“Back in the early 1990s I began working on an instrumentation of Bach’s Ouvertüre nach französische Art (B minor Partita) BWV 831 for transverse flute, strings and continuo. I had a strong urge to do this when, after having written a few Bach fugues while majoring in Music Theory, I then wanted to delve further into the harmonic / instrumental counterpoint of Bach with a view to specializing in the methodology of teaching counterpoint. The remarkable thing about the two keyboard works in the second part of the Clavierübung (1735) is that they actually appear to be two keyboard transcriptions of orchestral works. At that time, the need for purely orchestral music was of course extremely limited, and music that had no practical purpose was simply not composed. At the beginning of April 2000, when it became clear that no living composer would be taking part in commemorating the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the death of the greatest composer of all time, I decided to return to and complete my arrangement of the Overture BWV 831 for transverse flute, strings and continuo. The problems I had run up against in the early 1990s mainly revolved around Bach’s treatment of dissonance and parallelism in his contrapuntal writing circa 1730. After re-analyzing the four Ouvertüren (BWV 1066-1069), the following books in particular helped me a great deal in my writing:

• Laurence Dreyfus: – Bach and the patterns of invention (1996) – Bach’s Continuo Group (1987)
• Jesper Bøje Christensen: – Die Grundlagen des Generalbaßspiels in 18. Jahrhundert (1992)
• Dietrich Bartel: – Handbuch der musikalische Figurenlehre (1997)
• Alfred Mann: – The Study of the Fugue (1987)
• Robert L. Marshall: – The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1989)
• and especially Philipp Spitta – Johann Sebastian Bach (Part III, Appendix XII), which contains Bach’s own rules for playing the continuo.

French counterpoint books, such as those of Gedalge (1901), Dupré (1938) and Koechlin (1926), proved of little use, despite their charm. My attempt seemed to have turned out not too unsatisfactorily. And, since completing the exercise made me hungry for more, I went on to write two Ouvertures in the style of Bach, in May and June of 2000, after BWV 1066 and BWV 1068 respectively. Finally, in July 2000, I rewrote the Konzert im Italienischen gusto as a Concerto for violin solo, strings and continuo, and decided to give the whole piece—consisting of four orchestral works—the title Orchesterübung, with a nod to the Clavierübung.”

– Theo Verbey