Keyboard Transcriptions of Bach's Music for Unaccompanied String and Wind Instruments

The suites, sonatas, and partitas that Johann Sebastian Bach composed for solo violin, cello, flute, and lute are completely self-sufficient and require no additional harmony or accompaniment. Nevertheless, like almost everything he wrote, they are worthy of study by players of other instruments, and Bach himself arranged several of them for keyboard instruments; at least some of the lute pieces, moreover, were evidently intended from the beginning for performance on keyboard as at least an alternative.

Transcriptions by others exist as well, and as a student I was fortunate to hear Gustav Leonhardt perform his own transcription of at least one of the cello suites (perhaps in 1976 in Cambridge, Mass.). Over a period of several weeks I proceeded to make my own transcriptions of all six of these works, following them up fairly quickly with arrangements of the pieces for violin, flute, and lute. My intention in every case was to create music that would be as idiomatic to the keyboard, and requiring equal virtuosity of the player, as the originals (hence what I felt to be the need to arrange the lute pieces, which Bach actually seems to have left in somewhat thinly textured keyboard scores, leaving to others the transcription into lute tablature).

Naturally the results could hardly be mistaken for genuine keyboard works of Bach. Nevertheless, it is in the nature of any music by Bach, even an arrangement, to permit continual refinement, and over the years I have returned occasionally to these transcriptions to improve various details. I have decided to make them available in the form of free downloadable files for anyone interested in playing them. I ask only that my name be mentioned in connection with any public performance of these arrangements, and that no alterations or embellishments be made to them, apart from standard ornamentation.

Bach usually transposed his own keyboard versions of music originally composed for other instruments. I have done the same in order to place each transcription in an optimal part of the keyboard. The list on the next page indicates both original and transposed keys and provides links to the individual files (in pdf format) currently available.

I have formatted each score such that page turns will occur at convenient points; it may, however, be necessary to place sometimes two consecutive pages on the music desk, sometimes only one. I will be grateful to anyone who finds errors or other problems in these arrangements for bringing them to my attention by writing to me at dschulen AT wagner.edu.

David Schulenberg

August 10, 2010