Open Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 (2015)

Kimiko Ishizaka, Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert Douglass · 2015 · 109 min

The sequel to the Open Goldberg: the same pianist, the same crowd, the same deal — a studio recording and an open score of Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, twenty-four preludes and fugues through every key, set free under CC0 in 2015. If the Goldbergs are Bach's great single arch, the 48 are his textbook and his commonplace book at once: the C major prelude that every child has played, the C-sharp minor fugue in five voices, the B minor fugue that closes the book with a subject using all twelve notes. Ishizaka plays them without mannerism, at tempos that let the fugues be heard as conversations.

The recording was funded by 800-odd backers and released with a booklet and liner notes; it is on Wikimedia Commons movement by movement, which is how a good deal of the world now meets this music. A hundred and nine minutes in forty-eight files.

Chosen copy: Internet Archive item bach-well-tempered-clavier-book-1 — 48 FLAC files contiguously numbered 01–48 (… 01 Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846.flac … … 48 Fugue No. 24 in B minor, BWV 869.flac), 1.77 GB, 1 h 49 min, with the booklet, liner notes and session photographs.

Checked against the work: 24 preludes and 24 fugues, each its own file, paired in order. A third-party mirror of the project's own release (the 10.9 GB master-tracks-… item holds the raw session masters and is a different product).

Two layers, both free:

• The composition. Bach, 1722; no copyright anywhere.
• The recording. Released 2015-03-19 under CC0 1.0 Universal, stated by the project (the Open Well-Tempered Clavier release, Kickstarter 2013–15). The Archive.org mirror carries a Public Domain Mark rather than the CC0 URL; the dedication is the project's and is taken from its own release, not the mirror's tag. Performer, producer and backers credited here by house style, not by obligation.