About Jodey Bateman Pablo Neruda Translations by Jodey Bateman Contributors Abuela Musica Jalapeno Peppers Children’s Page Finder Submissions

A Musician's Cosmology: Das Wöhltemperierte Klavier, Vol. 1 (The Well Tempered Clavier) | Poem

 
 
 
 

A Musician’s Cosmology 

  A new look at Johann Sebastian Bach’s
“Das wohltemperirte Clavier”

Forty-eight lessons in transcendental musicianship

commentary and performance by
Lloyd Roger Grubaugh

Sample MP3 of Roger playing Bach's Prelude XV, G Major

 The title page of this collection of preludes and fugues reads, in part:
            “Das wohltemperirte Clavier oder Praeludia und Fugen durch alle 
            Tone und Semitonia sowohl tertiam majorem oder Ut Re Mi 
            anlangend, als auch tertiam minorem oder Re Mi Fa betreffend”.
This may seem like a mouthful for a title, but Bach wanted to make sure what he was doing was understood, at least in its mechanics.  And yet some misconceptions have clung to the work which I wish to dispel before diving into the material.

The usual English rendering of “wohltemperirte” is well-tempered, which has to do with tuning.  The ancient way, called “Pythagorean tuning”, used harmonic resonance as a guide, making fifths and fourths conform to exact mathematical ratios, 3:2, 4:3. This made these intervals very sonorous, but had serious problems.  The major third, which the ear wants to hear as a different, higher harmonic (5:4), is made quite ugly by this system, except for about three chords, greatly limiting the possibilities of harmonic variety.  And when the perfect fifth is compounded twelve times, you don’t land on the same pitch you started on.  In other words, tuning up from Eb : Bb  F C G D A E B F# C# G# creates an interval between G# and Eb which is so far from perfect that it was called the “wolf fifth” because it resembled the howl of a wild animal.  This error, called the “Pythagorean comma”, was overcome in practice by bending the natural intervals slightly, called “tempering”.  And by the eighteenth century, there were about as many systems for doing this as there were organ builders and keyboardists.  The test was what sounded good on a particular instrument, so tuning was more art than science.  The system we have today is called “equal temperament”, and simply divides up the error so that all intervals of the same type are identical. 

This idea was already being considered in Bach’s day but did not have wide acceptance, and is probably not what he meant by “well-tempered”.  More likely he was using a system which preserved subtle differences in intonation between the keys, differences much appreciated in that time.  So “wohltemperirte” was not a technical term denoting a specific scheme, but just a descriptive word for a system which allowed every note on the keyboard to be used as a tonal center.  And this was the revolutionary change which this piece worked in the minds of musicians who studied it.  The old system of seven “real” tones and at least fourteen “altered” tones, all with different pitches, is here consolidated into twelve tones, all equally “real”, opening up a new world of expressive possibilities through chromatic harmony and the “circle of fifths”, which is presented here as fact before it was ever described as theory.

The next term which is widely misunderstood is “Clavier”.  By this Bach meant “keyboard”, the playing mechanism common to organ, clavichord, harpsichord, piano, and most contemporary synthesizers.  The puzzling failure of publishers to translate this word in early English editions of this work has created the false impression that it was written for a specific eighteenth-century instrument, and therefore it is somehow impure to play it on a modern piano or digital keyboard.  I contend that Bach knew that the keyboard would evolve, and used a generic term purposefully, aware that he was guiding the future development of music.

The part about the major and minor thirds is clear enough, even if you don’t read German.  Which leaves one last confusion, also created by publishers, which is the idea that this piece is “Volume one” of a larger work.  The WTC is complete and unique, and the collection of preludes and fugues which was published as “Volume two” is not related to it and would not have been called that by Bach.  These two things are as different as an epic novel and a collection of short stories.  The WTC is one work with forty-eight movements, each unique in form, harmony, meter, which aims to fulfill the “doctrine of affections” by defining twenty-four distinct emotional states, and that’s just with the preludes.  The fugues connect those emotional conditions to twenty-four different formal schemes, giving a picture of the possibilities of the twelve-tone system so vast as to inspire composers for centuries, truly a Musician’s Cosmology.

                                                                      L. R. G.  April 2001 
editor's note: This is a work in progress. For questions and/or notification of the next installment, email us.
CD of Mr. Grubaugh playing Vol 1, Nos. 12-24


to Moongate