Johann Sebastian Bach wrote many amazing masterpieces, many still given life today through performance around the world. There are, however, many pieces that do not shine as brightly in the public eye. One of these pieces is Bach’s BWV 543, entitled “Prelude and Fugue in A minor” and otherwise nicknamed “The Great.” This music is said not to be a famous piece for organ but does itself justice when compared to his similar and more famous works. With its many musical structures weaving in and out of the piece and its highly virtuosic nature, after hearing the BWV 543 performed it is easy to understand why it is nicknamed as such.
To begin to understand the nature of a piece, such as the “Prelude and Fugue in A Minor,” one must first understand Bach and the influences upon him. Before his knowledge on the fugue became famous and was used to educate future fugue composers, Bach was born into the Baroque era. He was constantly surrounded by war, chaos, and a strong urge for forward movement in religion, science, and art. The world had been through struggles over land, a movement to explore a new world, and people being executed under the pretense of being witches. The effects rang clear and true through all the people who lived in this era, including Bach. This chaotic world, along with the great influence from the exposure to the music of other parts of Germany, Italy, and France, produced a perfect climate for Bach’s brilliance.
The music he produced had a lot of control with a lot of flair. He liked improvisation, but did not leave that up to the performer. Instead, he wrote very virtuosic passages for his pieces, with which the performer did not have much room for imaginative playing. Then there is his knowledge on how to writ...
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...ther with transposed subjects and countersubjects until the piece ends with a final cadence in the original key of a minor. Throughout the entire fugue there are many virtuosic passages that would befuddle the average musician. It is amazing that Bach was able to create such intensely dense music while following the strict guidelines for music of his time.
Johann Sebastian Bach was known as a musical master wrote many amazing masterpieces. One of the lesser known pieces is Bach’s BWV 543, entitled “Prelude and Fugue in A minor” and otherwise nicknamed “The Great.” This music is said not to be a famous piece for organ but does itself justice when compared to his similar and more famous works. The tight structure of the piece intertwined with its highly virtuosic nature is a great example of the influence the Baroque era had on Bach and his musical thought process.
Johann Sebastian Bach was a composer, a musician, teacher, and organist who later became a specialist in construction of organs. Bach learnt to play the violin, the orchestra, and the organ from his father and his famous uncle and twin brother to the father, Johann Christoph at a young age. The organ was his chosen instrument. He also achieved success in the art of Fugue, choral polyphone, instrumental music and dance forms. In Eisenach he attended Old Latin Grammar School, the same school that Martin Luther had attended. He sang in the schools choir. His parents died before Bach was 10 years old. His mother died when Bach was nine years old, his father’s death followed nine months later (Sherrane, 2011). After the parents death Bach was taken in by his older brother Johann Christoph who had already established himself as an organist in Ohrdruf. Johann Christoph had a great influence in Bach’s success in music as he taught him and encouraged him to study music composition. At the same time Bach was attending the Gymnasium grammar school in Ohrdruf where he studied theology, Latin...
He developed a musical language that was ideally suited to easily fitting to varying lengths of scene. On the other hand, made strong use of short repeated rhythmic phrases and ostinati. These could be readily repeated to fit the length of a scene and provided a feeli... ... middle of paper ... ... avid
A sinfonia (Italian for symphony) broadly refers to a number of instrumental works from the Baroque period, including symphonies, sonatas, canzonas, concerti, and Italian opera overtures. Even J.S. Bach titles his “three-part” inventions for harpsichord “Sinfonia”. Torelli’s Sinfonia in D (G.8) is a four-movement “concerto” for trumpet, strings and harpsichord continuo. Unlike a concerto grosso, where a main theme is presented and then reappears in fragments, the main themes of Sinfonia in D are developed rather freely. The second movement (Adagio) is a very short, slow, interlude without trumpet that introduces the third movement (Allegro). Hence, the program shows these two movements as “adagio-allegro” joined together.
Strip all the decorations and ornaments, and there is a straight-forward analysis. The piece begins and ends in D, cadencing to tonic. There is an A halfway in between, creating a half cadence. In order words, this can be easily be called a I-V-I, just like any other piece. That is fine. Because every song essentially is I to V to I, there must be something else that differentiates this piece from everything else. What makes this piece interesting? What makes tonic to dominant back to tonic worth listening for? To put it frankly, the notes in between the beginning, the middle, and the end, is what makes anything sound different. Bach devised some interesting ways to train our ears to listen to aesthetic notes when, in reality, it is D to A to D.
Bach used time and structure in his work to force his listeners to set themselves inside the narrative. So, while listening, as
Johann Sebastian Bach was born into a family of musicians. It was only natural for him to pick up an instrument and excel in it. His father taught him how to play the violin and harpsichord at a very young age. All of Bach’s uncles were professional musicians, one of them; Johann Christoph Bach introduced him to the organ. Bach hit a turning point in his life when both of his parents died at the age of ten years old. Bach’s older brother Johann Christoph Bach took him in and immediately expanded his knowledge in the world of music. He taught him how to play the clavichord and exposed him to great composers at the time. At the age of fourteen, Bach and his good friend George Erdmann were awarded a choral scholarship to the prestigious musical school St. Michael’s in Luneburg. From then on, Bach began to build his career in the music industry. His first two years at the school he sang in the school’s a cappella choir. Historical evidence has shown that Bach at a young age would visit Johanniskirche and would listen to the works of organ player Jasper Johannsen. This was thought to have been the inspiration to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Studying at the prestigious musical school has help Bach network his way around and become acquaintances’ with some of the best organ players at the time such as Georg Böhm, and Johann Adam Reincken. Through his acquaintance with Böhm and Reincken Bach had access to some of the greatest and finest instruments.
During this period of time, the industrial revolution was just revving up. While the work that Bach sent to the ruler in Dresden included only the Kyrie and Gloria portions of the mass ordinary, Bach would probably have considered it complete for such “short” mass settings were typical in Lutheran Germany at that time. It was perhaps his first attempt at setting the Kyrie and Gloria texts – the other four extant masses were all written later – and it was apparently his most ambitious: the scope of this is far beyond that of most missae brevis. Aspects of style and structure reveal that this missa has an internal unity of its own. All five voices are utilised in the solo movement, the instrumental families are represented in turn in the solo instrumental roles, and the various aspects of symmetry can be
The fugue from Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in B minor is a work that was composed in Bach’s later years. Bach composed this work during his tenure at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany. This work as a whole is a great example of Bach’s mature essays, which appeared in his later Weimar years. The fugue is very different from the prelude. None of the material from the prelude is introduces in the fugue. The subject is only two measures in length; the plain subject is boring by it self. But Bach turns that two measure subject into an eighty-eight-measure fugue. I will explore two different ideas that make up the majority of the fugue, melody and developmental form. I will also talk about how I would interpret this work when preforming it.
Classical Vault 2, dir. Bach - Brandenburg Concerto No 3 in G major, BWV 1048 Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. YouTube, 2013. Web. 21 Mar 2014. .
In 1749 Bach started a new composition called “The Art of Fugue”, but he did not complete it. Bach tried fixing his sight with a surgery but something devastating happened, he lost his eye sight completely and a year later he suffered a stroke and died. During his life time, Bach was better known as an organist than a composer, “Curiously, Bach refrained from calling himself a composer…” (Wolff 2000, p.3). Bach was able to give different emotions to others with music. Bach died a respected man and having an important position in the world of music.
Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven both flourished in their compositions of classical music; however, their genre of music differed considerably. Bach was a German composer during the Baroque time era of western music which is estimated to have taken place during 1600 to 1750. It was during this time that he composed prolific church organ music which included such works as the Mass in B Minor, much scared choral music, and the St. Matthew Passion, as well as composing over a thousand works in nearly every musical genre except opera. On the other hand, Beethoven was a German composer whom began to emerge during the classical era of western music twenty years after Bach. This era took place throughout the years1750 and 1830. The large quantity of arrangements, over two hundred works in numerous musical genres composed by Beethoven was significantly influenced by his predecessors, onset of deafness, and his highly personal expression of intellectual depth. Such works include the first an...
The first thing I will talk about is the type of music he is know for which gave him that name. Most people listen to the type of music he composed but next to none know who or how it was composed. There seems to be an abundance of music fans who know little or nothing about the origin of their music. By discussing what he has accomplished it will explain why he is considered to be so important to his type of music.
3. BWV in D major. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote four Orchestral Suites. This piece is the second of the five movements that compose his Orchestral suite No. 3. The date it was composed remains unsure, as there is strong evidence that the writing of the piece was done during his years at Köthen, even though the piece is said to have been composed and premiered some years later in Leipzig sometime between 1727 and 1730 by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, one of his students and himself. Johann Sebastian wrote out the main violin and continuo parts, C.P.E. Bach did the same with the trumpet, oboe, and timpani parts, and Johann Ludwig Krebs, his student, finished with the second viola and violin parts. Regardless the authors of the piece, Johann Sebastian Bach ended up getting all the credit for the piece. Air stands out as one of his most famous and successful pieces of the Baroque period, as well as of his life. The beginning of the piece is one of the most recognizable melodies of the Baroque
Often identified as the summarizer of the Baroque-era, Johann Sebastian Bach contributed significantly to the practice and theoretical development of Western music. Having composed copious amounts of music, Bach’s output of vocal compositions exceeds 500 works that includes: sacred and secular cantatas, motets, masses, and passions. Among Bach’s substantial collection of cantatas, the majority date back to his post in Leipzig. Although Bach is considered to have written five cantata cycles, only the first three are virtually complete; the remaining two are either lost or unable of being attributed to Bach.
The Classical Period brought forward new musical innovation. The sudden change in emotion and contrast in the music from the classical era is one of the many fascinating topics. However, the topic most talked about to this very day is Mozart’s Requiem. The mystery of which parts were composed by Mozart puzzles many. Even the rumor that surrounds Mozart’s cause of death is fascinating. Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, added more controversy to this intriguing mystery.