The Easiest Baroque Pieces, Measured

Baroque music has a reputation for being hard, and for the wrong reason. People look at a Bach fugue, see four independent voices, and conclude the whole era is out of reach. But the Baroque is also the period that produced more deliberately simple teaching keyboard music than any other, because that is how children were taught to play.

We measured all 552 Baroque pieces in the library. They run from 3 out of 100 to 91, and here they are, easiest first.

Why Baroque is the best era for a beginner

Three reasons, and they are structural rather than a matter of taste.

Each hand plays a real tune. In most later music the right hand carries the melody and the left hand accompanies, which means practising the left hand alone sounds like nothing. In Baroque writing both hands have lines that stand on their own, so hands-separate practice is not drudgery — you are playing music either way.

There are almost no dynamic markings. Not because the composers did not care, but because the harpsichord could not get louder when you pressed harder. That removes an entire layer of interpretation a beginner would otherwise be worrying about.

The textures are thin. Two voices, sometimes three. Compare that with a Romantic piece where a single beat can put six notes under your hands at once.

What is at the top of this list

The easiest pieces here are largely short Bach — the little preludes, the minuets, the arias and chorale settings. These were teaching material when they were written and they still are.

Which brings up something worth knowing before you tell anyone you are playing Bach.

The most famous "Bach" pieces are not by Bach

The Notebooks for Anna Magdalena Bach — the 1725 one in particular — are a compilation of music by Bach and by other composers of the era, and several of the best-loved beginner pieces in them turn out to belong to somebody else.

The Minuet in G major (BWV Anh. 114), the piece more people have learned as their first "Bach" than any other, is usually attributed to Christian Petzold. So is the Minuet in G minor (BWV Anh. 115). The Rondeau (BWV Anh. 183) is by François Couperin, and is properly called Les Bergeries. "Bist du bei mir" (BWV 508) is an arrangement of an aria from Diomedes by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. Four more pieces in the notebook (BWV Anh. 122–125) are thought to be early works by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

None of that makes them worse pieces. It does mean the "Anh." in a BWV number — short for Anhang, appendix — is a signal worth noticing.

How to practise Baroque music

One hand at a time, all the way through. More than in any other era, this actually works here, because each line is complete on its own. Use the hands-separate control and give each side a full pass before you put them together.

Slow down more than feels necessary. Baroque pieces are often written in a steady stream of equal notes, which makes unevenness extremely audible. There is no pedal wash to hide behind.

Do not add dynamics that are not there. The temptation, coming from later music, is to swell and fade. Baroque keyboard music was written for an instrument that could not do that, and it holds together better played evenly.

What is at the hard end

The fugues, the toccatas and the more elaborate suite movements — up to 91 out of 100. A fugue is difficult not because the notes are fast but because three or four melodies are happening at once and each one has to be audible. That is a listening problem as much as a finger problem, and it is the reason Baroque music rewards patience more than speed.

A note on what "Baroque" means here

The library's era labels follow the conventional boundary: the Baroque begins around 1600. Nineteen pieces by composers who died before that — Palestrina, Tallis, Lassus, Willaert, Dufay, Busnois — are filed under Renaissance instead, and a single thirteenth-century Cantiga under Medieval. They used to sit in the Baroque bucket, which was simply wrong, and they are not in the list above.

Where to go next

For a composer-by-composer version of this list, see the easiest Bach pieces and the easiest Handel pieces. For the other eras measured the same way, the easiest Romantic pieces. And pieces you can learn in one sitting cuts across all of them.

Facts about the Anna Magdalena notebooks from Wikipedia. Difficulty scores are our own measurement of each transcription in this library.