Bach's Compositional Unity Reworked by Chopin.

• Contemporary letters and documents show that Fryderyck Chopin studied and performed the two books of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. We know Chopin had a copy of these preludes and fugues on his desk when he composed his own set of 24 Preludes in the 1830s. But we do not know which aspects of Bach’s collection inspired Chopin. In this paper I will consider if the structure and proportional ordering in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier influenced Chopin as he made decisions about the form and structure of his 24 Preludes, and how Chopin reworked Bach to recreate compositional unity in his own collection.J. S. Bach created compositional unity in all of his publications and fair copies with layers of perfect 1:1 and 1:2 proportion in the bar structure, using a technique that I have termed proportional parallelism (Tatlow, Bach’s Numbers: Compositional Ordering and Significance. Cambridge, 2015, 2016). In doing so, Bach was imitating the example set by God when He created the Universe, which, many then believed, was ordered using the proportions of the perfect musical intervals: 1:1, the perfect unison, 1:2 the perfect octave, 2:3 the perfect fifth, and 3:4, the perfect fourth. Some of Bach’s Lutheran predecessors and contemporaries also occasionally used this kind of proportioning in their compositions. More significantly, though, so did several of Bach’s sons and students. This raises many questions about the origins, transmission, and meaning of the technique. Did it disappear when ideas changed, and Bach’s students and grand-students died? Was it transmitted into the 19th century from teacher to student? Did 19th century composers notice Bach’s ordering when they studied his scores, and was it sufficiently important for them to imitate or make their own? And if so, did they do to create compositional unity?  

Subject headings

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

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

Keyword

Musikvetenskap

Musicology

Publication and Content Type

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