ABSTRACT
In light of the sheer quantity of this body of music, a complete perusal of the shelves of scholarship it has inspired would be impossible here. Yet this survey of the catalog has already engaged, if obliquely, some of the important issues confronted by Bach scholarship over the past few decades. The first of these is more than simply terminological: what is meant by “keyboard music”? I will begin by examining some of the crucial implications of this question and its relation to Bach’s oeuvre and scholarship. I will then turn to related organological issues and their ramifications for performance. Scholarly inquiry into these matters has generally relied on source studies, a perennial strength of Bach scholarship, and I will turn to this area before moving to more recent work that adopts a more overtly hermeneutic approach. In conclusion, I present a short case study of the debate over the authenticity of Bach’s most famous “organ” work, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BWv 565): this controversy was joined over aspects of style and source studies, and, indeed, the question as to what constitutes “keyboard” music. In revisiting these scholarly tests and triumphs, I hope also to point towards some potentially rewarding directions for further research into Bach’s keyboard works. My central claim-hardly objectionable-is that the cooperation not only among these fields, but also between performance and scholarship, has led to some of the most important work in recent decades, and will continue to map out the productive territory ahead.
