Bach S Art Of Fugue And Musical Offering

"Bach's Art of Fugue and Musical Offering is the first comprehensive study of two closely related masterworks of the late Baroque fugal style. The initial volume in a series of American Bach Society Guides produced in collaboration with Oxford University Press, it unpacks these famously cerebral collections as endlessly fascinating material for study and play. Intended for a general readership, this compact guide also summarizes for practitioners a considerable body of knowledge about these singular works. Bach scholar and keyboard player Matthew Dirst explains their idiosyncratic musical language in initial chapters while reviewing how both projects took shape during Bach's final decade, as he reoriented his creative energies around capstone works of various kinds. The most systematic of these, the Art of Fugue and Musical Offering reflect his lifelong fascination with learned counterpoint, as demonstrated in elaborate series of fugues and canons in both and in an unusually intricate trio sonata in the latter. Later chapters provide commentary on individual movements and groups of pieces and on the historical reception of this music, including its impact on other disciplines. Recurring themes include Bach's diligent exploration of contrapuntal types and techniques, his embrace of musical games of various sorts, and his creative assimilation of diverse musical styles"--

Among Bach's last instrumental compositions are two splendid works that reflect his genius for working complex contrapuntal figures into an expressive, apparently seamless musical texture. The Art of the Fugue, composed ca. 1745–50, consists of nineteen canons and fugues that progressively illustrate the rich variety and complexity of fugal writing. This edition, reproduced directly from the authoritative Breitkopf & Härtel score, includes a keyboard reproduction printed directly beneath the score. A Musical Offering (1747), composed for King Frederick the Great of Prussia, comprises a three-part ricercar and a six-part ricercar for keyboard, a famous sonata for flute and violin, and a set of canons, all based on a theme devised by the King himself. Solutions of the canons and a realization of the keyboard part are included in an appendix.

The enigmatic character of The Art of Fugue became apparent as early as in its first edition, printed more than a year after the composer’s death. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who published both the first and the second editions, raised several unsolved questions regarding this opus. Anatoly P Milka presents a consistent and coherent solution to the unresolved questions about the history, structure and appearance of J.S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue, opening new perspectives for further exploration of this musical masterpiece. Milka challenges the present scholarly consensus that there exist two different versions of The Art of Fugue (the Autograph and the Original Edition) and argues that Bach had considered four versions, of which only two are apparent and have been discussed so far. Only Bach’s illness and death prevented him from fulfilling his plan and publishing a fourth, conclusive version of his opus.

In this text, the author develops a new interpretation of J.S. Bach's The Art of Fugue, based on a profound knowledge of Baroque-era thought and intense score study. Starting with the work's celebrated BACH theme, he attempts to show that The Art of Fugue contains an assertion of the composer's deeply held faith, and that aspects of Bach's spiritual convictions permeate the entire musical fabric of the work. The author postulates that The Art of Fugue is actually a musical representation of Bach's beliefs about the God-human relationship, and argues that the Christian doctrine of "salvation by grace" is the core concept that provides the work with its expressive content in much the same way that the opening ground-theme subject acts as a basic generating source for all subsequent musical materials. Although The Art of Fugue is regarded by the musical world as one of the most significant examples of Bach's contrapuntal craft, the author convincingly argues that this work has an important spiritual dimension that goes beyond considerations of the composer's craftsmanship. He devotes this book to a lively and controversial discussion of unprovable matters; that is, to those aspects of expressive content which he believes are concealed both within and beyond the musical materials.

J.S. Bach’s Musical Offering is a broadly known and extensively studied collection of musical pieces, written in 1747 shortly after his visit to the Potsdam court of Frederick the Great. The composition, however, survived in separated sheets of different formats, and finding the logic of its organization into a cycle became a great challenge for scholars of the following centuries. Based on ground-breaking findings by Christoph Wolff, who revealed the main principles of the Musical Offering’s structure, as well as those promulgated by Hans Theodor David, and more recently by G. Butler, W. Wiemer, R. Tatlow, and many other scholars, this book develops and revises their ideas, arriving at a unique conception of the possible original structure of the Musical Offering. While the rods of the collection do not provoke disagreements among scholars, the ordering of the ten canons (including the Fuga canonica) remains mysterious in many aspects, and this text gives them a close examination. It considers their kinds (thematic and contrapuntal); textual inscriptions; the canons’ function within the cycle (as vignettes to the main pieces); and their location, among other aspects. The volume includes profuse references to historical and cultural context; court etiquette; contrapuntal techniques; the history of the ricercar; expertise in Bach’s handwriting and habits of music layout in his manuscripts; and the Baroque principles of organization in arts.

This book, by a leading Bach performer, is designed to provide a practical guide to the performance of the "Art of Fugue."

Of contents of disc: Tracks 1-8 : Recordings -- Tracks 9-35 : Scores.

The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, is an incomplete work by Johann Sebastian Bach. It was most likely started at the beginning of the 1740s, if not earlier. "The governing idea of the work", according to Christoph Wolff, is "an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject." 83 pages.