Bach's Numbers

Compositional Proportion and Significance

Ruth Tatlow

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English

Cambridge University Press
06 October 2016

Baroque music (c 1600 to c 1750); Individual composers & musicians, bands & groups

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 groundbreaking theory of proportional parallelism and the latest source study research, Ruth Tatlow reveals how Bach used the number of bars to create numerical perfection across his published collections, and explains why he did so. The first part of the book 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 Tatlow presents practical demonstrations of this in Bach's works, illustrating the layers of proportion that appear within a movement, a work, between two works in a collection, across a collection and between collections.

By: Ruth Tatlow
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 244mm, Width: 169mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 730g
ISBN: 9781107459694
ISBN 10: 1107459699
Pages: 430
Publication Date: 06 October 2016
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

British-Swedish musicologist Ruth Tatlow is an independent scholar based in Stockholm. Her research into Bach's use of numbers led from her classic monograph Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet (Cambridge, 1991) to its sequel Bach Numbers, through publications on methodology, inventive techniques and the theory of proportional parallelism. In 2004 she co-founded Bach Network UK (BNUK), establishing its open access web-journal Understanding Bach in 2006. She is currently Chair of the BNUK Council, joint editor of Understanding Bach, and a member of the Editorial Board of the American Bach Society. Her research has attracted awards and grants from numerous sources including the Swedish Research Council, the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, the Society of Authors of Great Britain, the British Council, The Hinrichsen Foundation, The Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters.

Reviews for Bach's Numbers: Compositional Proportion and Significance

'Ruth Tatlow's painstaking investigation presents an astonishing trove of new information ... Her analysis of proportional relationships between the Ascension and Easter Oratorios (BWV 11 and 249), with their self-referential bar number total of 1400 and several internal 1:1 or 2:1 proportions, is utterly convincing ... Tatlow's theory is sound, resoundingly presented and offers a thought-provoking contribution to Bach scholarship; its conclusions can be considered on their own and lend themselves to practical use when a choice has to be made from several alternative versions.' Zoltan Szabo, Bach Bibliography (www.music.qub.ac.uk/tomita/bachbib)