Composition Lessons with Bach

Abstract

Bach’s unfinished Air with Variations in C Minor BWV 991, from the 1722 Clavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach, may have been designed as a set of compositional exercises for students to complete. This essay uses the first variation, which consists of a single melodic line with no other voices, as a cantus firmus for a progressive series of projects in composition or improvisation, suitable for an undergraduate course in eighteenth-century counterpoint. The first two projects provide a transition from previous work students may have done in strict species counterpoint in the Fux tradition. In project 1 they add a counterpoint entirely in eighth notes below the cantus firmus, while in project 2 they add a counterpoint in sixteenth notes. Project 3 is intended to sound more like “real” music, requiring students to add two voices in free rhythms beneath the given melody. This encourages them to maximize the expressive use of dissonance while achieving rhythmic fluency and melodic independence in a three-part texture. Since much of the pedagogy of counterpoint in Western music has depended on an oral tradition, this approach tries to fill in gaps in the oral record by guiding students and teachers through all the steps of planning and execution involved in completing these projects. Example 1. J. S. Bach, Air with Variations in C Minor BWV 991, mm. 17–32, renumbered here as mm. 1–16 (hereafter “J. S. Bach, cantus firmus”) { { TM TM TM TM 5 TM TM TM TM TM TM TM TM 10 15 2 4 2 4 & b b b Example 1: J.S. Bach, Aria with Variations in C minor, BWV 991, mm. 17 32, renumbered here as mm. 1 16; hereafter called "Bach, cantus firmus"