Works in progress: J. S. Bach's Suites for Solo Cello as artifacts of improvisatory practices

J. S. Bach's Suites for Solo Cello have long held an important, though enigmatic place in the Western canon, but recently the status of Bach's music has been challenged. In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works , Lydia Goehr argues that Bach did not write musical works. While this may be an exercise in polemic hyperbole, Goehr is right to call attention to the historical contingency of work-concepts. An examination of recent scholarship on the ontological status of the musical work offers insight into some of the roles that Bach's music has come to play in modern Western cultures, but what roles would the solo suite have played in the musical practices of Bach's day? Plausible answers are suggested by first identifying and bracketing modern assumptions about the nature of works, and then considering the relation of the suites to the improvisatory, pedagogical traditions that were Bach's heritage. The largely unexamined body of satirical novels and short stories about music by Printz, Beer, Speer, Niedt, and Kuhnau offer valuable evidence of these traditions, as they provide a remarkable portrait of a broad range of historical musical cultures.;A little-known portion of the polemical exchange between Scheibe and Birnbaum indicates that Bach's painstakingly notated ornamental details were designed as a pedagogical device, designed to serve as examples of effective improvisatory elaboration. Among the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources that document improvisatory practices, Christopher Simpson's The Division Viol and Friedrich Neidt's Musicalische Handleitung are particularly important. Niedt's treatise, which employs partimento thoroughbass realization to generate a suite of dances from a common figured bass line, appears to reflect a Bach family tradition that was fostered by Johann Nicolaus Bach in Jena. Since a number of sources document the practice of thoroughbass realization on the cello and viol, it is likely that improvising cellists would have employed similar methods. In many cello treatises, continuo realization is discussed as a means of accompanying recitatives, but traces of the practice may also be discerned in examples of unaccompanied solo music.