I’m still here, working away at the Bach Two-Part Inventions in a race against the baby clock.

And the other day, while trudging through # 5 in E min (which, okay, is kind of difficult…ugh…stay in a *&^% key, Bach!), I realized that I had never encountered ‘invention’ as a musical term anywhere except in reference to this specific collection of short pieces. It did not, as far as I knew, designate a particular form, although, loosely, there seemed to contain an exposition of a melody and then short variations on that theme following two/three different trains of thought, and then a recap at the end.

(Recaps are the Baroque equivalent of a mic drop.)

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“I’ve recently started to finish learning Bach’s Two-Part Inventions.”

This awkward sentence nudged itself into some of my written correspondence this morning, and I gagged a little when I reread it before sending. My first impulse was to emphatically land my finger on the delete key, and to retype something a bit more polished sounding. I’m revisiting the Bach Inventions, in the hope of finally learning them all. Nice, right?*

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