This next step in the process has a dual purpose. On the surface level, we’re essentially proofreading: checking for typos by playing through your transcribed notation. But on a deeper level, we’re beginning to develop our sense of physically playing the music—what the notes themselves are asking us to do. Combining these two purposes makes the mundane (proofreading) much more engaging (actually playing).

The proofreading aspect is simple. Print out your transcription. Yes, actual paper works best here. Grab a trusty red pencil. Play through the music a bunch of times, and use your ear to look out for any wrong notes. Beware of accidentals that didn’t carry through the measure, and make note of any courtesy accidentals that you find beneficial. In particular, beware of bass-clef-to-alto-clef transcription errors. Bass to alto is only one step (plus an octave) different, so an E-flat in bass looks like a D in alto. I made this mistake several times throughout the suite, see below. Rely on your aural knowledge of the suite, but question every note. If it sounds even the slightest bit suspicious, mark it and check the performing edition later.

A bass-clef to alto-clef typo.

 The proofreading element blends into our larger goal of engaging with the suites on an elemental level. Since there are no bowings, you are forced to account for just the pitches and rhythms. Despite this lack of indicated slurs, you’ll find that logical patterns and groupings begin to emerge. This is one of the first steps of developing your own edition! Don’t mark any slurs or groupings, but simply notice what’s happening with the organization of the notes. For example, I’ve been playing the prelude a lot this week, and this morning, I began to notice how Bach repeatedly injects consecutive tritones into a specific section of the piece (mm. 18–30, culminating in a tritone + an octave in m. 29). No interpretation needed yet: just notice what is happening.

Increasing frequency of consecutive tritones in the Prelude of the Fourth Suite.

The next weeks of the project will be filled with these important moments of discovery. It’s cliché to say that every time you play Bach, you notice something new. You won’t, if you’re just playing it. But, if you’re actively digging around, looking for shreds of information, you’ll start seeing patterns and figures, and notice something you hadn’t seen yesterday. They are mostly simple discoveries on their own, but as you gather them one by one, your relationship with the music deepens and you will begin, bit by bit, building your interpretation of the piece. When I took a Schenkerian analysis class with the great pedagogue Frank Samarotto, he used to say that Bach doesn’t waste a single note, that every note is there for a reason. Looking deeply at this (yes, even through this proofreading step) begins to make this clear.

An early, rather unglamorous step in this project is transcription. There are, however, some hidden benefits. Essentially, we are inputting the notes from the “Performing Edition” from the Bärenreiter set into notation software. I use Finale, which I first learned to use in high school, but I’ve had students use Muse Score with good results. Our goal is to have a stable digital version of the notes that you can use as the baseline for exploring the sources. This will make it possible to easily manipulate it later with articulations, slurs, fingerings, and more. For violists, this is helpful to get it into alto clef. Along the way, you can also start adjusting the spacing and formatting.

In this step, you will confront the first real, editorial decisions in this project. When discrepancies in pitch and rhythm arise between the sources (a few times per movement), you need to decide which notes to actually write down. I’ll pick one option but won’t agonize over it—I postpone the final decision until later. But make sure to put a mental asterisk on each, so that you can play the differing versions later.

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While most of this step is grunt work, you gain a certain closeness to the actual materials of the music during this process. Throughout history, copying music was an essential part of studying composition. For composers like Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, hand copying the works of others was a way to get inside the pieces and the minds of the composers, and it was a major pedagogical tool. While typing into a keyboard isn’t as fluent as handwriting, I still acquire a more intimate understanding of the notes than if I had just picked up a score and started playing. For example: I use Finale’s Speedy Note tool to input the notes, so in order to notate a leap of a perfect fifth up, I have to tap the up arrow four separate times. I can feel the steps needed, and start to understand from a tactile perspective the arrangements of steps and skips in the musical lines. Is this a major discovery? No. But any scrap of insight is a bonus in this project, and transcription certainly provides it.

This gets at the overall crux of this project: spending the time to notice things. The closer and closer we get to the music, the more we notice. This project forces us into many modes of interacting with the music, more just staring at a printed page and playing it. Every different mode can give us a new shred of insight. We copy down the notes in Finale, you proofread your typing, you even listen to the MIDI playback, we deal with page layout, you look at the spacing of the notes, you stare (for a long time) at the facsimiles, you interpret the slurs, and so on. Not many of us would, say, re-notate the Hindemith sonatas, since already have solid, definitive editions. But with the Bach, we gain this closeness and intimacy with all of the materials, and this is real discovery begins.

Happy typing!

Before getting into the music, the first step of this project is to gather the materials. Sounds boring, but who doesn’t like to buy stuff?! You’ll need to get your hands on (at least) facsimiles of the four handwritten manuscripts. The best way to do this is to buy or borrow Bärenreiter’s incredible facsimile edition (BA5217, or the older BA5216). It contains five facsimiles of the sources (the handwritten sources A, B, C, and D; and the first published edition, E), a modern “performing” edition, and a useful 40-page text volume describing the sources, performance practice, and the suites. It’s an incredibly important tool for this project, and costs around $75. I got my edition as a Christmas present when I was a student!

All seven parts of the Bärenreiter facsimile edition. Probably the most cherished sheet music I own!

While scans of the sources are all available on IMSLP, you’ll be much more efficient if you have the printed edition. Nothing beats being able to lay out the scores side by side and trace through each movement. I’m not a technology-denier—I perform almost 100% from an iPad—but this project would be much more difficult if I tried to do it all digitally.

And then, it’s such a thrill to be able to get be able to get close to the handwriting in these sources. Even though they are just facsimiles and not the real thing, you really get a sense of the shape of notes, slurs, and flavor of the music by getting your nose into the airspace of these pieces. I haven’t been able to replicate that feeling with digital scores.

About the “performing” edition, as the publishers call it. It’s helpful, no doubt, but impossible to perform from. It’s a beautifully presented blank slate for beginning for the project: a modern engraving of only the pitches and rhythms, with the occasional ornament. There are no slurs, so it offers a clear view of the nitty gritty notes. Yet, there isn’t complete agreement on the pitches/rhythms, so they insert floating alternative measures when this occurs. This is great for the scholar, but bad for the performer trying to progress at tempo through the piece. See these floating measures below from the E-flat Prelude.

Floating alternate measure in the so called performing edition.

And of course, for us violists, the music is set in bass clef, so we’ll need to transcribe it anyway. On to the next step: transcription!

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In this course of this blog, I’ll be detailing the steps toward creating your own edition of the Bach Cello Suites. It’s a fascinating exercise—one that I’ve done many times myself and with my students—and it results in a deeper and closer connection to these masterpieces. I’ll be using the Fourth Suite in E-flat major BWV 1010 to show all of the steps while posting periodic excerpts of myself playing. I’ll also be posting this on Instagram, where you can follow me @viola_bratsche.

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I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about, teaching, and playing these suites, and have given a number of presentations about this very project. You can view a powerpoint here, which is available on the Presentation tab of this website.

To briefly set up the problem: There exists no manuscript of the Cello Suites in JS Bach’s hand. Our understanding of the suites comes from four handwritten manuscripts from the 18th century and the first printed edition from the early 19th century. All of the sources contain fairly similar (but not exact, as we’ll see) pitches and rhythms, but they diverge greatly in the slurs and articulations. Making a judgment as to which is the “best” version is an impossible task, as they all have their strengths and weaknesses and show different flavors of the music. Rather, I find that it’s useful to systematically see where they agree and disagree, in hopes of approaching the since lost autograph manuscript. If, for example, all four sources have a slur over the same group of notes, we can assume with relative certainty that the slur appeared in Bach’s autograph manuscript. While this does occur, it’s not as frequent as one would hope, so a lot of close study is needed.

For this project, I’ve developed a fairly systematic way of comparing the sources to find where they agree and disagree. After identifying this, the fun (and sometimes frustrating) process of decision-making begins. There’s a lot to consider, but it should engage all parts of your musical ideas: meter, harmony, performing ease, modern vs period instruments, expressive intention, and so on.

This blog will detail those steps and examine any issues as they arrive. The end result will be my new edition of the E-flat suite, complete with a performance. By embarking on this process with the suites, I’ve found that I get to know them on a much deeper level than if I had played someone else’s edition. The slow process of studying them this way reveals the incredible depth and variety in each suite.