Well temperament is a type of tempered tuning described in 20th-century music theory. The term is modeled on the German word wohltemperiert. This word also appears in the title of J. S. Bach's famous composition "Das wohltemperierte Klavier", The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Strähle's construction is a geometric method for determining the lengths for a series of vibrating strings with uniform diameters and tensions to sound pitches in a specific rational tempered musical tuning. It was first published in the 1743 Proceedings of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences by Swedish master organ maker Daniel Stråhle (1700–1746). The Academy's secretary Jacob Faggot appended a miscalculated set of pitches to the article, and these figures were reproduced by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg in Versuch über die musikalische Temperatur in 1776. Several German textbooks published about 1800 reported that the mistake was first identified by Christlieb Benedikt Funk in 1779, but the construction itself appears to have received little notice until the middle of the twentieth century when tuning theorist J. Murray Barbour presented it as a good method for approximating equal temperament and similar exponentials of small roots, and generalized its underlying mathematical principles.
Johann Philipp Kirnberger was a musician, composer, and music theorist. He studied the organ with Johann Peter Kellner and Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber, and starting in 1738 he studied with the violinist Meil in Sondershausen, but most significant is the time he spent from 1739 until 1741 studying performance and composition with Johann Sebastian Bach.
Andreas Werckmeister was a German organist, music theorist, and composer of the Baroque era. He was responsible for a temperament that resulted in all tonalities sounding acceptable on the keyboard. This important step toward equal temperament was highly influential to the harmonic basis underlying much of subsequent Western music.
Robert Holford Macdowall Bosanquet was an English scientist and music theorist, and brother of Admiral Sir Day Bosanquet, and philosopher Bernard Bosanquet.
Sechs Chorale von verschiedener Art: auf einer Orgel mit 2 Clavieren und Pedal vorzuspielen, commonly known as the Schübler Chorales, BWV 645–650, is a set of chorale preludes composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Johann Georg Schübler, after whom the collection came to be named, published it in 1747 or before August 1748, in Zella St. Blasii. At least five preludes of the compilation are transcribed from movements in Bach's church cantatas, mostly chorale cantatas he had composed around two decades earlier.
The Kirnberger temperaments are three irregular temperaments developed in the second half of the 18th century by Johann Kirnberger. Kirnberger was a student of Johann Sebastian Bach who greatly admired his teacher; he was one of Bach's principal proponents.
Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg was a German music critic, music theorist and composer. He was friendly and active with many figures of the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
Johann Peter Kellner was a German organist and composer. He was the father of Johann Christoph Kellner.
The Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 846–893, consists of two sets of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys for keyboard by Johann Sebastian Bach. In the composer's time, clavier referred to a variety of stringed keyboard instruments, most typically the harpsichord or clavichord, but not excluding the organ, although it is not a stringed keyboard.
The concerto for two harpsichords in C minor, BWV 1060, is a concerto for two harpsichords and string orchestra by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is likely to have originated in the second half of the 1730s as an arrangement of an earlier concerto, also in C minor, for oboe and violin. That conjectural original version of the concerto, which may have been composed in Bach's Köthen years (1717–1723), is lost, but has been reconstructed in several versions known as BWV 1060R.
The first major biographies of Johann Sebastian Bach, including those by Johann Nikolaus Forkel and Philipp Spitta, were published in the 19th century. Many more were published in the 20th century by, among others, Albert Schweitzer, Charles Sanford Terry, Christoph Wolff and Klaus Eidam.
Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work is an early 19th-century biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, written in German by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and later translated by, among others, Charles Sanford Terry.
Johann Sebastian Bach's music has been performed by musicians of his own time, and in the second half of the eighteenth century by his sons and students, and by the next generations of musicians and composers such as the young Beethoven. Felix Mendelssohn renewed the attention for Bach's music by his performances in the 19th century. In the 20th century Bach's music was performed and recorded by artists specializing in the music of the composer, such as Albert Schweitzer, Helmut Walcha and Karl Richter. With the advent of the historically informed performance practice Bach's music was prominently featured by artists such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt and Sigiswald Kuijken.
Friedrich Wilhelm Birnstiel was an 18th-century German music publisher known for publishing two volumes of four-part chorales by Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1760s.
In the period following Johann Sebastian Bach's death in 1750, apart from the publication of The Art of Fugue in the early 1750s, the only further publications prior to the 1790s were the settings of Bach's four-part chorales. In 1758 Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg was the first to start preparing a published edition of Bach's four-part chorales, but in 1763 was prevented by royal duties. C. P. E. Bach, who owned the original manuscripts, then set about the same task, producing two volumes in 1765 and 1769. Dissatisfied with his publisher Friedrich Wilhelm Birnstiel, he surrendered the manuscript rights in 1771 to Johann Kirnberger and his patron Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia. From 1777 onwards, Kirnberger unsuccessfully made requests to Birnstiel and a new publisher, Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf, to publish the chorales. Following Kirnberger's death in 1783, C.P.E. Bach approached Breitkopf, who published them in four volumes between 1784 and 1787.
Herbert Kelletat was a German musician, organist, author of musicological works and choir director. Since 1930, he published scholarly papers, especially on the history of the organ and on matters of musical tuning.
