With his own towering compendium, Bach clearly wanted to supersede his colleague’s more modest, and certainly more pedantic efforts. The Hamburg musician, theorist, prolific man of letters Johann Mattheson had in his Exemplary Organist’s Trial ( Exemplarische Organisten-Probe) assembled two sets of bass lines in all keys that were then to be harmonized by the keyboardist in a range of styles. The most recent precedent for Bach’s collection had been published just three years before, in 1719. Autograph title-page of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, 1722. This first collection was followed in the early 1740s by a second, longer volume also of twenty-four preludes and fugues. One of the most ambitious was a systematic survey of composing and performing preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys, its title page penned three hundred years ago in 1722. Yet only a fraction of it appeared in print: four parts of his Clavierübung (Keyboard Practice) were published in his lifetime. The composer was certainly aware of the lasting importance and practical value of his massive and sustained research project in the art of keyboard elaboration. While on occasion Bach made music in some of these mansions, it was almost entirely out of public view that he had set about creating his own keyboard encyclopedia, one that ranged across many volumes, myriad styles, far-flung geographically and historically. Only the city’s wealthy patricians had the money - and space - to have these weighty folio volumes adorn the bookshelves of their mansions. But it was available in the Leipzig library and accessible to students. The books were lavish and expensive, the print run around 1,500 copies. Pizza-boxed sized containers of knowledge to be hefted from their shelves and leafed through with all the fingers, the individual volumes of Zedler’s Lexicon were a lot bigger and heavier than phones or laptops. The digital revolution may have increased facility with the digits while the brain atrophies under the monogram not of JSB (Johann Sebastian Bach), but GTS: “Google That Shit.”īach’s admirers and students praised what they saw as his revolutionary inclusion of the thumb as an equal partner at the keyboard: his first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, wrote that “in Bach’s method the thumb was made a principal finger, because it is absolutely impossible to do without it in what are the difficult keys.” How fascinated - or, more likely, perplexed - Bach would have been by the silent symphony of thumbs playing at tiny flat keyboards made not of bone or wood but of glass. At smartphone or computer keyboard our fingers feed our brains - or, so the more skeptical might claim, enfeeble them. The accessibility of the encyclopedists and the Wikipedists increasingly dominates our days and nights, not just as a philosophical precept but as a practical way of knowing the world. + Read more on Flypaper: “Bach and Bitcoin” The project spanned two decades of Johann Sebastian Bach’s tenure as Director of Music in the same city.īach’s name does not appear in Zedler’s Lexicon, but the word Clavier (keyboard) does, defined in a modest paragraph of five lines in volume six from 1733 as: “the part of an organ, harpsichord, or clavichord made from wood, bone, or ivory and played with the fingers so that the strings or pipes bring forth their tones.” Yet that great French undertaking was dwarfed by its German predecessor: Johann Zedler’s Großes vollständiges Universal Lexicon (“Grand and Complete Lexicon”), which ran to nearly 70 volumes published in Leipzig between 17. That ethos was embodied in the celebrated Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, the first of its seventeen volumes appearing in 1751, the year after Johann Sebastian Bach’s death. + Combine theory, improvisation, and jazzy hip-hop, and improve your piano chops with Grammy-winner Kiefer in Kiefer: Keys, Chords, & Beats.Īccessibility of knowledge was crucial to the Enlightenment. This article originally appeared on CounterPunch
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