Noctave
The piece
This anonymous minuet comes from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, a 1725 album containing pieces by Bach and other composers, partly copied out by Anna Magdalena, his second wife. Long counted among Bach's works, it carries a number from the appendix (Anhang) of the BWV catalogue, which gathers doubtful or misattributed pieces. It opens with a G major chord spread upward, which the left hand immediately echoes in the bass.
That arpeggio calls for a supple right hand: G–B–D–G rises an octave, then the hand comes back to A to end on F-sharp, a sixth to take without a jolt. In the next bar the left hand answers with the same figure two octaves lower, while the right hand plays three quarter notes. The second part moves to E minor, with its D-sharp, and slips eighth-note triplets into the cadences: play them a little tighter than ordinary eighths. At the marked 120 beats per minute, that means about three notes per second for the right hand.