Discovering Bach’s Secret Tempo Code is organized in two parts. Part 1 represents the historical and analytical half while Part 2 represents the statistical and analytical half. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to this author’s unique story and personal experience.

In June 1992 I had just finished my first year at the University of Kansas working towards a D.M.A. in piano performance and M.M. in historical musicology. One of the courses I really enjoyed that year was a “Performance Practice Seminar” taught by Professor J. Bunker Clark.

In the eighteenth century, the normal or natural tempo that represents the music most clearly was known as tempo giusto, also sometimes referred to as tempo ordinario. Eighteenth-century performers were generally steeped in tradition and would have rarely chosen a tempo outside the accepted range for any given style. 

In his biography Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff begins with a ten-page essay, a Proloque titled “Bach and the Notion of Musical Science,” which sets forth the thesis that Bach preferred to refer to himself as “one who produces works of musical science” rather than a “mere practitioner of music”. Wolff writes:

The letters Alpha and Omega, Α and Ω, are the first and last letters of the Classical Greek alphabet, which symbolize the unity and oneness of “God, the Father” and “God, the Son” in Christian theology.

Theorizing about proportional tempos in Bach’s music is nothing new and this book is certainly not the first publication to propose such a thing; however, this author is perhaps the first person to categorize these proportional tempos into a logical and coherent system of rows and columns consisting exclusively of integers

In Chapter 5, the forty examples of extremely accurate duration ratios (with an average discrepancy of 1.2%) from a wide variety of works and genres indicates that Bach operated with a unique system that allowed him to achieve these ratios.