In Bach's Hand

I visited Oxford this week to discuss some new music for a concert which will welcome a new acquisition to the Bodleian Library - the manuscript score of Bach's Cantata 128. You can currently visit the score in a ground floor gallery of the Weston Library, and it's already online in a very convenient form. It's one of Bach's larger scale cantatas, written for Ascension Day, and of course he was in a great hurry - you can see many satisfying ink smudges and crossings out on this working document, crammed into sixteen moderately-sized pages. It's a fantastic piece of music, with incredibly high horn parts.

Part of the visit involved ascending to the roof of the library. It was the first day of sun in a long while. My phone shot can't begin to convey the beauty of the view over Oxford's famous buildings, all seemingly bunched together from this rare perspective.