to inverting certain books, but I noticed every time.

—

This was short-lived. Maybe only half a year before the shelf was condemned. It actually did get photographed in a (now defunct) design magazine. I felt like I had achieved something great when that happened— but it was April 2015, and we collectors know what happened then:

Marie Kondo burst on the scene. God save our recycle bins.

One excerpt from her book— a book about organizing, mind you, not a book about the human spirit, not a book of poems, not a book about love or anything of the sort: a book about organizing, left me in tears. What was wrong with me?

And so began the days of getting rid of all my books. Poignant Pentateuch to boastful nineteen-hundred, however many it had been, it was all doomed to die now.

Obviously enough, all of the books with the dishes were sold. If they were there, what was their use? Those that gave me a hard time in the color wheel were quickly off the wheel and onto the street. Reference books- gone, cookbooks- gone, any extremely common book- gone. I had, in the eleven years of reading, lost touch with my religion: goodbye St. Augustine, St. John of the Cross, GK Chesterton, (I’ll keep Thomas Merton, though.) I had also, in a sense, also outgrown the beats: goodbye Ginsberg, farewell Ferlinghetti. I sold six hundred books to one single shop in Brooklyn (and visited it a year later to the eeriest of feelings…) I made many a friend happy by giving away any book they asked for. I was actually able to pay my rent with book sales, and to show for it, I had an even brighter, ever slimmer color wheel.

That April, I sold, gave away, or put on the street sixteen hundred books. I now had only three hundred odd books. That shelf gave me such immense joy to look at and be near, I stopped purging. I had arrived. Something, as Marie Kondo said it would, ‘clicked.’

—

But poor Rachel. We were through. I left for Europe to moan. Would I ever grow up? When I came back to my old life, and my new color wheel, the joy wasn’t in it. I had to clear out all the memories and rid myself of all attachments. The books she gave me had to go, even those quite dear to me: Steinbeck’s letters, R Kelly’s ‘Soulacoster: the diary of me’ (once full of laughter, now simply full of sadness… for godssake, the ‘of’ is in italics!) Frank Ohara’s poems, Thomas Lux poems, gone. She was a reader, all the books we read together had to go: Eugenides, Cheever, Dahl, Yeats.

I was nearing 200 books. Some didn’t fit in with the colors so I taped their spines with brightly colored tape — then a few days later thought that seemed stupid and inauthentic. If a book had to be dressed to fit into the damn wheel, it didn’t deserve to be there in the first place! Curbside.

I started getting rid of books I never thought I could live without. It made me feel like I was almost irreverent to let some go, as if I were quitting a religion I didn’t realize I was part of.

I turned to Marie Kondo who mentioned it was important to thank the discarded objects, to let them go peacefully. Maybe that’s what I was doing wrong. I set condemned books in a pile near the front door for a few days before hauling them to the shop. Every time I walked in or out of the apartment, I thanked them, but mostly, I said goodbye.

In Europe, I had spent a solitary month reading music electronically— I never thought I would be able to do that, but I quite enjoyed it. Returning then, I made an effort to stay modern: I got rid of every book of Dover sheet music I had (and I advise every musician to do the same: every single one is online, free, in the same edition.) I donated them to a music school. It seemed charitable, but only I knew I was just being selfish.

I had an abusive high-school piano teacher who nearly ruined music for me (hell, she nearly ruined me!) so what were those same books doing in my house!? The Well-Tempered Clavier, Schubert impromptus, sure, these are not permissible to live without, but what were these specific objects, filled with her hateful scribbles, doing in my house?

A friend of mine, Tepfer, took those six volumes.

“But… why are you getting rid of these?” He asked.

I warned him of the horrid teacher, that even though I had erased all her markings, she was still in there, somehow, messing with my head. He chuckled a bit and left. He didn’t believe in such black magic.

A half hour later he texted:
“man you werent kidding about the bad juju in those books halfway home the bag dropped from my bike slid under front wheel locked it flipped landed on my wrist waiting 4 xrays”

He fractured his wrist. This is a true story.

—

I was down to a hundred and sixty books, though fifty of those were a first edition of the Harvard Classics. Published in 1909-1910, these represented the fifty volumes of what every educated gentleman in 1910 should know (the first volume is Ben Franklin’s autobiography and other Americana, to give you a sense.) Ten more of those hundred and sixty books were my grandmother’s books from the 19th century, the earliest was Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’, printed in 1871.

They were so old I never opened them. These will fetch a pretty penny. I thought.

So I took the more than century-old paper snake, eighth feet in length, to the famous Strand bookstore, where a famous (and I now know, retired) man appraised them. Entering the store, I saw a face which could have been so easily caricatured, I wasn’t sure it had a third dimension. His face had grown into the repetition of fingering books and staring into a computer screen. His nose held up his glasses, angled severely on his pointy face, pointed sharply at his task. Everything was pointed in lines. In fact, a whole row of people at the same long desk were appraising books in a line. His line of apprentices and all the energy in the room pointed toward him. Each person working behind the desk looked more and more like him as the line approached him. The appraiser at his left — clearly his successor and disciple— almost, almost! had his head, nose glasses, almost at the same angle. I waited with the others trying to strike it rich with whatever printed treasure chest a dead relative had forgotten about.

Luck saw that he, the master appraiser, handled my books. Without using the muscles in his neck to look, as if an odor had offended him, he took all but two seconds to consider the books from the 19th century. He didn’t touch them. The Harvard Classics— all fifty at once— received maybe five seconds of his glance, but still, he didn’t touch them. My beautifully illustrated edition of Shakespeare, nearly two feet tall, met his fingertips, and even met his caress. It went to one side of the counter.

“Mary,” speaking to an assistant, “would you please pass these books back to the gentleman.” She handed me back my eight-foot snake.

“We would buy this book from you at the value of 18 dollars.” He told me, speaking about the Shakespeare. We would. Not, we would like. He didn’t wait for my reply or reaction and was about to call the next customer when I interrupted.

“W… Wh… What about the other books?” I asked, “Are they too old?”

Without missing a beat, and yet without condescension, he replied, “It isn’t a matter of old: you could have an old book that’s worth a small fortune. It’s a matter of condition.”

His eyes traveled, as if it were the first time that day his glance left his hands, and he looked at me with an expression explaining that such eye contact was carefully rationed out. This was the glance of a master. There was no possibility of a counteroffer. I accepted his mastery and took the 18 dollars. I bought wine. Drinking from the bottle in the same neighborhood, I left the books, one at a time, on stoops of various apartments until the whole of the Harvard Classics had been strewn about on 4th avenue.

—

One hundred books. Count ‘em. I owned as many books as I did when I was a teenager! No longer was this large library weighing me down, hell, I might even be able to move now! Home would always be where the books were, and if I could fit my library into a suitcase, why then, I’d be like a bird!

“The only good reader is a re-reader.”

Nabokov said that. I pondered this. Was it true that I was less likely to read my hundred books, once, before I read my favorite ten, ten times? I calculated how much ten readings of ten books would influence me more than one reading through one hundred books. And so began my ultimate task of trying to divide one-hundred by ten.

I hadn’t read maybe five of the 100, but now, with so few books, those which went unread for years were finally readable! Three of the five were interesting, but the other two made me wonder why I had kept them for so many years. In any case I tossed all five, and then another five, and soon five more. I was coming close to the number of books Kondo recommended: 20, or if you can, 10 books.

—

I called the poet Ron Price because I felt like I was dying.

“You’re doing what?”
“I got rid of almost all my books.”
“Why?”
“…I… I’m not sure.”

He laughed. Then in his signature Memphis-snake-bit-grit voice, “Sometimes you have to give away what you love before you can keep it.”

Ah… Yes, so true. I was giving away my love of literature to keep it, to acquire it again. I was going to become a re-reader and my band of ten books would allow me to…

Price interrupted my stream of positive thoughts and added, “but not always.”

Ah s***! I’m confused again. What was I doing!? Had I committed an egregious sin? Kondo’s book! Was this the most evil book of all? A book encouraging you to throw away books? She warned that the sentiment found in objects could die when you ‘purge,’ and therefore you start examining exactly where your real sentiment lies, but my god, I was pretty sure my real sentiment was lying in the garbage.

I opened one of the last Thomas Merton book I owned and read, “you cannot be a holy man if you value possessions.”

“Ach!” I shouted. I threw down the book.

I went walking with one of my favorite books to walk with: the heart and diamond sutras in beautiful translations. I must have read this book at least twelve times on walks. I tried to memorize it at one point. But there, on a bench, this one time, one word: attachment. As if rehearsed, I draped the book over a parking meter and walked on.

Finally, pretty close to only twenty books, I actually read Borges for the first time. Funny how that works. Until then, the only words of his I knew were about heaven being a library. And I’m pretty sure I had just spent months disassembling heaven. His words were,

“…reading (which is to say the rereading)…”

Again, here was another immortal talking about rereading!

And in an obsessive text to a friend about this whole process, I misspelled ‘bookshelf’ into ‘bookself.’ Oh happy mistake! Oh revealing accident! Your bookshelf is your book-self! Choose wisely:

Complete Shakespeare
Complete poetry of Cesar Vallejo
The Book of Tea- Kakuzo Okakura
Teh Tao Ching- Lao Tzu
Chuang Tzu- (ed. Thomas Merton)
Clavichord Tuning and Maintenance- Peter Bavington
A clavichord builders manual (1973)- David Way
J.S. Bach- Albert Schweitzer (2 Vol.)
Bach, Essays on his Life and Music- C. Wolff
The Well-Tempered Clavier (2 Vol.) (Newly purchased editions)

This is twelve books. Compared to the five books that arrived with me to this city, there is little change: the Messiah of the West has become the Messiah of the East, the piano has become the clavichord, but there is little change.

There are plans however: Two of my most read books (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and its sequel, Lila) I discarded due to their thick size and now crumbling covers, but not before finding the text of each, rearranging both into a single slim volume, and ordering it custom printed. Thirteen. Then the Bhagavad Gita: it’s always been one of the most beautiful things I have ever known, but the editions never have, so I wrote the entirety of the scripture into a beautiful yellow notebook: Fourteen.

In the process, I should mention, I cut down my clothes to six pairs of trousers, six shirts and a couple jackets, I gave away many sentimental objects, I sold half the artwork in my apartment and I deleted permanently twelve thousand photographs and sixteen thousand emails. Hitting the delete button quite literally made me feel lighter.

—

“So what if I gave you a book?” someone asks. I respond saying I will now have the space to read it and the freedom to get rid of it! “You would get rid of my gift?”

I turn to Kondo again: people who give gifts with the expectation that the receiver keeps them, are giving for the wrong reasons.

Others ask, “how could you do that? I just, I just love books so much!” But who else then, if not I, has ever known the love of books? “But the feel, the smell, the…” yes, and I too have known and loved every aspect of a book. “…but what will you read now?” Well, I’ll read everything. “…on one of those e-reader things?” Yes, on one of those.

Will I ever own more books in the future? Why not ask me if I’ll own less? My friend Jesse challenged me to scan all fourteen books into my computer and simply have no books. I’m up for the challenge, but for now enjoy looking at the narrow stripe (still organized by color) of fourteen. If there comes a book which I feel desperate to keep, it must be one that shakes me deeply, I would welcome that.

But for now, fourteen was Bach’s number and the number of lines in a Shakespeare sonnet.

-Brooklyn, 2015.

—

Postscript, 2017:

That book did arrive, number fifteen: Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Book of Disquiet.’

Post-postscript, 2021:

Pessoa’s writing has shaken me deeply enough that I have moved to Portugal. I now, very slowly, read him in the original. I notice even my local bike mechanic knows the names of at least four of Pessoa’s heteronyms. I have, in this frenzy, bought a dozen volumes of his writings, and a few things I decided I couldn’t live without, such as Whitman, Milton, William James, and R.H. Blythe’s four-volume haiku work. Still, I’m under 50 books, my entire library sits on a single shelf.

Post-post-postscript, 2026:

I currently own 286 books. Turns out I did grow up— 286 books and one child— but I’m getting ready for another purge— of books I mean. I’d like to get back around 200. I have a rule about a new book, which is that it must be hardcover and colorful on the spine. (Yes, my shelf is still ruled by the rainbow.) I can’t imagine owning nearly 2000 books ever again, but who knows: when writing this piece, I could not have imagined 286.

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But are we so confident in our own interpretations that we can throw out the likes of Hans Bischoff, Carl Czerny, Ferruccio Busoni (pictured) and Donald Francis Tovey? These heavily annotated performance editions, while, yes, they should be read alongside a ‘cleaner’ modern edition, can certainly still teach us some beautiful musicianship.

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In this episode, I let Sir Donald Francis Tovey’s remarks on the g-sharp minor prelude and fugue, BWV 863, lead us through an analysis of the work.

Some more from Busoni (the previous prelude and fugue,) his footnotes and ossias are exciting:

Most of these editions are in the public domain on IMSLP. Have a look:

https://imslp.org/wiki/Das_wohltemperierte_Klavier_I,_BWV_846-869_(Bach,_Johann_Sebastian)

Finally, here is the source of confusion about the Picardy third at the end of the g-sharp minor fugue. At first glance, it certainly looks like B natural in the alto voice. (Soprano clef)

But look closer. (Sorry for the resolution.) This is not Bach’s normal natural sign. It has a slash (maybe two slashes?) through it:

Here are few of Bach’s natural signs. Upon comparison, the above sign certainly is modified with extra strokes to form a sharp:

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Concepts Covered:

An analysis of BWV 863 exploring the four-voice fugue, the two counter-subjects, the invention of the prelude with its inversions — guided by Sir Donald Francis Tovey's annotated Well-Tempered Clavier edition. We mention Busoni, Czerny, and Bartok’s edition as well. What do these historic performance editions still have to teach us? Why a modern urtext editions won’t tell the whole story, and finally the confusion at the end of the prelude and fugue: the Picardy third in the alto voice at the finale.

Let me repeat that for those of you feeling clever or citing google without thinking:

Happy Birthday Johann. Today, March 21st, not March 31st.

Why are people confused about this? How did this become a thing? And what extremely boring person got so frustrated with a toccata they started tampering with Bach’s wikipedia page?

There were two main calendars in Europe at the time: the Julian and the Gregorian. We are currently on the Gregorian, but it took a while to get everyone on board. Greece held out until 1923 even, and Protestant Germany was holding back in 1685, when Bach was born.

But you know, you gotta get with the times, man! Gotta catch up to the modern world! It’s gonna be 1700 pretty soon! We’re gonna have mercury thermometers and calculus… You’re living in the past! …ten days in the past!

So in 1700, Germany did indeed make the jump from Julian to Gregorian. In the year 1700, they jumped from February 18, to March 1. No one died, no one was born between Feb 18th and March 1st, 1700 in protestant Germany. (No one even used the toilet.)

Germany joined the Gregorian calendar when Bach was 15 years old, with the legal stipulation that all prior dates would remain valid. A legal stipulation, in fact, protecting the old dates from being overridden, and converted to the new calendar.

So, come on people, let’s not try to override this actual legal stipulation. (Here’s my gentle reminder that saying Bach was born on March 31st is illegal.) We can’t go about dismissing ecclesiastical records in favor of our modern abstractions just because we’re feeling smug about hybrid cars and vegan smoothies. It’s not like the Gregorian calendar represents some objective truth that the Julian calendar was failing to capture.

Bach was Born on March 21st. The next person I hear whispering in the bar, “well, technically he was born on March 31st…” is getting a mordent —to the face.

Are you that person who’s trying to switch Bach’s birthday to the 31st? Wow. Can’t wait to hang out with you on Christmas: “Actually, statistically speaking, the odds that Jesus was born on the 25th of December are practically zero! Did you know that in Judea, shepherds typically watched their flocks by night from Spring to early Autumn?” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get a life.

Maybe you know about Shakespeare and Cervantes? That they died on the same day? Or rather, the same date. It’s the same thing: Protestant England, on the Julian calendar, and Catholic Spain, on the Gregorian. It created this beautifully poetic coincidence. The greatest writers of their generations both died on April 23, 1616— 10 days apart.

Now, we’re not going to switch the date on which Shakespeare died, are we?! No. That’d be asinine. Which is exactly what shifting Bach’s birthday to March 31st is, asinine. March 21st is also Early Music Day in Europe— for this very reason, and we’re not going to move early music day are we? No, that’d be asinine.

March 21st is also, nicely, International Poetry Day, …and World Puppetry Day, …and World Day for Glaciers— if you ask me we have too many days, but sure, why not. In fact, why not make a puppet of Bach reading a poem and dance him around on some ice cubes today.

Today is also Harmony Day in Australia, beautiful! The immortal god of harmony, that he should share Harmony Day in Australia. I pictured everyone leaning into triads and flat-nines down unda’ but this day happens to be about racial harmony, but still! Still. Let’s sing four-part chorales with everyone we know.

Bach’s birthday is March 21st. It always was March 21st. You know who was born on March 31st? Haydn. Who? Exactly. Never heard of him. If anyone wishes me a happy birthday Bach in 10 days, I’m blocking you.

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About 12 years ago I decided I wanted to be part of this tradition. After some trial and error, I hit upon a method that allowed me to learn Bach (or any other composer) by ear. And more than just being glad for having developed the skill of transcribing, the method is extremely efficient: I find that pieces are usually memorized faster than when using sheet music.

Here is the method as explained in the episode:

-Record, slowly with the score, up to 60 seconds of music (or even 10 seconds if you like.)
-Put away the score and play ‘call and response’ with the recording, relying on your ears.
-Once learned, re-record the music as you've heard it, now learned aurally.
-Re-open the music, play the new recording, checking for inaccuracies, missing details, &c.
-Repeat…

Now, once something is memorized, you may want to keep it memorized. So you’re up against the ol’ Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve: the speed at which your mind forgets without conscious review. We all have our own curves, but my rule has been roughly:

Play the newly memorized music twice on the first day,
Review the music on the second day,
… three days after learning,
… one week after learning,
… two weeks after learning,
… one month after learning,
… three months after learning,
… six months after learning,
… one year after learning,
…two years after learning.

You can even put dates in your calendar saying, “You learned fugue X three months ago: Review it today.” With this practice, you’re sure to have some counterpoint written into your DNA.

The Pakistani musician I mentioned is the immortal, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Listen to his extraordinary live concerts where he and his band achieve the heights (while sitting on the floor.) In my next life I’d like to be one of the guys in back clapping only quarter notes.

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How can we spend our lives playing music from the 18th century without any contact with the instruments used then?
Can we know objective aspects of older music while playing on a single model of an instrument developed toward the end of the 19th century?
Do pianists exist in a vacuum, where a musical interpretation is guided by a sort of subjective vision— is it even vanity or self-flattery?

Certainly there are pianists who know the Steinway’s predecessors, but on the whole, I feel there is a real ignorance of the instruments on which our repertoire is founded. Perhaps, though, we are in the midst of a revolution of touch and interpretation: I’ve recently seen more pianists playing fortepianos, owning clavichords, et al. This can only lead to a more text-based reading of the music.

But— mind you!— is that a good thing? Do we want to push the art of keyboard playing in a direction away from self expression and toward people claiming the ‘truth’ is on their side? That sounds awful! Even if pianism indeed exists a vacuum, it certainly produces rare visions of the music only accessible through such an art.

Enough musing. While playing the A-flat major Prelude BWV 862 on my double manual harpsichord, the instrument, in a word, told me about the music. There was something about the limited palette of the instrument that forced upon me a new approach. This sort of radical adjustment to one’s playing is typical of playing on historic instruments. On the modern grand piano, possibilities are endless, but on older instruments, the sound tends to constrain the range of possible interpretations.

The prelude BWV 862 saw some lovely revisions between the earliest conception of the piece and the version we know. For starters, take the lovely line of the concertino solo in BWV 862a:

How different is the revision!

Now bars 22-27 in the earliest version:

Revised to the more evenly shaped:

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Concepts Covered:

J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Das Wohltemperierte Clavier, As Dur, BWV 862, The concerto style of the prelude, between two manuals in the prelude, Fugal analysis, early versions of WTK 1, BWV 862a, and the possible ‘vacuum of pianism’ creating subjective art vs. seeking objective facts about the music. Historic instruments leading to a text-based interpretation, using knowledge of older instruments to inform modern piano playing et cetera.

What an opening:

In this episode we listen to at least 14 different interpreters play this expressive trill. Such a simple idea, but how many different ways this idea can be realized! At an even speed or speeding up? With a turn at the end or a turn at the beginning or no turn at all? Crescendo all the way through or perhaps even diminuendo?

Between earliest version and the fair copy, Bach seems to smooth out the rhythm in the solo voices. This is a rare case where the earliest version is rhythmically more nuanced than the revision.

Bar 6. The last beat is more varied in the early version:

It is smoothed out in revision:

Bar 9. The top two voices sing in different rhythms in the early version:

In revision, Bach makes them consistent:

Penultimate bar. Note the 64th notes in the early version:

Everything is more uniform in revision:

As we progress through Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier, our fugal themes become increasingly complex and chromatic. Here, the fugue’s subject is angular, modern even:

The subjects come in an memorable stretto toward the end:

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Topics Covered in this episode:
J.S. Bach Well-Tempered Clavier Book One, BWV 861 prelude and fugue analysis, also Baroque ornamentation and how to play a trill, performance practice. We examine Bach’s manuscript sources in the early vs late versions of this pair. A general discussion of Baroque keyboard music, harpsichord vs piano performance, fugue structure and form, and Bach’s counterpoint.

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The three-voice fugue begins:

But after only a few bars, Bach is ready to bring in all the voices again— this time with the melodies upside down. (Inverted exposition.) N.B. The middle voice’s theme began on the previous page:

And there are stretti in this fugue, one melody interrupting another. Here’s one where the themes are rhythmically shifted to the second half of the bar:

The prelude is equally joyous. The earliest version of this prelude is a mere 15 bars long, compared to the 19 bars of the latest version. Notice, too, how Bach changed the key signature of only one (!) staff. The earliest version reads:

But later, on the top staff, Bach changes it to 24/16 (!) in the fair copy, P. 415:

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Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott, BWV 721, in f-sharp minor (note the Phrygian key signature!) is an extraordinary little piece. Written around 1709, it is a profound and most elusive chord progression. Here is the first page:

The text from 1524, based on Psalm 51, was translated by the English ecclesiastical reformer Myles Coverdale. I know nothing about him but his Wiki page is fascinating!

Finally, John Milton. If, one day, you sit down to read Paradise Lost you may feel… well, lost. It was the writing of the late John Carey that led me through this beautiful poem. Spoiler alert: Milton wrote the poem between sleeping and waking, totally blind, by dictating what he was receiving from a ‘Heavenly Muse’ he thought was the same muse responsible for inspiring the Mosaic books of the bible— Wow. Reading the poem with this in mind is a completely different experience. For Milton, the poem was a purely audible experience, hence reading it aloud brings it to life. He, after all, never saw it on a page.

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Concepts Covered:
Bach in the Phrygian Mode, Tone III, Missing flats, missing sharps, Bach’s Key signatures, John Milton, how did Milton write Paradise Lost, Etymology and Entomology, The Origins of the Negroni Cocktail

Source quoted:
Leaver, Robin A. Luther's Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications. Eerdmans, 2007.

Individual keys are often loaded with personal significance to the composer. To what extent was Bach thinking of the double sense of Kreuze— both as ‘cross’ and the musical sign for a sharp?

As discussed in the episode, f# minor wasn’t necessarily the key signature with three ‘crosses,’ as Bach’s f# minor looks like this on the page:

Is it more likely that Bach saw b minor as the image of Golgotha on the page? Dare we speculate further and claim that the symmetry of the C# between the two F’s is Christus between the two thieves? Speculation adds nothing of substance… but it’s fun! Bach’s b minor on the page:

In any case, Kreuze was probably never far from Bach’s mind, and f# minor was usually a key for expressing pain and suffering in the cantatas. The fugue from Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 859 is full of blatant passion language, seen in the weeping of the countersubject:

One question I have concerning modern editions is the tenor voice in bar 36. In the earliest version, Bach has given— as a cautionary accidental— D natural:

But in the revision, he forgets the cautionary accidental (or deems it unnecessary.) Does this omission justify D#?! I don’t think so. Both Henle and Bärenreiter suggest D#:

At the end of the episode, we explore the canon from the sonata in A Major for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1015. The third movement (in f# minor) is a strict canon from beginning to end. Check this out:

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Concepts Covered:

Bach and religion, composition as theological thought, the symbolic meaning of musical keys in Bach’s works, f♯ minor & b minor, Calvary or Golgotha. Kreuze in Bach studies: the double meaning of “cross” and the sharp (♯) sign in German language. f♯ minor as a key of suffering and affliction in Bach’s cantatas and keyboard works. Passion rhetoric in BWV 859 (WTC I)

Canon analysis of BWV 1015, the Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord in A major.

In this episode I seek (in 18 minutes) to demonstrate mathematically pure intervals, alongside ‘tempered’ intervals. The circle of fifths is in fact a spiral of fifths— it is infinite. We seek to make it a circle for convenience, but this means that the distance between what would be mathematically pure intervals must be altered (!) in order to force the spiral into a circle.

The question remains: how do we do that? Music today is heard in equal temperament, where all keys, all tonalities sound the same. Pure intervals have been forced into identical ‘impure’ ones— convenient, but this deprives us not only of a beautiful natural simplicity, but also the individual character of each key found in unequal temperaments. From the earliest European music, numerous solutions to this immortal problem have been offered. By the time Bach arrives, his solution, laid out for us in The Well-Tempered Clavier, is certainly an elegant one…but we don’t quite know exactly what it is.

The remainder of the episode analyzes the prelude and fugue, no. 13, in F-sharp major, BWV 858. A look at the opening of the prelude in earliest version offers lovely insights into Bach’s working mind:

In revision Bach changes the repeated note — a recognizable motif of the early version— into a trill, now acting as its own motif:

Particularly fascinating is the way Bach changes the harmonic rhythm from the early version here, bar 17:

Now again from measure 17 in the revision. Bach inserts two full bars, extending the harmonic length of g# minor and C# Major:

A huge thanks to Bradly Lehman for helping preparing this episode. I haven’t even scratched the surface of what his work covers, but hopefully you’ve got some idea how deep the topic of tuning can go. Lehman has some great online resources illuminating the fascinating world of temperament. For starters, try:

www.larips.com (Spiral spelled backward)

Dig deeper with this essay here, published by the Reimenschneider Bach Institute:

Thenotestellushowtotune Lehman

1.01MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

And finally, more Articles and Essays by Bradley Lehman

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Concepts Covered:

Pure vs tempered intervals, ‘spiral of fifths,’ vs. the circle of fifths, equal temperament, loss of key character, Bradly Lehman temperament, historical tuning systems, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, temperament and tuning, F-sharp major Prelude and Fugue No. 13, Bach’s compositional revisions, and BWV 858