On the Cover

Johann Sebastian Bach, painted by Elias Gottlob Haussmann in 1748, two years before his death.

The covers of this series show the person you would most want as a teacher of the subject, if you could bring anyone back. For music, the answer was not difficult.

Bach is remembered as a composer. In his own working life he was just as much a teacher. He taught keyboard, composition and figured bass to his own children and to a long line of pupils, and much of his greatest music was written to teach. The two-part and three-part Inventions were exercises for students. The Well-Tempered Clavier, whose tuning is the subject of Chapter 9, was written, its title page says, for the use and profit of young musicians eager to learn and for the pastime of those already skilled.¹ Almost every idea in this book, the scale, the comma, the temperament, the counterpoint, the continuous bass and the fugue, meets in his work.

Look at what he is holding. The sheet of music in his right hand is a puzzle canon for six voices, which he offered as a demonstration of his craft. It is written in only three short lines; the reader is expected to work out how the other voices enter. Chapter 18 explains what a canon is and why a composer would present one as a calling card.²

The image. The painting is in the public domain by age. The cover renders it as an engraving: a program lays down several hundred horizontal lines and sets the thickness of each from the tone of a photograph of the painting at that point. Nothing is added, invented or generated. The source photograph is listed in images/SOURCES.md.

Source to pull before print: the title page of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I (1722), in a standard translation.↩︎
The Canon triplex a 6 voc., BWV 1076. Source to pull before print: a standard reference on the canon and on the two Haussmann portraits of 1746 and 1748.↩︎

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