The Question and the Answer

Day 1 | 20 to 30 minutes

Meet the Bach family

Focus: hear the piece as household music before analyzing it.

• Learn a little about Anna Magdalena Bach: professional singer, music copyist, and active participant in the Bach household.
• Remember why the notebook matters: it contains music by Bach, family members, and other composers. It preserves music people used, copied, learned, and enjoyed at home.
• Listen to the Minuet in G, BWV Anh. 114 several times. On the first listen, do nothing else.
• After the last listen, sing or hum the opening phrase without the recording. Do not grade the pitch yet. Keep its shape and its rhythm.

Do not analyze yet: Today is about memory. Ear training begins when the music continues after the recording stops.

Day 2 | 25 to 35 minutes

Learn the opening by ear

Focus: hear idea, response, and arrival before reaching for tab.

• Mandolin out, notation closed. Find the opening note, then work out the first short phrase by ear.
• Use the familiar notes of G major as your territory: G, A, B, C, D, E, F sharp.
• Play the first phrase and stop. Ask: does my ear feel finished? Notice the pull to continue.
• Find the responding phrase. Listen for the moment your ear says, "Ahh, we are home."
• Sing the complete opening, then immediately play it. If singing and fingering disagree, slow down and repair one small interval at a time.

• Idea, then response. Question, then answer.

What to notice: a melody behaves like language. A cadence is the moment a phrase gets its punctuation and the ear hears an arrival.

Day 3 | about 30 minutes

Cadences: make tension come home

Focus: feel V to I resolve, before it is a label in a theory book.

• Recall the Week 1 map: I is home, IV is moving away, V is tension.
• In G major, play D and then G repeatedly. Let each chord ring long enough for your ear to feel the change.
• Name what happens. Unfinished becomes finished. Tension becomes release. A question gets its answer.
• Listen to the Minuet again. Pause after likely punctuation points and decide whether you hear a comma, semicolon, question mark, or period.
• Repeat the experiment with a hymn, fiddle tune, country song, or bluegrass number you know. Find one V to I arrival by ear.

• V to I: tension resolves. D to G: home.

What to notice: cadences are everywhere: in Bach, bluegrass, hymns, fiddle tunes, country, and rock. Music has punctuation because phrases create expectation and closure.

The tune shelfEvery tune written out here, with the chord letters printed over the bars, so the fiddle tune for the last step is a click away rather than a thing to go and find.mandolintrainer.com/tunes/

Day 4 | 30 to 40 minutes

Learn the A section as musical chunks

Focus: use the notation to correct what the ear found.

• Now consult standard notation or mandolin tab. Compare it with what you found by ear and repair any notes or rhythms.
• Learn the complete A section slowly, keeping the pulse steady and the pick relaxed.
• Refuse to memorize "fret, fret, fret." Group notes into phrases: perhaps three notes belong together, four form an arpeggio, or one idea repeats.
• Mark one phrase that feels unfinished and one that feels complete. Play each alone and describe the difference.
• End by playing the A section once while listening for the larger sentence rather than individual coordinates.

Musical vocabulary, not coordinates: chunks are easier to hear, remember, transpose, and reuse than isolated fret numbers.

Minuet in G on this siteThe whole minuet is written out there: standard notation, mandolin tab under the notes, chord letters over the bars where the chord changes, and playback at three speeds. The A section is the first half, up to its repeat sign.mandolintrainer.com/tunes/minuet-in-g/

Day 5 | about 30 minutes

Hear two voices

Focus: separate melody and bass, then hold both in attention.

• Choose a piano performance of the Minuet. On the first listen, ignore the familiar tune and follow only the bass.
• Listen again and follow only the melody. Notice its contour, breathing points, and cadences.
• Listen a third time and try to hold both layers at once.
• Name the roles: upper voice is the melody, lower voice is the harmonic movement.
• Tap the bass rhythm with one hand while humming the melody. If the layers collapse, isolate them again before recombining.

What to notice: two things can happen at once without turning into a blur. That is the seed of Bach's counterpoint.

• The Little Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach: Menuet in G major, BWV Anh. 114Rami Bar-Niv, pianoFree to hear, on the page that holds the score. It is the fourth item in the recordings list at the top, named there as 4. Menuet G-dur, BWV Anh.114, and it runs about a minute and a half. Bar-Niv recorded the whole notebook, so the pieces either side of the minuet came out of the same house.Listenhttps://imslp.org/wiki/Notebook_for_Anna_Magdalena_Bach_(Bach,_Johann_Sebastian)
• Minuet in G, BWV Anh. 114, on pianoVarious players, pianoA search rather than a recording. Almost every piano student plays this piece, so what comes back is dozens of performances at every speed. Pick one where the left hand is audible, because the left hand is the whole assignment today.Listenhttps://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Minuet+in+G+BWV+Anh+114+piano

Day 6 | about 30 minutes

Make your mandolin answer itself

Focus: use high and low registers like different speakers.

• In G major, invent a short phrase high on the mandolin. Keep it singable: three to five notes are enough.
• Stop. Let the silence make the first phrase feel like a question.
• Invent an answering phrase lower on the instrument. Aim for a sense of arrival, not cleverness.
• Reverse the roles: begin low, answer high. Notice how register changes the character of the exchange.
• Record one question-and-answer pair. Listen back and decide whether the second phrase answers the first or only follows it.

• High: the question. Low: the answer.

You have started thinking contrapuntally: The instrument has one player, but register and memory let the ear imagine different characters.

Day 7 | 25 to 35 minutes

The Bach "whoa": Invention No. 1

Focus: hear two musical voices talk to each other.

• Listen to Bach's Invention No. 1 in C major, BWV 772. Do not learn it or follow a score.
• Listen for one voice introducing a tiny idea and the other voice grabbing it.
• Notice how the voices chase one another and how the idea moves into new pitch areas.
• Recall your Week 1 word: sequence. Listen for repetition creating direction.
• Return to the Minuet's A section. Play it once and hear its phrases as question, answer, punctuation, and arrival.

The "whoa": Bach can build an enormous amount of music from one tiny idea. Counterpoint is a conversation in which each voice remembers the same thought and changes it.

• Invention No. 1 in C major, BWV 772Luis Kolodin, 2021, pianoFree to hear, in the recordings list on the page that holds the score. It runs about a minute and a half, which is the whole point of the day: the amount of music Bach gets out of one small idea has nothing to do with length.Listenhttps://imslp.org/wiki/Invention_in_C_major,_BWV_772_(Bach,_Johann_Sebastian)
• Invention No. 1 in C major, BWV 772Wanda Landowska, 1956, harpsichordOn the same page, further down the same list, from her RCA Victor album. Landowska is the player who put the harpsichord back in front of audiences, and the two voices separate more cleanly on it than on a piano. The file sits on IMSLP's European server, so it does not play in every country. The Kolodin recording above does.Listenhttps://imslp.org/wiki/Invention_in_C_major,_BWV_772_(Bach,_Johann_Sebastian)