Notebook for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach: Piano Comb Bound Book

This collection captures Bach at his most purposeful as a pedagogue. Unlike anthologies that scatter excerpts across decades and styles, the Notebook presents 62 pieces organized in a way that builds systematically on what students have learned. The comb binding means your students can actually hold the book open during practice without wrestling with page turns, which changes how they approach daily work at the keyboard.

Clarity wrapped in elegance. Each phrase unfolds with logical inevitability, yet there's a quality of inevitability that feels almost conversational. The music breathes within its strict formal boundaries, offering both intellectual satisfaction and genuine musical beauty.

Advanced intermediate pianists and serious music students preparing for entrance auditions, grade 10 and up piano students, and teachers building a comprehensive keyboard technique curriculum. This works for independent practice as well as group study where students can listen to and learn from one another's interpretations.

• Start with the shorter preludes and two-part inventions before tackling the longer sinfonias. The progression matters; each piece prepares the hand position and mental approach required for the next.
• Record yourself playing through the three-part voices separately before combining them. This forces clarity in line independence and prevents the middle voices from disappearing.
• Pay attention to Bach's figured bass notation and implied harmonies, even when you're executing individual lines. Understanding the harmonic understructure transforms mechanical practice into musical reasoning.

Assign selections from this book as technical studies that double as recital material. Students preparing Bach for competitions or conservatory auditions will find both the well-known pieces (the C-major Prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier) and the less frequently performed works that reveal different facets of Bach's keyboard thinking. The variety means your studio or class can program Bach across multiple performance levels without repetition.

• Independent voice leading in two and three-part textures
• Baroque ornament execution and notation reading
• Harmonic analysis through figured bass
• Legato and separation in sequential figures
• Maintaining rhythmic clarity across multiple simultaneous patterns
• Phrasing and breath in keyboard music