Click on Bach’s picture to see the movie The Green Notebook.
Click on Bach’s picture to see the movie The Green Notebook.
The second piece is the Minuet in g minor played on the piano. It is the minuet notated above. You will notice how different the two instruments sound.
In this animated gif you can see some beautiful harpsichords. You will see that they are very nicely decorated and that some of them have two keyboards. Also, the color of the keys is different from that of the modern pianos.
After watching this movie, we already know that the Notebook for Anna Magdalena is a compilation of the Bach family’s best-loved music in order to be played by the family.
Very soon, you also are going to play some of the Notebook’s pieces. One of them is the beautiful Minuet in g minor. This is one of those pieces in the Notebook that was not composed by Bach. The Minuet’s composer was Christian Petzold, a musician who lived at that time. Let me show you the musical score of the Minuet in g minor.
Next you can listen to two different pieces of the Notebook. The first one is a marvelous piece called Aria which Bach later used in his great work The Goldberg Variations. You can hear it played on an instrument called harpsichord.
We are now going to discover a little more about the harpsichord: the harpsichord and the clavichord can be considered the grandparents of the modern pianos. They were, along with the organ, the most important keyboard instruments that existed during Bach’s time. Nowadays we also use the piano to play Bach’s music.
Well, for today we have finished our journey into the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. I hope you enjoyed it. Next time we will continue with a new adventure!