While
most definitely a work of fiction, The Fugue Code takes several facts (both
verifiable and uncertain) about Bach's life and times as points of departure.
For starters, the play accepts the controversial theory that J.S.
Bach's second wife, Anna Magdalena, was no mere copyist and doting spouse, but
herself a talented composer - but I have chosen to take Anna's role quite a bit
further!
Follow these links to indulge your research-hungry mind
about this and other topics relevant to The
Fugue Code...
Anna Magdalena Bach: copyist
or composer????
A.M.'s
wikipedia bio
Articles about
Martin Jarvis, the Australian musicologist who believes that Anna Magdalena
composed several works attributed to J.S. Bach, including the Cello
Suites:
CBC Telegraph
Martin Jarvis' profile on the Charles Darwin University
website
Information about the
1968 film "The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena
Bach"
Secret codes in the
music of J.S. Bach!! (and
others)
Actually, most useful
articles on this subject are found in scholarly journals and are not freely
accessed on the internet. Search at JSTOR (an online database of PDF'd scholarly articles) for
detailed articles about Bach's musical codes (the best keywords are "cipher" and
"gematria"). Here are a few links to more basic
information:
Numbers in The Goldberg
Variations
The Debate
on Bach-Cantatas.com
Hidden Lutheran chorale
melodies
Other code-drunk
composers:
Robert
Schumann (all the good articles are, again, to be found on JSTOR)
Edward Elgar
Dmitri
Shostakovich
Tunings and
Temperaments
The Fugue Code presupposes that Bach preferred
a system of tuning harpsichords and organs called "Perfect Tuning". This
is a fanciful invention on my part - but Bach might have tried it if he could
have. Read about Bach's actual
preferred tuning systems here:
the title page of
the Well-Tempered Clavier????
You
decide...
An introduction to
historical tuning systems (why Equal Temperament
sucks)
If nothing else,
these links should convince you that tuning
systems were something past
composers cared about deeply.
Some modern composers (like the
American composer Harry
Partch) have furthered research into tuning by developing microtonal
scales
(with more than 12 pitches in the
octave).
Music in the Spheres and
Music in the
Cathedral
The Medieval theory of Musica
Universalis revives Pythagorean
ideas
Johannes Kepler
brings Pythagorean harmony into modern 16th-century astronomy
Abnormal
Acoustics
An interesting
conjecture of an acoustic code (not just
note-names)
in the masonry of the Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland.
The destructive and
"supernatural" properties of Infrasound (sound waves at a frequency
below what humans can
hear):
Wikipedia article
and links
An
account of alleged experiments with infrasonic
weapons
A (reasonably) direct musical
parody of The Da Vinci
Code!
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