Song Details

Title: Two-Part Invention No. 1 - Bach

Year: 2005

Zach's Role: Piano... of course

Description: Johann Bach (1685-1750) was involved in music for his entire life, coming from a musical family, and finding regular involvement with the keyboard (particularly organ) from a young age. His résumé included such prominent employers as Prince Leopold and the Duke of Saxe-Weimar. Though he was often in conflict with the authorities, he was a happy family man, as evidenced by his score of children. These many little Bachs were produced partially by his wife Maria Barbara, and after she died, the rest he created with his second wife Anna Magdalena.

A consistent man, Bach was just as prolific musically, with compositions covering nearly every genre of his time. A master of counterpoint and inseparable from any discussion of the fugue, the density and complexity of his music are such that analysts and commentators have uncovered in it layers of religious and numerological significance rarely to be found in the music of other composers.

When Bach's eyesight started failing, an itinerant oculist tried some surgery, which tragically may have been responsible for his death soon afterwards. Anna outlived him by ten years, eventually dying in poverty.

This remarkably brief invention in two parts exemplifies Bach's mastery in permutating a motive. The initial exposed musical idea quickly becomes enmeshed in its own unrealized complexity, appearing in various keys and voices, sometimes inverted, sometimes only hinted at, as though it struggles to escape the mathematical twists in which it is caught, yet never finds freedom. Nevertheless, it remains the constant thread woven throughout this short work, if not the very material of which it is sewn.

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