How to practise it
Bach wrote the Inventions as lessons in playing two independent voices. In No. 13 the hands take turns with the same idea, a broken chord in sixteenth notes, while the other hand plays a line in eighths against it.
- Learn each hand alone until you can play its line as a melody, with its own shape and its own breaths.
- The sixteenths are broken chords: play each beat's notes together first to hear the harmony and find a fingering that keeps the hand in place.
- With both hands, listen for the hand that has the sixteenth figure; the other must not cover it.
- Choose a tempo you can hold through the hardest bars rather than a fast one that breaks there.
Polyphony · Evenness
Where the score comes from
Johann Sebastian Bach, Invention No. 13 in A minor, BWV 784. Mutopia engraving by Allen Garvin, after Bach-Gesellschaft: https://www.mutopiaproject.org/cgibin/piece-info.cgi?id=59. Original engraving explicitly dedicated to the public domain by its typesetter. Noctave MusicXML edition: https://noctavepiano.com/en/free-library/bach-invention-13-bwv-784/; Public-Domain: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/. Gradiano: canonical title, composer and provenance metadata added. Empty tempo direction repaired with a metronome mark matching the upstream MIDI tempo (quarter = 100). A-minor key metadata restored from the first measure; signature and sounding notes unchanged.