Memo-1450

Type:

Bach Caricature

Title:

Bach

Description:

Johan Sebastian Bach was so dedicated to music that he walked over two hundred miles to learn new techniques from Dietrich Buxtehude. The music he created was so avante-garde that it “Confused the unprepared congregation”.
He was sacked as a choir-master at the Neue Kirche in Arnstadt after he had played jingles to mask the attrocious singing. This was defined as impiety, and he suffered greatly from criticism from the pietist J.A. Frohne of Mühlhausen.
His problem was that if the congregation drifted down in pitch, he would have liked to drift down also - so that his accompaniment would be in step with the singing. This is called TRANSPOSITION. However, the harmonies only worked in a single key. If he transposed, he lost the precision of tuning because the kink slid into the scale.
Bach began to campaign for a system that dropped the simple arithmetic of Pythagoras where each semitone was a twelfth of the tonic - such as one twelfth of A 220. In its place, every semitone would be some MAGIC NUMBER times the frequency of the semitone before. This would stretch the exponential system down into the scale itself.

Measures:

Creator:

Charles Douglas Wehner, 2004

Comments:

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Source/Links: The Science of Honk , and Variety Piano
Contributor: Aryeh Oron (January 2008)