The cello suites are some of Bach's most profound and celebrated works. From the iconic first suite prelude, to the brooding fifth suite fugue and the folkish exuberance of the sixth, these works offer us countless musical ideas, styles, challenges, and joys. The suites are unique among Bach's work in that they are restricted to a lone instrument which can only play a fairly restricted set of chords. While in his later solo violin works Bach would learn to push the polyphony of strings to their limits, the cello suites are far more conservative. What we're left with is Bach at his simplest, most pure, and most human. Where he typically may utilize 4 to 6 independent voices monstrously interwoven on an organ, here he uses a single line with ephemeral voices taking turns on a string. This minimalism presents famous problems for its interpreters, and a whole lot of fun for those transplanting the music to other instruments!

The melodica is a small wind instrument known for its sweet and highly responsive tone. As acoustic instruments go, it's quite a newcomer: it emerged in the 1950s as a sort of handheld breath organ, typically made of cheap plastic and very out of tune. While it is occasionally used in professional music, especially in reggae and jazz, it is most widely used as a toy teaching instrument in Asia. Over the years more capable instruments have emerged, perhaps most notably the Hammond-Suzuki 44HP models on which this album is played, which have an extended range, phosphor-bronze reeds, and an open back which together enable a greater depth of musicality. Even still, the state of the art leaves much to be desired: the low reeds often choke or speak inconsistently, many notes bend too easily, and tuning is very laborious. In this recording we've patched up a few egregious tuning failures (such as a reed breaking and slipping down a quarter tone during the 4th suite), but in an effort to accurately convey the instrument's personality most have been left in place.

Playing the Bach cello suites on melodica has comforts and challenges. The instrument's keyboard layout makes fingering the notes much easier than on cello, especially when played with two hands. In contrast, playing the suites on melodica requires almost continuous circle-breathing and painstaking attention to articulation and decays to capture the string instrument's character. Some techniques even apparently had to be invented to pull this off, such as the partial key presses in the 6th suite gavotte's pedal section.

I have been obsessed with Bach for some 10 years and with melodica for 5, and it's been an absolute joy studying the two in this project. To my knowledge this is the first recording of all but a few movements of the suites on melodica, and among the first solo melodica albums in general to date.

Despite Bandcamp's limited licensing options, this album is released to the public domain under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) license. No rights reserved.