Description
A subject of continuously turning figuration passes ceaselessly between the hands in this D minor piece, among the most athletic of the fifteen Inventions. The 1723 collection was written to teach two-voice cantabile playing and to give a first grounding in composition; No. 4 takes on the particular problem of controlling a fast, unbroken stream of notes.
In the second half the subject returns inverted, holding the tension by running the same material upside down. The piece lasts well under a minute, and its small note values run almost without a break from start to finish.
It is a piece that falls apart the faster it is taken. The key is not finger speed but keeping hold of the metre: bars in 3/8 are short, and the line steadies once it is felt in two- and four-bar groups rather than beat by beat. Because both hands move in the same small values, bringing the subject out by weight alone takes deliberate attention.
A set of 15 two-part counterpoint studies (BWV 772-786) that Bach composed for his son's musical education.
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Sheet music provided by Mutopia Project
What this piece teaches
Invention No. 4 in D minor, in 3/8. A ceaselessly turning subject passes back and forth between the hands, and in the second half it returns upside down. The lesson is holding on to the metre inside a fast, unbroken stream of notes.
How to practise it
- Feel each bar of 3/8 as one beat and count in groups of two and four bars; the line steadies.
- The faster it goes, the more easily it falls apart. Make sure it holds together at 0.75x before raising the speed a little at a time.
- In the score view, look for where the subject appears upside down in the second half.
About the Composer
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Johann Sebastian Bach was the towering figure of German Baroque music, serving for decades as Cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Renowned for his mastery of counterpoint, he laid the foundations of keyboard music with works such as The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Inventions. This site includes minuets and polonaises from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, the Inventions and Sinfonias, and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier. The Notebook pieces are catalogued with BWV Anh. (appendix) numbers, but many are by other composers - Petzold's minuets among them - or by no one known, and most of their song pages give the current view of who wrote them.
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