WTF Bach

Welcome to a new series on Bach’s first and most comprehensive published collection of organ music, the so-called, ‘Organ Mass,’ more accurately known as, Clavier-Übung III.
Got Bach?

The title page reads:
Third Part of the Keyboard Practiceconsisting of various preludes on the Catechism and other hymns for the organ. For music-lovers and particularly for connoisseurs of such work, for the recreation of the spirit, prepared by Johann Sebastian Bach, Royal Polish and Electoral Saxon Court Composer, Capellmeister and Director of the chorusmusicus, Leipzig. Published by the Author.
This is a group of 27 pieces for organ, some with pedal, many without. It was published in 1739. There are many ways to approach this giant work. The history of the engraving itself is a fascinating detective story.
In this episode, I don’t even begin to speak of the music, but rather focus on the origins of liturgical organ music, and Bach’s precedents in his personal library for creating his own model.
We also discuss what it means for Bach to have published something during his lifetime, what kinds of works he published, and why.
(P.S. I said Pliny the Elder. I meant the Younger. Kudos to you if you caught that!)
Keyboard Practice, Third Part!

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Bibliography: (Yes, I’m going to start adding bibliographies to some of these episodes, especially the ‘history-heavy’ ones. My goal is to establish WTF Bach as a legitimate scholarly resource, or at least a good place for other scholars to begin.)
Primary Sources
Bach, Johann Sebastian. Clavier-Übung III. Leipzig, 1739.
Bach, Johann Sebastian. Bach: Orgelwerke, Bd. 4: Dritter Teil der Clavier-Übung. Edited by Manfred Tessmer and Christoph Wolff. Kassel: Bärenreiter, BA 5264.
Caeremoniale episcoporum. Rome, 1600.
Caeremoniale Parisiense. Paris, 1662.
Codex Faenza. Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 117. c. 1420.
Frescobaldi, Girolamo. Fiori musicali. Venice, 1635.
Grigny, Nicolas de. Premier livre d’orgue. Paris, 1699.
Heinichen, Johann David. Der General-Bass in der Composition. Dresden, 1728.
Kuhnau, Johann. Neuer Clavier-Übung. Part 1. Leipzig, 1689; Part 2. Leipzig, 1692.
Pliny the Younger. Epistulae 10.96–97. To Trajan, c. 112 CE.
Robertsbridge Codex. British Library, London, Add. MS 28550.
Scheidt, Samuel. Tabulatura nova. Hamburg, 1624.
Secondary Sources
Butler, Gregory G. J. S. Bach’s Clavier-Übung III: The Making of a Print, with a Companion Study of the Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch,” BWV 769. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990.
Ferguson, Everett. “Congregational Singing in the Early Church.” 2004, 144–59.
Herl, Joseph. Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Leaver, Robin A. Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007.
More, Mother Thomas. “The Practice of Alternatim: Organ-playing and Polyphony in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, with Special Reference to the Choir of Notre-Dame de Paris.” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 18, no. 1 (1967): 15–32.
Ponsford, David. French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Stauffer, George B. J. S. Bach: The Organ Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
Stauffer, George B., ed. Clavier-Übung III. Vol. 8 of The Complete Organ Works of J. S. Bach. Colfax, NC: Wayne Leupold Editions, 2010.
Van Wye, Benjamin. “Ritual Use of the Organ in France.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 33, no. 2 (1980): 287–325.
Williams, Peter. The Organ Music of J. S. Bach. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Yearsley, David. Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.


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One of the most important documents we posses about J.S. Bach— indeed the first biographical writing— is his obituary, written by his son, C.P.E., and his student, Agricola.
Also referred to as the ‘Nekrolog,’ the obituary appeared in Mizler’s (yes, the Society of Musical Sciences gentleman) publication, Musikalische Bibliothek, in its very last installment.
In this brief portrait of the greatest composer, we are struck by the renown of his family tree, the unanimous admiration of all those who heard Bach, but ultimately by the humility of his spirit despite his towering achievements.
Write That Fugue!

The obituary is also important because it contains Bach’s ‘first list of works.’ The five cantata cycles and five passions mentioned in the list are addressed in this article on Bach’s missing works:
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The music at the end is BWV 600, from a forthcoming ‘electrified’ arrangement of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein.
The beautiful passage toward the end of my rant— with the koto accompaniment and bird song— comes from one of my absolute favorite books: R.H. Blythe’s writings about Haiku. Blyth considered the three greatest geniuses of time to be Basho, Bach, and Shakespeare— in that order! Wow! What am I missing with Basho!?
More than a podcast. This is WTF Bach.

I take my groceries from the bag and notice the bag says,
This is more than food.
More than food? But I want to eat …food. Just food. Maybe they’re referring to the packaging? This is more than food: it’s packaging wrapped around the food. But then I read on:
This is impact.
Impact? Do I want to eat impact? Does impact have gluten?
My chocolate bar, too.
This is more than chocolate.
Uh-oh.
This is freedom.
Yikes. Should I …eat the freedom part? Maybe I shouldn’t. Sounds like something a dictator would do.
How would you like your freedom Signori Mussolini?
Rare. Very rare.
My milk says something too. Goddamn! When did food get so talkative?
For Family Farm Dairy, milk is more than just a drink.
Oh here we go again…
Our Cows are family.
Family? With, like, beds in the house? I thought dogs in airports was too much, but now: cows… Do not pet. Emotional support heifer.
And while I’m in the airport, I need something to eat. I’m still hungry because this all this impact and freedom hasn’t filled me up. I see a sign,
Eat beautiful.
Eat beauti…ful…? Oh I get it, ‘Subway. Eat Fresh.’ now this. But this is somehow worse. We all want fresh food, even if it is grammatically incorrect fresh food, but beautiful food? I’m not ready for that. Especially since it’s …at an airport.
Eat beautiful? What was wrong with eat beautifully? But then again, what is eating beautifully? Picture Sophia Loren eating sushi. But eat beautiful? Sorry, don’t eat adjectives.
Eat photogenic. Eat prepossessing. Someone will drop one of these on us soon enough.
Sirs, our data reports show that people are consuming 20% more beautiful, but they’re not eating enough of our product! Hence, our new slogan: eat sexy.
Oh yes, yes! Eat sexy. Fantastic, brilliant. Maybe we can get some pink ribbons and black and white photos on the edamame. Could we wrap the steaks in lingerie? Who would eat beautiful when they could eat sexy?
Spread the Happy.
This is a real one. These are all real ones. Honey, can you, uh, pass the happy? I know we’re in a sexless marriage and our children never call, but if we just spread a little more of this Happy…
Cadbury told us to Free the joy
Now it’s on us to free something? To free an emotion? We wouldn’t have to if they didn’t trap it in there. One chocolate bar is freedom, another is enslaving joy. Poor joy, all trapped in that wrapper. Here let me set you free.
It’s all spin-offs on Coca-Cola, anyhow, the greatest grifters of all time. Open happiness. God, it’s brilliant. It preys on people. Open happiness, I even like it.
But then they changed it to taste the feeling. The feeling. What feeling? The feeling of… tasting? Taste the feeling of tasting. It’s weird. It’s just shifting around words until they’ve lost all meaning. But that’s old hat by now because these days coca-cola tells us it’s real magic. Magic. We’ve gone from happiness to magic.
Ah. I see where this is going Allow me to save coke years of market research, what you’re after is, “Coke: the Carbonated Christ.”
Food is out of control— and arrogant! I liked it when food was food. I’m sick of eating beautiful and happy. I want a meal! Would you care for some freshly ground joy on your magic? Oh grow up! Are you living in Never-Never Land?
Remember, “the best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup?” Nice, simple. Somewhat true. The best part of waking up, after, naturally assuring yourself you haven’t died in your sleep, could well be a cup of coffee.
Folgers never said, “we’re more than Folgers, we’re a cultivated set of moral codes, congratulations.” Nowadays our coffee tells us, This is more than coffee. It’s Starbucks.
Oh! I see… Well, you should be the first to know that this podcast is more than a podcast. It’s WTF Bach.
Don’t you feel lucky.
Maybe junk food needs to speak. Your body can’t possibly feel good about washing down your chocolate taco with that coke, so you need a mind-numbing mantra as you do it. This… is happiness… c’mon, c’mon, cram more of that happiness in there…
But then— but then!— my rice spoke to me— rice! Rice isn’t supposed to talk. Rice is a quiet food— The zen meal. But today at the store, all the rice said,
Live like you mean it.
Why, the thought never occurred to me! Like I mean it? Have I been living like I don’t mean it? How does one mean… wait, What is meaning… is this one of those Buddhist riddles…
When did rice figure out the meaning of life and why are they announcing it on a pouch?
Live like you mean it… what is it? Life? Like I intend to keep liv…? oh… I see. By eating. Don’t starve, eat food if you want to go on living.
“We all eat in complete solitude; the melancholy of the four seasons bathes us in its pitifulness. And deeper even than this is our perception of the pathos of eating. We eat to live. We are but a step from starvation, a hair’s breadth from death. And the obliviousness of [ourselves to our] own pathos, the self-forgetful state in which [we are] while eating, induces in us the same state of unselfconsciousness. This is the realm of pathos (in the sense that All is Pathos) to which this verse leads us with such gentle hands.”
Well if you put it that way, I agree. You must eat to live, so pick me! Pick me!
I’d always assumed that food didn’t need to tell the humans to it eat it, but hey, I am glass half-full kind of guy. Glass half full of Aspire. This is more than water. This is daydream.
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Volume 6 in ‘J.S. Bach: Complete Keyboard Works’ is on presale today! Here are the relevant links:
* J.S. Bach: Complete Keyboard Works, Vol. 6 - Arrangements of Albinoni and Reincken(https://modernclassicalx.lnk.to/JSBachCompleteKeyboardWorksVol6FromArrangementsofAlbinoniandReincken)
I might call this volume a ‘headphones album’ or perhaps one to listen to in the car: The sonic space shifts throughout the course of these pieces. I describe this process in depth in the episode, but essentially each track is two recordings of the piece, playing simultaneously: one recording is the original live performance, while another is that very same performance, played back through the Disklavier with the dynamics flatlined— as if the piano keyboard were incapable of dynamics — like a harpsichord. The two recordings were then ‘live panned’ during the mixing according to my feeling for the music. The result, while perhaps less extreme than this all sounds, is certainly a noticeable phenomenon, especially in headphones or seated between two speakers as in a car. But enough about that, let’s get to the music.
Fugue it:

Reincken, one of the two composers Bach arranges on this album, is mentioned in Bach’s obituary:
During this time, about the year 1722, he made a journey to Hamburg and was heard for more than two hours on the fine organ of St. Catherine’s before the Magistrate and many other distinguished persons of the town, to their general astonishment. The aged Organist of this Church, Johann Adam Reinken, who at that time was nearly a hundred years old, listened to him with particular pleasure. Bach, at the request of those present, performed extempore the chorale ‘An Wasserflüssen Babylon’ at great length (for almost half an hour) and in different ways, just as the better organists of Hamburg in the past had been used to do at the Saturday vespers. Particularly on this, Reinken made Bach the following compliment: “I thought that this art was dead, but I see that in you it still lives.” This verdict of Reinken’s was the more unexpected since he himself had set the same chorale, many years before, in the manner described above; and this fact, as also that otherwise he had always been somewhat inclined to be envious, was not unknown to our Bach. Reinken thereupon pressed him to visit him and showed him much courtesy.
Reinken was only in his late seventies— not a hundred— when he and Bach met, but he had already been an important part of Bach’s early development. Around 1714 Bach made arrangements of string chamber music by Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751) and Johann Adam Reinken (1643-1722.) Where Bach’s concerto arrangements BWVs 972-987 for harpsichord, and BWVs 592-597 for organ, maintain the general structures and forms of the originals, Bach’s Reincken and Albinoni music is arranged with much more freedom, especially in the fugues, where Bach often doubles, if not triples, the length of the original models.
The full track listing to the forthcoming album, on presale today, available October 23:
1: Fugue in A major, BWV 950 (on a theme by Albinoni)
2. Sonata in C major, BWV 966 (after Reincken): I. Praeludium 3. Sonata in C major, BWV 966: II. Fuga4. Sonata in C major, BWV 966: III. Adagio – Allegro5. Sonata in C major, BWV 966: IV. Allemande
6. Fugue in C major, BWV 946 (on a theme by Albinoni)
7. Sonata in A minor, BWV 965 (after Reincken): I. Adagio8. Sonata in A minor, BWV 965: II. Fuga9. Sonata in A minor, BWV 965: III. Adagio – Presto10. Sonata in A minor, BWV 965: IV. Allemande11. Sonata in A minor, BWV 965: V. Courante12. Sonata in A minor, BWV 965: VI. Sarabande13. Sonata in A minor, BWV 965: VII. Gigue
14. Fugue in B minor, BWV 951a (early version of BWV 951)15. Fugue in B minor, BWV 951 (on a theme by Albinoni)
16. Fugue in B-flat major, BWV 954 (on a theme by Reincken)
Write That Fugue!

We’ve covered one of the pieces on the album on the site before. In a post from September 2025, I described in depth the transcriptive changes between Bach’s BWV 965 and Reinken’s Hortus Musicus. In this post, you can see excerpts of the scores of both the Bach and the Reinken. It might be helpful to see this again:
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We’ve now covered the seven surviving earliest vocal works by Johann Sebastian Bach! This episode is a brief tour through the episodes we dedicated to these pieces, refreshing our memories and attempting to identify unifying stylistic features.
All the episodes covering the Arnstadt/Mülhausen cantatas can be found at:https://wtfbach.substack.com/t/early-cantatas
Wanna Cantata?

Here’s an image that might help you wrap your head around the earliest cantatas:
For the first time I spoke about Bach’s librettists. We will meet them as our study moves into the later cantatas. There are five identifiable poets, and one anonymous. What did you think about my mnemonic?
Solomon Franck (a.k.a Solomo)Erdmann NeumeisterGeorg Christian LehmsChristian Friedrich Henrici (a.k.a. Picander)Christiane Mariane von Ziegler
S-N-L-P-Z (Saturday Night Live PiZza…Anyone?)
And wasn’t it thrilling to hear the similarities of styles between the cantata composed by Bach’s third cousin, Johann Ludwig Bach, JLB 7, and BWV 143? The JLB cantata survives in a copy by JS himself. Have a look at JL. See the relation?
Johann Georg Sachs’ organ music, as promised. He was the cantor who gave Spitta the (once misattributed) cantata BWV 223.https://imslp.org/wiki/Charakteristische_Orgelstücke_(Sachs,_Johann_Georg)
Write That Fugue!

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Summary:
Bach’s early cantatas, seven surviving works from his Arnstadt and Mühlhausen years (BWV 4, BWV 71, BWV 106, BWV 131, BWV 143, BWV 150 and BWV 196), are quite special works. Their texts use mainly the Psalms and Lutheran hymns rather than freely composed poetry. Instrumentation in these early cantatas is generally light: five of the seven use five parts or fewer, apart from the singers and continuo. Recitatives, closing chorales and da capo arias are almost entirely absent. The choir runs through the works rather than appearing only at the beginnings and endings. Tempi and meter shift freely, and suddenly, and the text appears to drive the music. We also conclude (or try to conclude) our thoughts on the authenticity of the cantata BWV 143. We also discuss the case of BWV 223, a fugue snippet left by Spitta, thought to be a lost Bach cantata until about 2004, but now attributed to Handel (and still missing? Anyone able to clear that up?) Performers featured were Koopman and Suzuki.


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