Malinowski’s WTC Project: Book II, Second Half

This afternoon I completed my traversal of Stephen Malinowski’s animated visualizations of all of the preludes and fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Readers may recall that I divided this task into four equal parts, each accounting for twelve of the prelude-fugue couplings in each the two books. Thus, this afternoon was devoted to the preludes and fugues from F-sharp major to B minor in the second of Bach’s two books.

Readers may recall that I had some misgivings about the first half of that second book. This was less of an issue this afternoon, perhaps because my capacity for listening required a “learning curve” to adjust to the harpsichord performances by Colin Booth. Most important, however, was a growing appreciation for the diversity of techniques that Malinowski engaged. It is seldom (if ever) the case that the eye is confronted with what might be called a “glorified player piano roll.” Malinowski approached each selection with a sense of how we wanted to guide the attentive ear; and, having made that decision, he could then select a repertoire of shapes, colors, and animation techniques.

I should again emphasize that these are visualizations of performance, rather than of the score pages being performed. One might say that the task of any keyboardist playing these preludes and fugues must begin by deciding how (s)he wishes to guide the attentive listener through Bach’s rich polyphonic structures. Thus, Malinowski’s visualizations provide a means through which that listener can better appreciate the decisions that Booth made. Were Malinowski to revisit this project with recordings of Glenn Gould or András Schiff, I suspect that he would seldom (if ever) fall back on any of his past visualizations. On the other hand, having now experienced the logic behind Malinowski’s visualizations, I suspect that my capacity for listening to these preludes and fugues will now pursue new perspectives in listening to both performances and recordings as a consequence of those experiences.