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WTF Bach

WTF Bach

De: Evan Shinners
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J.S. Bach explained — music analysis, Baroque history, counterpoint and performance practice. A classical music podcast for listeners who want to understand what they're hearing. Weekly analysis of Bach's music: Well-Tempered Clavier, Brandenburg Concertos, St. Matthew Passion and more. Classical music education for all levels.

wtfbach.substack.comEvan Shinners Música
Episodios
  • 129: I Got Rid Of All My Books (11 Years Ago...)

    129: I Got Rid Of All My Books (11 Years Ago...)
    Apr 7 2026
    Back to Bach next week! In the meantime, I thought you’d appreciate a story I wrote after I ‘discarded’ the majority of my possessions— mostly books. Whereas I easily tossed things like clothes, artwork, komono, plates, pens, et cetera, getting rid of my massive library took months and was an emotional rollercoaster. I haven’t ever looked back! …mostly. Sans Eyes, Sans Books, Sans EverythingIf you go home with somebody and they don’t have any books, don’t f*** ‘em!-Not so old aphorismLast scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion;Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.-As You Like It, 2:7-for Marie Kondo (and Rachel)At eighteen years old, I moved to New York City with five books: a Mozart biography, a Bach biography, a Beethoven biography, a book about Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and a Bible. My sheet music library (which was already massive) and any other books (which were insubstantial) I left with my parents. All I valued at that time was playing the piano and any reading dealing with that. After a year, my personal Pentateuch had grown four times in size, but was humble still.Eleven years later I had one-thousand nine hundred and thirty two books.Books bought, books found, books stolen, books given, books I printed: any way one could get a book, I got books. I dreamed of creating a library that resembled my teacher Lowenthal’s: wall to wall books, books falling out of books, books used as bookshelves themselves, pages on the ground from who knows which books, books with missing covers, covers with missing books, books rapidly-read-horizontally-stacked-under-coffee-cups books, books under-the-piano-to-muffle-the sound books, books piled-on-top-of-the-piano-to-complete-a-cliche books, the divine image of the godhead seen in books spinning endlessly out from the library walls.“I always imagined heaven to be a kind of library.”That was the first sentence by Borges I ever read, and Lowenthal’s study was the closest to paradise I had been.—I lived in seven different apartments in New York, and with each move at least 75% of the boxes were books, and with books come their doomed counterparts: bookcases (so help us god.) Many a reader may commiserate. Once the first small white case was filled, (Ikea, 2007) there needed to be a match (Ikea, 2008.) By 2009, I had two crumbling, completely useless, bookcases.I called the poet Ron Price, who, though he owned less books than Lowenthal, seemed to have given more thought to their casing. I discussed a sleek white Ikea bookshelf I had seen online:“Oh! Don’t buy a f***ing BILLY!” he shouted.He knew the make. …Everybody knew the make. Little did I know, the crumbling pieces of piecemeal that already housed my books bore the same name.“Buy some nice wood. Make some sturdy shelves.”“Hmm… You’ve been down this road it seems.”He chuckled.“The… shelves are even more important than the books?” I went so far as suggesting“I don’t know about that.” he muttered.In a month, I had, at only a few times the cost of escaping Billy’s curse, three black bookcases, two inches thick per shelf. Unbendable.My East Harlem studio was immensely stylish: I dreamed I would see reconstructions of it in museums as I had seen reconstructions of Proust’s bedroom. Two tall cases stood side by side, and a third half-case, tastefully empty, was stacked horizontally on the other two. It created one giant fifteen foot wide wall, ten feet tall. It was like a tree for inanimate objects.And then, many a reader may commiserate, I tasted the rainbow: a design magazine with a bookshelf arranged by color. I didn’t do anything else for two weeks.I spent every day agonizing over the color of books and where on the new color coordinated shelves they would go. I grouped by color, but then realized my groupings were random. I needed the spectrum: a clean sweep from infrared to ultraviolet. I needed a circle? No, but, this was disastrous. Is color a circle? No, color is a triangle, right? The primary colors are only three… After two months of switching books around, I hit upon the solution: Primary colors would outline a triangle marking the top and the lowest corners. Then, the secondary colors would form the inverted triangle pointed at the bottom. It was so obvious. The only choice then was which of the primary colors to put at the top. In my collection, it made sense that blue should be the crown. Hence: orange went to the bottom, green and purple at the shoulders, therefore yellow and red at the... damn! That looks amazing!But what of all these books without color? Whereas I had previously banished them to the edges, now the black and white spines fit brilliantly into the middle. A zero in the middle of all the brilliance. Quickly, no matter how beloved the content, brown, tan, and off-white, gray books, these were imposters. I stuffed them here or there where they wouldn’t...
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    24 m
  • Ep. 128: Donald Francis Tovey's Well-Tempered

    Ep. 128: Donald Francis Tovey's Well-Tempered
    Mar 24 2026

    I don’t blame us for preferring our rather clean, modern Bach editions to this:

    But are we so confident in our own interpretations that we can throw out the likes of Hans Bischoff, Carl Czerny, Ferruccio Busoni (pictured) and Donald Francis Tovey? These heavily annotated performance editions, while, yes, they should be read alongside a ‘cleaner’ modern edition, can certainly still teach us some beautiful musicianship.

    In this episode, I let Sir Donald Francis Tovey’s remarks on the g-sharp minor prelude and fugue, BWV 863, lead us through an analysis of the work.

    Some more from Busoni (the previous prelude and fugue,) his footnotes and ossias are exciting:

    Most of these editions are in the public domain on IMSLP. Have a look:

    https://imslp.org/wiki/Das_wohltemperierte_Klavier_I,_BWV_846-869_(Bach,_Johann_Sebastian)

    Finally, here is the source of confusion about the Picardy third at the end of the g-sharp minor fugue. At first glance, it certainly looks like B natural in the alto voice. (Soprano clef)

    But look closer. (Sorry for the resolution.) This is not Bach’s normal natural sign. It has a slash (maybe two slashes?) through it:

    Here are few of Bach’s natural signs. Upon comparison, the above sign certainly is modified with extra strokes to form a sharp:

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    Concepts Covered:

    An analysis of BWV 863 exploring the four-voice fugue, the two counter-subjects, the invention of the prelude with its inversions — guided by Sir Donald Francis Tovey's annotated Well-Tempered Clavier edition. We mention Busoni, Czerny, and Bartok’s edition as well. What do these historic performance editions still have to teach us? Why a modern urtext editions won’t tell the whole story, and finally the confusion at the end of the prelude and fugue: the Picardy third in the alto voice at the finale.



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    41 m
  • Bach's Birthday is Today, Not March 31st.

    Bach's Birthday is Today, Not March 31st.
    Mar 21 2026
    Happy Birthday Johann. Today, March 21st, not March 31st.Let me repeat that for those of you feeling clever or citing google without thinking:Happy Birthday Johann. Today, March 21st, not March 31st.Why are people confused about this? How did this become a thing? And what extremely boring person got so frustrated with a toccata they started tampering with Bach’s wikipedia page?There were two main calendars in Europe at the time: the Julian and the Gregorian. We are currently on the Gregorian, but it took a while to get everyone on board. Greece held out until 1923 even, and Protestant Germany was holding back in 1685, when Bach was born.But you know, you gotta get with the times, man! Gotta catch up to the modern world! It’s gonna be 1700 pretty soon! We’re gonna have mercury thermometers and calculus… You’re living in the past! …ten days in the past!So in 1700, Germany did indeed make the jump from Julian to Gregorian. In the year 1700, they jumped from February 18, to March 1. No one died, no one was born between Feb 18th and March 1st, 1700 in protestant Germany. (No one even used the toilet.)Germany joined the Gregorian calendar when Bach was 15 years old, with the legal stipulation that all prior dates would remain valid. A legal stipulation, in fact, protecting the old dates from being overridden, and converted to the new calendar.So, come on people, let’s not try to override this actual legal stipulation. (Here’s my gentle reminder that saying Bach was born on March 31st is illegal.) We can’t go about dismissing ecclesiastical records in favor of our modern abstractions just because we’re feeling smug about hybrid cars and vegan smoothies. It’s not like the Gregorian calendar represents some objective truth that the Julian calendar was failing to capture.Bach was Born on March 21st. The next person I hear whispering in the bar, “well, technically he was born on March 31st…” is getting a mordent —to the face.Are you that person who’s trying to switch Bach’s birthday to the 31st? Wow. Can’t wait to hang out with you on Christmas: “Actually, statistically speaking, the odds that Jesus was born on the 25th of December are practically zero! Did you know that in Judea, shepherds typically watched their flocks by night from Spring to early Autumn?” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get a life.Maybe you know about Shakespeare and Cervantes? That they died on the same day? Or rather, the same date. It’s the same thing: Protestant England, on the Julian calendar, and Catholic Spain, on the Gregorian. It created this beautifully poetic coincidence. The greatest writers of their generations both died on April 23, 1616— 10 days apart.Now, we’re not going to switch the date on which Shakespeare died, are we?! No. That’d be asinine. Which is exactly what shifting Bach’s birthday to March 31st is, asinine. March 21st is also Early Music Day in Europe— for this very reason, and we’re not going to move early music day are we? No, that’d be asinine.March 21st is also, nicely, International Poetry Day, …and World Puppetry Day, …and World Day for Glaciers— if you ask me we have too many days, but sure, why not. In fact, why not make a puppet of Bach reading a poem and dance him around on some ice cubes today.Today is also Harmony Day in Australia, beautiful! The immortal god of harmony, that he should share Harmony Day in Australia. I pictured everyone leaning into triads and flat-nines down unda’ but this day happens to be about racial harmony, but still! Still. Let’s sing four-part chorales with everyone we know.Bach’s birthday is March 21st. It always was March 21st. You know who was born on March 31st? Haydn. Who? Exactly. Never heard of him. If anyone wishes me a happy birthday Bach in 10 days, I’m blocking you.Dig Out Your Inner Ear:Enjoying your contrapuntal journey? Here’s how you can help:We encourage our listeners to become a paid subscriber atwtfbach.substack.comFree subscriptions are also beneficial for our numbers.You can make a one-time donation here. We run a 501(c)3, so let us know if you want a tax deduction:https://www.paypal.me/wtfbachhttps://venmo.com/wtfbachSupporting this show ensures its longevity. Thank you for your support! Get full access to W.T.F. Bach? at wtfbach.substack.com/subscribe
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    6 m
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