Collage über B-A-C-H

The piece unfolds in three short movements, each taking an old musical form and running it through a modern, astringent harmonic filter.

I. Toccata. A toccata is traditionally a fast, virtuosic showpiece for keyboard. Here it opens abruptly with sharp, percussive gestures, the B-A-C-H motif appearing almost immediately as a jagged four-note calling card tossed between instruments.

II. Sarabande. A sarabande is a slow, stately old dance in triple meter. Pärt's version is hushed and strange, the Bach motif now stretched into long, held tones, with the harpsichord adding a dry, antique color against the strings.

III. Ricercar. A ricercar is an old contrapuntal form, an ancestor of the fugue, in which a single theme is passed voice to voice. Pärt builds the finale from close imitation of the B-A-C-H figure, the parts overlapping and colliding until the motif seems to dissolve into the ensemble.

Listen for the four-note motif itself: once you can hear it, it recurs constantly, sometimes stated plainly, sometimes buried inside faster figuration, giving the piece an audible thread from start to finish.

Pärt wrote this piece in 1964, while still working within the dense, dissonant style he had absorbed from twelve-tone and collage techniques circulating in Soviet Estonia at the time. The title refers to a German musical cipher: the letters B-A-C-H correspond to four actual pitches in German note naming, a motif Bach himself used and that later composers have borrowed as a tribute. Pärt fractures this four-note figure and scatters it through three short movements, setting it against strings, harpsichord, piano and oboe. The piece belongs to Pärt's pre-tintinnabuli period, before he developed the spare, bell-like style of works like Fratres and Spiegel im Spiegel that made him internationally known. It remains a curiosity in his catalog, valued for showing where his musical language began.