What I’m playing / Learning… “Invention No13″ by J.S. Bach
This is a classical piece written by one of the most well known composers af all time. Amazingly, Bach was not fully appreciated as a composer until over 100 years after he died.
No13 is a two part piece requiring two guitarists playing together (it was originally written for the piano). The style is referred to as “contrapuntal” meaning that the two parts dance around eachother to form the melody.
The style of music itself is called “Baroque” and playing it makes you feel a bit like you’re the entertainment at an 18th century royal reception or playing the background music for some dialogue in a Three Muskateers film. The link above takes you to the Baroque music entry in wikipedia. Try searching wikipedia for just “baroque” to get more of an idea of what baroque can refer to, i.e. it was not just a musical stlye.
It’s a pretty difficult one, No13. I found that I started to pick it up really quickly and after committing several sections to memory, thought that it would be a breeze. But as it happens, there is an inner element of surprise difficulty whilst learning the piece and especially when playing it with someone else who is also learning their part.
We have both committed the first half to memory and the standard is getting ok now so it will be our job over Christmas to learn the rest.
If you have the time and the patience (and a similarly able partner) I can highly recommend giving it a try. Search google for “invention 13 by bach tab” or something similar and you should find the tablature. Or if you really can’t find it, let me know and I’ll make it available here.
No go forth and learn. Learn to play the guitar so that everyone might listen and learn from what you have learnt. Then knowledge and compassion can be experienced by the whole world and people can start to clean up some of the mess that they and their ancestors have created. No one will starve, no one will fight, and no one will die before their time. Science will become exclusively a force for good and the whole world will benefit. And our wisdom shall live on until the sun breathes it’s last breath and our genetic mutations are wiped out and their life force scattered back into the vacuum from whence it came, to catch rides with passing meteorites and comets and spread our memories to new planets to form new living creatures that hopefully use the good and bad from what we have learned to become better moral beings.
If you’ve read this far, you probably think I’m insane. And you’re probably right.
Now go play some guitar.
The Guitar Master
0