14 Canons on the Goldberg Ground (J. S. Bach) by William Marsey

This piece is made out of the fourteen canons found hand-written into Bach's personal copy of the Goldberg Variations. Almost certainly written as part of a lesson (the first four canons being instructively simple and forming the basis of the rest) the ingenuity of this music is eye-roll-inducing. Each canon fits with the bass line of the Goldberg Variations, often also includes that bass line in its own melody, and is written in shorthand: symbols, and floating, sometimes upside-down clefs show how to copy and manipulate the written music to realise the larger canon.

These pieces by their nature are stricter and more gnarly than the canons that make up the Goldberg Variations, and tend to trap themselves in surreal 2- or 4-bar loops. Rather than transcribing them for piano, I have taken the canons as sketches for a larger piece, allowing them space in some parts, but upsetting them in others. The result is a piece of music made with and about these canons, indulging in the various characters produced by these 14 weird 1700s musical mechanisms.