Program Note

Catalogues do not go on forever. They are exhaustive, and then they end. Someone has decided, according to some conviction, upon a perimeter of boundaries, which are made known, and has cast off many more objects in order to present only the things which belong in the catalogue.

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Edition Breitkopf Nr. 3765 is a collection of Johann Sebastian Bach's Choralgesänge. On the back cover of the book are printed four sentences in German and English: "The present edition contains all the chorales by Johann Sebastian Bach with and without obbligato instruments. The greater part stems from Bach's cantatas, passions, oratorios, and motets. The only source for the remaining was the edition of four-part chorale hymns which Carl Philip Emanuel Bach published during the years 1784-1787. The chorales are listed alphabetically after the melody." These sentences are paraphrases, in modern German and English, taken from the preface written in 1 91 2 by the editor, Bernhard Friedrich Richter.

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Richter's preface, which is printed at the start of the collection, is at pains to make transparent the decisions that went behind the inclusion of certain chorales ("Der einzige figurierte Choral, Nr. 1 99, "Weg, weg mit allen Schätzen", wurde wegen seiner Zusammengehörigkeit mit den übrigen Chorälen der Motette "Jesu meine Freude" aufgenommen, ebenso Nr. 259 "Nun danket alle Gott" trotz seiner übrigens kurzen Zwischenspiele wegen seiner bequemen Verwendbarkeit") as well as the people who made his labor easier (Johannes Zahn, Ludwig Erk). The verbose anxiety arising from his confrontation with finitude touched me.

The work is a catalogue of all the ascending minor thirds between consecutive printed noteheads in each of the four or five voices printed in the Richter edition of Johann Sebastian Bach's Choralgesänge. Five-part chorales have been reduced to four voices by means of tremolos or consolidation (Nr. 1 98. "Jesu, meine Freude", Nr. 350. "Welt, ade! ich bin dein müde"). For the most part each ascending third, consisting of two notes, is lifted from its context, and the rest of the voices of the chorales are truncated according to the length of the two notes of the ascending minor third. In the rare cases when the occurrence of one ascending third in one voice dovetails with an ascending third in another voice, these ascending minor thirds are kept together to avoid redundancy. The snippets are ordered according to decreasing density, so that given the same tempo indication throughout, the harmony accelerates as time goes by, without my having to alter the noteheads from their original printed forms. I have otherwise kept the order of snippets quite close to the order in which they appear in the book.