The Well-Tempered Guitar

All of the notes–more or less—are here. They just aren't sustained as long. There are many octave transpositions and some of the thicker chords have been thinned or re-voiced. Oh, and most of the ornaments have been removed, resulting in a score that is simpler to read and to play: performers may restore them, according to taste and practicality. In the score the voice-leading has been left to the discretion of the player, or to the ear of the listener— the originals are freely available online, but part of the point of adaptations is to make these guitar pieces; if you want the original, learning to play a two-manual harpsichord would be your best option, and would give you insights into this music not possible on the guitar or piano. But as with piano much is gained as well as lost.

My exemplars in this kind of transcription have been Valentin Bakfark, who made numerous lute transcriptions of Renaissance choral works in the 1600s, and Bach himself, who made many transcriptions and adaptations of both his own and other composers' music. And also those musicians who adapted Bach's music in his own lifetime for the lute, including the composer himself. 

My original plan was bolder, and less tenable: having discovered how minimally four-voice hymns needed to be altered to play them on the guitar with the original pitches and voicings, through playing hundreds of them, and already used to improvising in a chorale style, I felt emboldened to do what had preciously seemed impossible—making guitar versions of some of the music that has most daunted and delighted me, largely by J.S. Bach. I started off with the Fifth French Suite, and the 3-voice Ricercar from The Musical Offering, proceeding thence to portions of the Art Of The Fugue, before eventually deciding that I wanted to try versions of the fugues only of Book One of the WTC. I'd made an e minor transcription of the c minor fugue many years earlier, which seemed to work well enough, and hadn't presented it because the accompanying prelude was intractable, or so I thought. 

A composer myself, I've loved this music for decades and finally got to a stage where I wanted to spend most of my time and energy on music not my own. Although my keyboard skills are awkward, I've played all of these preludes and fugues many times on the piano at home, over years, as well as hearing a number of different recordings. 

Originally these were going to be virtuoso pieces, requiring the kind of agility and strength that might be required to play the Paganini violin Caprices, but the combination of me and the guitar was just not up for that: my focus shifted from making them just barely possible to be played by a rare master with very advanced technique, to making it possible for me to play them. And in that process it became less about making the transcriptions themselves available as sheet music and more about developing interpretive ideas and living in the music as a performer, and listener: as is the case with other things I've made, such as poems, I hope to record these so that I can appreciate them as I'm jogging, or falling asleep, but I certainly don't mind sharing them with you out there in the world.

Here you will find scores of adaptations of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach for solo classical guitar in PDF.

This includes versions of all of the Well-tempered Clavier, now that

I have demonstrated the playability of all of their contents via YouTube.

The scores are available free of charge, and may be performed or copied freely. They may not be sold for a profit, unless as a result of very specific negotiation with me or my designated agent. This is my own work, and while the original music by Johann Sebastian Bach is in the public domain, these adaptations are mine, and it would be only fair to acknowledge this fact. 

                                                                                                                                                                           John Alexander Blyth