How I turned Bach's Prelude in C minor into a new piece
and why this is in keeping with Bach's own creative practise
In Forrest Kinney’s wonderful book Music-Creativity-Joy (review coming soon) there’s a wonderful essay called ‘Variation is Natural’, which opens like this:
Maria Anna Mozart (a.k.a. Nannerl) wrote that her brother Wolfgang would, at the age of four, learn his pieces and “using as a model what he had learned, he would then improvise on the keyboard.”
A man named M.T. Pitschel wrote about J.S. Bach in 1741: “The famous man, who has the greatest praise in our town in music, and the greatest admiration of connoisseurs, does not get into condition to delight others with the mingling of his tones until he has played something from the printed or written page, and has thus set his powers of imagination in motion.”
Mozart and Bach did not view a piece of music as something only to play as written—that was just the first step. The piece was to be used to inspire creation, to “set the powers of imagination in motion”! Mozart and Bach had the attitude of creators, not of modern performers. A score is a diving board into the pools of creativity.
With that in mind, I’m pretty sure Bach would not have minded that my latest single, “Rethinking Bach”, is a reworking of the Prelude in C minor from the 1st book of the Well Tempered Clavier.
Here’s my version:
Some of Bach’s pieces lend themselves particularly well to elaborating in this kind of contemporary style, especially the ones that are built around some kind of ostinato. The famous Prelude in C major is a particularly obvious example, but the whole collection is full of inspiring details that can be elaborated.
It’s just a question of noticing and exploring the details, like I talked about in my recent post about frost.
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If you’d curious to explore my rethinking of Bach’s C minor Prelude, you can download the score for free here by entering the code “creativity” at the checkout.