370 four-part chorales by Johann Sebastian Bach

Four-part chorales collected after J.S. Bach's death by his son C.P.E. Bach (and finished by Kirnberger, J.S. Bach's student, after C.P.E. Bach's death). Ordered by Breitkopf & Härtel numbers.

The first complete edition of these chorales was published by Breitkopf & Härtel between 1784–1787 in four volumes. The first incomplete edition consisting of 200 chorales in two volumes was published by Friedrich Wilhelm Birnstiel in 1765 & 1769, reprinted in 1975 by Georg Olms.

This digital edition is referenced against the fourth edition of the chorales by Breitkopf & Härtel, c. 1875: 371 vierstimmige Choralgesänge von Johann Sebastian Bach. 4th ed. by Alfred Dörffel. Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig [c. 1875]. 178 pp. Plate Number: V.A.10. Retypeset c. 1915 as Edition Breitkopf 10. Reprinted by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., New York [c. 1940]. A scan of the original edition can be viewed on IMSLP).

The source edition has 371 chorales, but chorale 150 is not a four-part chorale, so it has been omitted from this analytic edition of the chorales. However the numbering of the chorales is maintained as in the source edition, with file chor150.krn not being included in this digital edition.

Online notation for the chorales

Try out the Bach chorale typesetter which allows you to manipulate the notation of the chorales and transpose them as well as generate excerpts of them.

They are also available in the Verovio Humdrum Viewer, where you can edit the musical content and listen to the music.

Data processing tools and other resources

These digital scores can also be found as a submodule in the humdrum-data repository.

This digital edition is in the Humdrum file format. Tools for processing files in this format can be found online at:

https://github.com/humdrum-tools

These digital scores may also be found on the kernScores website:

 http://kernscores.stanford.edu/browse?l=370chorales

with mirrors at:

 http://kern.humdrum.org/browse?l=370chorales
 http://kern.ccarh.org/browse?l=370chorales

which includes dynamic conversions to other data formats.

The Humdrum Extras command-line programs can download the files from kernScores. A quick method of downloading:

    mkdir chorales
    cd chorales
    humsplit h://370chorales

To get online access to a single chorale, for example to transpose the first chorale to C major:

   transpose -k c h://370chorales/chor001.krn

To interface to the Humdrum Toolkit commands, use the humcat command to download to standard input (the -s option is needed when downloading multiple files):

   humcat -s h://370chorales | census -k

Makefile

The makefile provided in the base directory includes example data processing commands. Type "make" when in the same directory as the makefile to list the commands that can be run with the makefile.