J.S. Bach

Well Tempered Clavier

A mini history lesson: a lot of early contrapuntally-based keyboard music was originally written in open score. I recently completed an open-score edition of the 48 fugues from the WTC, much pined after by students of fugue and analytical technique in general. To my knowledge, there are only a couple of editions around right now. One is an abomination, now mercifully out of print, cooked up some years back by a deadly duo of Conservatory teachers (W. Andrews and M. Sclater); the other is by Laurette Goldberg, published in Berkeley, California, also hard to find, and very expensive. I started editing individual pieces because of my own teaching and, as usual with me and Bach, things just went from worse to worser, so I ended up finishing the whole lot, which are now available to you, gracious reader. Hats off to public domain and private industry. Just to give you an idea of how things look, here’s a pdf of the C major fugue from Book I. Yes, you should sing all of the voices from all forty-eight fugues this very instant.