Bach's Numbers : Compositional Proportion and Significance

• In eighteenth-century Germany the universal harmony of God's creation and the perfection of its proportions still held philosophical, moral and devotional significance. Reproducing proportions close to the unity (1:1) across compositions could render them beautiful, perfect and even eternal. Using the principles of her ground-breaking theory of proportional parallellism, Ruth Tatlow explains how Bach used the number of bars, sections, movements and works to create numerical perfection across his published collections, and explains why he did so. The first part of the book - Foundations - illustrates the wide-ranging application of belief in the unity, showing how planning a well-proportioned structure was a normal compositional procedure in Bach's time. In the second part - Demonstrations - Tatlow presents examples of this in Bach's work illustrating the layers of proportion that appear within a movement, within a work, between two works in a collection, across a collection and between collections.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Musikvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Musicology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Proportion; Parallelism; Compositional Procedure; J.S.Bach; Poetic forms; Anagram; Acrostic

Musikvetenskap

Musicology

Idé- och lärdomshistoria

History of Sciences and Ideas

Tyska

German

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

bok (subject category)