Clavierübung

Quite what the implications of the curiously unprepossessing term ‘Keyboard Practice’ are is less clear than one might suppose. Players now are used to Studies or études, exercises or essercizi, and every child knows ‘to practise’ means ‘to exercise oneself in the performance of music with the view of acquiring skill’ (OED). Clearly, with the Goldberg Variations one does do this, and an English publisher of the time might well have called them Lessons for the Harpsichord, when ‘lesson’ suggested written-down music helpful to players, either as practical instruction or as substitutes for compositions and improvisations of their own. But there is another kind of practice, the kind spoken of by lawyers and doctors as they ‘practise a profession’ or ‘put their subject into practice’ or even ‘buy into a practice’: this is practice as distinct from theory.

Musica prattica had been a common term in treatises of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italy and in those elsewhere imitating or influenced by them, treatises applying the rules of harmony and counterpoint for the creating of actual, written-down music. When in 1689 Johann Kuhnau – uncommonly for the time, a university graduate (Leipzig, in law) and not averse to literary conceits – came to publish a set of seven harpsichord suites in his university town, he seems to have coined the term Clavier-Übung as a German equivalent of the venerable Italian term.