Ruth Tatlow on Mrs. Bach

What seems to us (and many others) a cogent and measured assessment by Ruth Tatlow of the Mrs Bach brouhaha (see Tim Cavanaugh’s essay, our post of 13 November 2014) appears in no. 10 of the online journal Understanding Bach, published just now. It’s a must-read, handsomely presented and with facsimiles of the manuscripts in question.

“A Missed Opportunity: Reflections on Written by Mrs Bach”

Tatlow appears briefly in the film.

Ruth Tatlow photo: Klas Palm

Understanding Bach is the web journal of Bach Network UK, founded in 2004 by the musicologists John Butt, Reinhard Strohm, and Ruth Tatlow. It has appeared annually since 2006. The Bach Network also sponsors annual Dialogue Meetings; in even-numbered years these are a constituent of the International Conference on Baroque Music (ICBM).

Ruth Tatlow is an independent scholar currently based at Statens Musikverk (Swedish Performing Arts Agency) on a project funded by the Swedish Research Council. She teaches musicology at Musikskolan Lilla Akademien in Stockholm and was recently visiting professor at the Eastman School of Music. After a brief career as the prize-winning clarinettist Ruth Ballard, she took degrees in musicology and then theory and analysis at King’s College, London (Ph.D. 1987). Between 1999 and 2003 she was research consultant to John Eliot Gardiner during the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. Tatlow is author of Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet< (Cambridge UP, 1991) and Bach’s Numbers: Compositional Proportion and Significance (Cambridge UP, 2015). Statens Musikverk feature HERE; Academia.edu profile HERE; Festival O/Modernt bio HERE.