Two-part Inventions

J.S. Bach’s 2-part Inventions are the ideal terrain for anyone wishing to perform keyboard music of the eighteenth-century. These marvellous compositions were conceived for educational purposes for students to learn not only how to play two parts correctly, but also and above all, as Bach himself says in the frontispiece of one of the autograph manuscripts, to acquire the art of the cantabile and the style of the composition.

This publication, far from dictating universal or definitive rules, only wishes to give some suggestions for how to approach the musical concepts of the time, with the aim of helping to make the keyboard music transparent, with a pronunciation and phrasing aesthetically consistent with the sense of the message, which was the main purpose of playing well and composing well.

Once you have learned the meaning and purpose of the fingerings or articulations proposed, you will get used to using them almost automatically, as if the fingers were the tongue that expresses a speech, with all its syllables, words, sentences and punctuation.