The Archive — Notes on a notebook

Why H is a note

Read in German, four notes spell his name. One of them is called H. Where that letter comes from is a thousand years old, and Bach himself pointed it out.
Johann Sebastian Bach · The Art of Fugue · Leipzig, 1748–49
The B A C H notebook open at the last leaf of the fugue: Bach’s page on the left, the first page of staff paper on the right
The notebook open at the last leaf of the fugue: his page on the left, the first of yours on the right. The photograph is a digital view of the notebook.

Play B flat, A, C and B natural, and in German you have spelled a name. In German, the note that English calls B is H, and what English calls B flat is simply B: the four notes read B-A-C-H.1 The H is the odd one. Why should a letter so far down the alphabet be a note at all?

Two ways to write B

The custom is older than Bach by centuries. In the tenth century, music began to use two forms of the note B, a semitone apart, and told them apart by their shape. The higher one was written square and called b quadratum, or b durum, hard B. The lower one was written round and called b rotundum, or b molle, soft B.2

The pair left traces everywhere. The German words for major and minor, Dur and Moll, come from it, and so do the signs ♭, ♮ and ♯.3 From the sixteenth century, in Germany and Scandinavia, the square b came to be called h, after the letter it looked like, and the name B stayed with the note a semitone below. Romance and English usage did not follow.4 An H that began as a square B.

His own remark

Bach knew what his name could do. In 1732 the organist Johann Gottfried Walther published in Leipzig a dictionary of music, the Musicalisches Lexicon, with an entry on Bach, music director in Leipzig since 1723. Walther closes it with the family: everyone who bore the name, as far as anyone knew, had been given to music, “which perhaps comes from the fact that even the letters b a c h, in their order, are melodic”. And then, in brackets: “This remark has the Leipzig Mr. Bach as its inventor.”5

Two passages in German blackletter from Walther’s Musicalisches Lexicon of 1732, with the letters b a c h printed as notes
Johann Gottfried Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon, Leipzig, 1732, p. 64: the end of the entry on Bach, from one column to the next. The letters b a c h are set apart in the type. Ghent University Library copy, digitized by Google, via the Internet Archive (public domain).

The fugue

The final fugue of The Art of Fugue has three subjects. The third spells his name in notes.6 In the Bach-Gesellschaft edition, the name enters in the tenor in bar 193 and comes back in the other voices. On the last leaf of the manuscript the tenor sings it once more, in bars 235 to 237, two bars before the music stops in the middle of bar 239.7

On that leaf you can see the H. The fugue is in D minor, and its key signature turns every B into B flat. To write B natural, Bach has to cancel it, and at the start of bar 237 there is a natural sign in front of the tenor’s note. The sign comes from the square b.8

A detail of Bach’s manuscript: two staves of keyboard music, with a natural sign circled in red at the start of a bar
Leaf 5 of the manuscript, bars 236–237. At the start of bar 237, in the lower staff, the natural sign before the tenor’s B: the H. Circle ours. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Mus.ms. Bach P 200/1 (public domain).

The note beside it

To the right of the break, written across the empty staves, there is a note in another hand: “NB: While at work on this fugue, where the name B A C H was introduced in the countersubject, the author died.” It is usually attributed to Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and it can only have been written after Bach’s death.9

The note suggests a man who died with the pen in his hand. The dating of the leaves tells a different story: by the chronology of Yoshitake Kobayashi, they were written between August 1748 and October 1749, at least nine months before Bach died in Leipzig on 28 July 1750. Why the music stops, no one knows for certain, and the scholars who have studied the manuscript disagree.10

The notebook

Our notebook reproduces the five leaves of the fugue in Bach’s hand, every leaf at the same scale, with their story. Then come 102 pages of staff paper, ruled like his: two staves to a system and five systems to a page. On the last leaf the music stops, and the page facing it is the first of yours.11

The B A C H notebook closed: the last leaf of the fugue on the cover, with a cream label
B A C H · A4 spiral-bound notebook, 120 pages, lies flat, $35 · printed to order. On the cover, the last leaf of the fugue. The photograph is a digital view of the notebook.
The document itself.
Curated in Mar del Plata, printed in the USA.
See the notebook →

Notes & sources

  1. Store norske leksikon, “b (tone)”, updated 25 November 2024.
  2. Store norske leksikon, “b (tone)”: two forms of b from the tenth century; b quadratum or b durum, the higher; b rotundum or b molle, the lower.
  3. Store norske leksikon, “b (tone)”.
  4. Store norske leksikon, “b (tone)”: from the sixteenth century, “h” in Germany and the Nordic countries; not in Romance or English-speaking countries.
  5. Johann Gottfried Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon oder Musicalische Bibliothec (Leipzig: Wolffgang Deer, 1732), p. 64, entry “Bach (Joh. Sebastian)”: “welches vielleicht daher kommt: daß so gar auch die Buchstaben b a c h in ihrer Ordnung melodisch sind. (Diese Remarque hat den Leipziger Hrn. Bach zum Erfinder.)” Read on the Ghent University Library copy (Internet Archive, bub_gb_7_k-AAAAcAAJ) and on IMSLP #59684; translation ours. The same entry gives his post: Music-Director in Leipzig from 1723.
  6. J. S. Bach, Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080, the unfinished fugue on three subjects. The note on leaf 5 calls the name the countersubject.
  7. Bar numbers as in the Bach-Gesellschaft edition (Breitkopf & Härtel), read from the public-domain encoding of the Mutopia Project (no. 766). The last leaf of the manuscript holds bars 227–239: Anatoly Milka, “Warum endet die Fuga a 3 Soggetti BWV 1080/19 in Takt 239?”, Bach-Jahrbuch 100 (2014).
  8. Observed on leaf 5r, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Mus.ms. Bach P 200/1, Faszikel 3. On the origin of the natural sign: Store norske leksikon, “b (tone)”.
  9. Leaf 5r, our reading of the facsimile: “NB ueber dieser Fuge, wo der Nahme B A C H im Contrasubject angebracht worden, ist der Verfaßer gestorben.” Attribution: Milka 2014; Christian Brückner (2016).
  10. Bach Digital, source record for P 200/1, Faszikel 3, after Yoshitake Kobayashi, “Zur Chronologie der Spätwerke J. S. Bachs”, Bach-Jahrbuch 74 (1988). On why it stops: Christoph Wolff, “Bach’s Last Fugue: Unfinished?” (1991); Gregory Butler, The Musical Quarterly 69 (1983); Milka 2014.
  11. The notebook: the five leaves of the manuscript, every leaf at 78% of its size, a short guide and 102 pages of staff paper.
MÉTRICA · THE ARCHIVE · MAR DEL PLATA · PRINTED IN THE USA