Bach and the Art of Improvisation

Got in time , and no damges

Many improvisation manuals pretend to be unabridged, complete, style period correct, but I never found such quality and consistency on this matter, this is a serious and plausible intent to restore the old art of maestro Bach himself,Congratulations, excellent work!Rodrigo Treviño - Organist, Organ and Improvisation Professor ENM UNAM & National Conservatory of Music México,

Right away the author goes to great lengths to assure the reader they won't be able to effectively apply this book unless they learn baroque fingering on a clavichord. So, the author's audience for this book is clearly students ensconced in esoteric corners of Academia. Heck, when I got my degree in harpsichord from the California Institute of the Arts we didn't even have a clavichord THERE. A professional musician wandering in the wilderness of the Real World like me still got some good ideas from the rest of the book.

This is by far the best book on baroque (organ) improvisation that I ever studied.I understood that there is a part 2 as well but so far I could order it nowhere.

Very quick shipment and an awesome quality of the item! I recommend it!

great book ;)

Nice

I have carefully read this book cover to cover, and must say that I agree completely with a review by Timothy Tikker, in the March 2016 issue of The American Organist, which I’d strongly recommend you read before buying this book.He sums up saying that the book has a large and comprehensive bibliography and includes some tables of useful terminology. But when that summary is put in context with the rest of the review, his real message becomes clear: this is a textbook for 17th-18th century composition theory, based on citations from primary sources to an extent not found in other common practice theory texts. But it is in no way an improvisation method.For instance, the chapter on two-part inventions gives exercises for hand-copying Bach’s inventions, then composing one’s own inventions, but gives no instruction at all as to how to improvise any. Ruiter-Feenstra devotes many pages to Fuxian species counterpoint, but then only gives exercises for composing such, never for improvising any. By the time she refers to Bach’s use of the Golden Section (proportion based on 61.8%), it’s obvious that any kind of at-the-moment invention of music is the farthest thing from her mind (or does she honestly expect that, when improvising in a church service, fitting music’s timing to the liturgical action and so not yet knowing how long you’ll need to play, you’re actually going to decide in advance that your music will be precisely 22 measures long, and at the “Golden Section” 13th measure you’ll provide a moment of “heightened activity”…?!). This book gives no real advice on how to make the leap from composing to improvising.That would be enough of a problem. But even as a theory text, this book has serious flaws. Ruiter-Feenstra has written many of her own musical examples, several of which fall short, e.g. Applications 7.2 D-E1 (p. 194) or 7.5C (p. 198), which are marred by inappropriate treatment of non-harmonic tones. Other flaws leave one dismayed at the lack of care that went into preparing this book: musical examples crammed onto the page into an illegible mess (pp. 96, 108…), Applications 7.2A-C turning up missing (p. 193); bizarre gaffes: saying “Pachelbel was approximately one generation younger than Bach,” when on the previous page (66) she gives Pachelbel’s year of birth as 1653, so a generation-and-a-half older than Bach; asserting that Bach was not a court musician (p. 179), leaving the reader baffled that this would-be Bach scholar is completely unaware of the composer’s years in Anhalt-Cöthen.This book is a great disappointment. Strongly disrecommended!