Johann Sebastian Bach Inventions Blog

“Mastering Bach’s music is the greatest musical challenge of all”

Welcome!

This blog is about Johann Sebastian Bach’s Inventions – and about my personal journey toward learning how to master playing them well.

My primary goal is to learn to play piano music – as if my private piano teacher would be Johann Sebastian Bach, himself. Not a bad choice, isn’t it? :o)

Bach’s Inventions – the 15 two-part small musical compositions – was the basis of how Johann Sebastian Bach instructed his pupils.

The pieces represent the ”pillars of artistic piano playing”  as József Gát, the editor of the Hungarian edition aptly put it.

When I had the idea of having Bach teaching me to play the piano, I started a little background research. I learned from Wikipedia and other sources about Bach that he first had his pupils (including his wife and his sons) learn the small pieces from the “Clavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach”.

Nevertheless, I had a strange feeling about the pieces in that collection: most of the times they struck me as “strange Bach” music, but I dispersed the idea with the thought that the pieces must have been written for pedagogical reasons. Only later did I learn that these pieces were NOT written by him – with the exception of one (D minor) Menuet that on the other hand resembled true Bach music, like a violin piece from one of the sonatas, for example.

So, finally, I turned to the Two-Part Inventions.

They didn’t appear to be difficult pieces (yes, that was a very foolish thought) so I said to myself: LET’S PLAY THEM ALL, let’s go through them QUICK! Well, I didn’t go through them quick – to say the least. :(

Ever since I started playing them around 2010 Spring, I find more and more stuff for practice as if they were a never-ending source for learning!  This was the first miracle...

Every day I learn newer and newer things about them, about my own playing, about music, about counterpoint and music-writing...

So the day came when I realized: I must write down my experience! I should start a blog on this! God knows... maybe only for myself. Or maybe others will join me... who knows.

I thought this blog might help other people playing Bach’s music. It’s my way of rediscovering Bach’s music: from the onsets. I imagined this blog as a Traveller’s Diary. This is a journey towards Bach’s music – and towards myself.

Hope you will enjoy it – as I myself enjoyed writing and experiencing it.

Happy reading!     :o)

David