Description
Written in the small metre of 3/8, the eleventh three-part Sinfonia stands out for its flowing pulse in a set where 4/4 and 3/4 are common. It is the G minor piece on the same tonic as the G major No. 10.
The bars are short, and the pulse moves as if each bar were felt as a single beat. The three voices flow on without a break, and the subject appears in each of them in turn and overlaps the others. It has 518 notes in 109 seconds, with a range from D2 to C6 that fits on a 61-key keyboard. That is among the lower note counts of the fifteen here; the weight falls less on fine figures than on never letting the flow break.
The note count is not especially high; it is rated advanced because it asks you to keep three voices flowing unbroken over long stretches within a small metre, and to shape the expression as the harmony changes. Playing it bar by bar stops the flow, so it matters to take several bars in one breath. Lower the playback speed to check the phrase groupings in the score view, sort out the voices with the hand colours, and build up the practice in long phrase units with an A-B loop.
A set of three-part counterpoint studies (BWV 787-801) that expand on the two-part Inventions, teaching more complex polyphony.
Browse all songs in Three-Part Sinfonias →Sheet Music
Sheet music provided by Mutopia Project
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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