Andreas Werckmeister (November 30, 1645 – October 26, 1706) was a German organist, music theorist, and composer of the Baroque era. He was responsible for a temperament that resulted in all tonalities sounding acceptable on the keyboard. This important step toward equal temperament was highly influential to the harmonic basis underlying much of subsequent Western music.[1][2]
Of his compositions only a booklet remains: pieces for violin with basso continuo, with the title Musikalische Privatlust (1689).
Also some organ works remain: Canzon in a-minor, Canzona in d-minor, Praeludium ex G, Canzonetta in D-major.
Theoretical works
Werckmeister is best known today as a theorist, in particular through his writings Musicae mathematicae hodegus curiosus... (1687) and Musikalische Temperatur (1691), in which he described a system now referred to as well temperament (in which all keys are playable, as in J. S. Bach's later work The Well-Tempered Clavier) now known as Werckmeister temperament. The system distributes 1/4 of the comma to the four fifths G–D, D–A, A–E, and B–F♯, leaving the others as pure 3:2 ratios; this tended toward somewhat wider thirds than in equal temperament.[3]
Title page of Andreas Werckmeister, Orgelprobe (1698).
Werckmeister's writings – particularly his writings on counterpoint – were well known to Johann Sebastian Bach. Werckmeister believed that well-crafted counterpoint, especially invertible counterpoint,[4] was tied to the orderly movements of the planets, reminiscent of Kepler's view in Harmonice Mundi. According to George Buelow, "No other writer of the period regarded music so unequivocally as the end result of God’s work".[3] Yet in spite of his focus on counterpoint, Werckmeister's work emphasized underlying harmonic principles.
List of works
Musicae mathematicae hodegus curiosus... (1687)
Musikalische Temperatur, oder... (1691)
Der Edlen Music-Kunst... (1691)
Hypomnemata musica (1697)
Erweierte und verbesserte Orgel-Probe (1698)
Die nothwendigsten Anmerckungen und Reglen, wie der Bassus continuus... (1698)
^David Yearsley [nl], Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 20, cited in George B. Stauffer [review], Journal of the American Musicological Society 58/3 (Fall 2005), p. 711.
Further reading
David Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint. New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
