Bach's Cello Suite #1 Prelude arranged for Alto Sax

Suite 1 for Cello Solo Arranged for Alto Sax by Jeff Smith

Johann Sebastian Bach BWV 1007






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 Public Domain



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Where Does Bach Take You? Many people are often surprised to learn that I wrote my first novel based on this music, but the connection is much more convoluted than one might think. I wrote this arrangement while working on my Ph.D. in Computer Science — a project in which I was seeking a way to devise more creatively inspiring composition tools, by allowing composers to focus on manipulating patterns and structures in the music, rather than focusing on the notes themselves. For my research, I worked extensively with the patterns I saw in the score of this Cello Suite, and also in the Invention #1 in C Major. In one especially curious experiment, I combined those two pieces of Baroque elegance, and was surprised to be presented by my software with a modern, minimalist jazz piano composition that I call Morning Traffic. At the same time, I was also writing that first novel. A fantasy about a young girl who was raised in a cruel environment, but then travels to a magical forest land in search of the parents she had always believed were dead. Throughout my writing process, I was continually devising new compositions, as extensions and variations on the patterns and themes of these two Bach pieces, and those strange new compositions painted images in my mind that strongly influenced the moods and even the events of the novel. The result, in 2011, was not only a 5-fold improvement in the measured creative output of my experimental composing tool and a successful defense of my doctorate. It also spawned an independent album of the experimental music, and the published novel. All in the same month. It was a crazy time for me. I sit here now, working hard on the second novel in that fantasy series, having become a full-time novelist since completing my dissertation, and I still play regularly with my composing tools, the results of which still inspire new stories and new adventures for me, in a creative process that Robert J. Sawyer once told me was preposterous and absurd. To each his own. But I have always wondered about this simple arrangement, that sits here on Scribd day in, and day out, gathering people's attention for a time, and I wonder: do any of them know about the full meaning of this song for me? Can any of them guess at how it has so completely shaped my life over the last five years. Probably not. So I thought I should tell you.

Jefferson Smith March, 2013. Come visit me at creativityhacker.ca. I would love to know that somebody came because of the music.