Piano Video Lesson: How to Play Bach's Two Part Inventions - Part 1

Welcome to virtualsheetmusic.com. I'm Robert Estrin. And today is a beginning of a series on how to approach Bach Two Part Inventions. These are masterful works. They're not very long and they're brilliantly conceived. Now, what is a Two Part Invention? First of all, Two Part Invention is simply counterpoint with two different lines. In other words, there's never more than two notes playing in a whole piece and yet it's an amazing composition. It's built with a subject and a countersubject and it's being able to delineate the subject and the countersubject that makes these pieces sparkle.

Well, how can you achieve that? Dynamics is one way but perhaps even more important is by phrasing the two different themes differently from one another - the subject and the countersubject. So for example, in the very first invention you have a subject it is this. And you have a countersubject that's this. And the entire piece is built upon just those two elements. Listen how the very first section sounds like. Now in this particular invention, the subject and the countersubject are incredibly similar but what happens in just a few bars into it is that the fragment of countersubject is elongated - the eighth notes. Notice how I play them legato in groups of notes with the last one being short. This is how you can delineate the different between them. In fact, the whole subject and the countersubject are delineated by the phrase that goes slurring the whole subject and the countersubject together. This is how to bring it out. Now, the beauty of Bach is that you could actually bring much of your own to the music. In other words, there is no right or wrong. If you wanted to play the phrasing completely differently, no one could say that this is not accurate. Why? Because Bach did not write phrasing in in the inventions. It's up to you how to delineate the lines.

The beauty is that you do not have melody and harmony as you do in later period music where you have obvious melody like in a Mozart sonata where you have a melody in the right hand and an accompaniment in the left hand. The left hand merely being broken chords. Here, everything is melody. So the secret is bringing out the melody wherever it occurs and try to delineate phrasing. I'm going to demonstrate with some other inventions in future videos for you where the subject and countersubject are even more extremely different which provides a wonderful opportunity to understand the structure of this music.

Thanks so much for joining me. Robert Estrin here at virtualsheetmusic.com.

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