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Comment by username223 | Hacker News Reader

The lute suites are crazy. He didn't play the lute, modern guitars didn't exist when he wrote them, the pieces aren't playable on a guitar without some changes, they sound amazing, and they are brutal to even approximate. He wrote many-voiced ("polyphonic") music for an instrument played by beating two hands on six strings. Not content with that, he wrote fugues for the same instrument, which are polyphonic music that obeys a lot of rules.

Take the time to learn the rules of fugues, then try to understand one of Bach's.

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Incidentally one of his lute suites is the same as the c minor cello suite. Except I think on lute it's in either a or e minor, I forget now. I don't know whether the cello suite came first or the lute suite though.

But as a violist I found this interesting. I like to play his violin sonatas and partitas but on viola but people have discouraged me from this because it means changing the key and everyone insists that Bach is very deliberate in his choice of key and it's almost blasphemy to think about playing his music in a different key. But the lute/cello suite is a direct contradiction to this.

The people telling you that Bach is specific about his key are talking about his work on temperament...none of which applies to the cello suites or sonatas and partitas for solo violin. The violin family isn't tempered, and wasn't played tempered unless it was playing with a keyboard.

On the violin family his choice of keys was driven by the technical requirements of the instrument, what open strings were available, what chords were natural.

Transpose them a fifth down and play them with no worries. I certainly transpose the cello suites up an octave and a fifth and play them on violin with no qualms.

>everyone insists that Bach is very deliberate in his choice of key

They’re being precious. He was a consummate pro who frequentlyrecycled his own themes and those of others, and his pieces often changed keys a dizzying number of times within just a few measures. Besides, that shit sounds beyond awesome on viola.

> Besides, that shit sounds beyond awesome on viola.

I agree. There's a fantastic recording of one of my favorite violists today, Antoine Tamestit, playing Bach's second partita. It's his appropriately named album "Chaconne", and it also includes the Ligeti viola sonata, which is probably one of the hardest things I've seen written for viola. Ugh, it's one piece that I just don't even know how to begin practicing. :)

G minor, I believe. I personally think it works better on the guitar, and can't imagine trying to do justice to polyphonic music on an instrument where it seems hard to play more than one string at a time. Sort of like the Paganini caprices -- I first heard them played by Eliot Fisk on the guitar, and even if he is sloppy sometimes, it sounds better than any violin recording I've heard.

The best guitar recordings of Bach are by Paul Galbraith. He really took it to the next level with a custom built 8string guitar and astonishing technique.

I found the one I'm talking about on Apple Music, John Williams playing them on guitar. It's BWV 995 for lute, and it is in a minor.

fwiw on cello it's BWV 1011.

I'll check it out, since Williams is a great guitarist. I have a couple of recordings of BWV 995 at hand, and they both claim to be in G minor.

Oh, interesting! Perhaps Bach wrote it for lute in g minor and Williams plays it in a minor on guitar? I didn't think of that.

Wikipedia seems to agree with you on the key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suite_in_G_minor,_BWV_995

It's not uncommon to retune a guitar for some pieces, often making the lowest string D instead of E. I don't think that was true for this piece, but I don't have the sheet music, and it has been awhile. It's worth remembering that the guitar is a relatively young instrument.

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