J. S. Bach, Two-part Inventions English Suite in A minor & Notebook for Anna Magdalena

Excerpt from the CD booklet essay by Trevor Stephenson:

An audience member once said to me, after I had given a concert- lecture on Bach, “I don’t know much about music, but I do know that with this Bach fellow you can never predict the next note.” After thanking him and confessing that I had never thought of that—and I may have offered him the fee for my next ten lectures—I tried to add that this phenomenon appears to be true not only for the first time one hears or plays a piece by Bach, but for every time—and that’s why we keep coming back. No matter how much or how little you know about music, Bach’s glorious and satisfying unpredictability endures.

Bach’s music is rooted in a seeming paradox, nourished by both secure patterning and unanticipated variation. I always find that his music sounds as the grain of wood looks. One sees the flow, the elegant striations and rays, yet there is never mundane duplication, no two cells in quite the same relationship, only infinite and structured invention.