| A not so well-tempered question |
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Bach's "Well-tempered Clavier" consists
of two books, each containing the same number of fugues. In the
first book, instead of having (as usual) one subject, one fugue has two
and another has a prime number; in the second book, two less than half
the number of fugues in it have two subjects, and one has the same
prime number as before, which is a measure of the whole number of
fugues, and also of the whole number of subjects diminished by
eighteen. If the whole number of fugues were increased by one,
one-seventh of the result (which is an integer) is less by two than
one-third of the whole number of subjects in the first book. How
many fugues are there?
Printed in the Musical Times, May 1893. Cited in: Scholes, Percy (1947) The Mirror of Music. London: Novello & Company, vol. 1, p. 415. src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> |
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