Date: Thursday 09 October 2025

Time: 16.00 - 17.30

Location: Boydell Recital Room, House 5, top floor, Trinity College Dublin.

Admission is free and all are welcome.

‘How Humans Have Been Attempting to Complete Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fugue Fragment BWV 562ii Before Artificial Intelligence Takes the Job Out of Their Hands.’

From his many hundreds of surviving compositions, it is clear that Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) seldom struggled to finish a movement. Fewer than a dozen of his keyboard works have come down to us as fragments, Contrapunctus XIV from The Art of Fugue being by far the most thoroughly discussed and the most frequently completed by latter-day musicians. Less widely known is the first page of an organ fugue Bach wrote, very late in life, as the companion piece to a (fully extant) Fantasia he had penned some forty years previously.

In this talk, five of the completions of that fugue that have circulated since 1969 will be compared and evaluated according to the musical implications of the opening, the physical characteristics of the manuscript, and certain traits of the composer’s more than twenty intact organ fugues. The results will be presented of applying methods of objection-in-principle and continuous revision to the problem of determining Bach’s most likely intentions for the missing portion of this tantalising fragment.

Andrew Johnstone read music at Oxford University, where he was organ scholar of Worcester College and studied organ playing with Thomas Trotter. From 1989 to 2005 he was assistant organist successively at Dublin's two Anglican cathedrals, and he is now assistant director of music at St Bartholomew’s Church, Clyde Road. He has performed throughout Ireland and the UK, as well as in France, Germany, New Zealand and the United States. He has given the Irish premières of organ works by Francis Jackson, Calvin Hampton, Guy Bovet and Johann Sebastian Bach. Andrew is a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists, and a member of the academic staff at the Department of Music, Trinity College Dublin.

For further information on this event please email Dr Nicole Grimes, Department of Music, School of Creative Arts at nicole.grimes@tcd.ie