Jammin' with Joe Brooks....

Neil G. Haverstick:

>Well, it's obvious that he (BACH) could improvise on a very
>high level, than go back and jot down a close fascimile...endless var-
>iations, at an incredible level of physical execution.

Well, we *do* have a number of contemporary accounts of Bach's
prowess an an improvisor of multi-voice fugues based on a theme
given to him by someone with whom he dined. They were, unsurprisingly,
wowed.

And remember that we also don't use figured bass notation to generate
our accompaniment, either. In some sense, one could perhaps think of
figured bass as the "skeleton" around which an improvisation was based
in the way that you or I would read from a chart.

With regards,
Gregory

_
I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one,
paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only
maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard
Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI



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