Bach's Numbers: Compositional Proportion and Significance by Ruth Tatlow

English | 2015 | ISBN: 1107459699 | 430 Pages | PDF | 6.7 MB
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.

- Proposes a new theoretical basis for Bach's compositional method
- Part I provides comprehensive coverage of the evidence supporting every aspect of the
theory of proportional parallelism
- Part II uses practical demonstrations to apply the new method to all of Bach's works