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Ruth Tatlow

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British-Swedish Bach scholar, musicologist and writer

Ruth Mary Tatlow (née Ballard) was born in London, England in 1956, and grew up in Colton, Staffordshire. She is a British-Swedish Bach scholar, musicologist and writer, and since 2023 a visiting researcher at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg.

Education and career

Ruth Tatlow studied at the Royal Academy of Music (1974–78), and spent two years as a freelance clarinettist (1978-1980), winning second prize in the National Clarinet competition (1979). From 1980 she studied musicology at King's College London, gaining a first class BMus in 1983 and the Purcell Prize for the top finalist. She was awarded a PhD in 1987, supervised by Arnold Whittall, and advised in 1985 by Ulrich Siegele (University of Tübingen), funded by a DAAD scholarship.

Ruth Tatlow's doctoral thesis Lusus Poëticus vel Musicus was published in 1987. Her first monograph, based on the thesis, was published in 1991 as Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet by Cambridge University Press, in paperback in 2006, and in Japanese translation in 2011

Her second monograph Bach’s Numbers: Compositional Proportion and Significance (Cambridge University Press, 2015), was awarded Choice ‘Outstanding Academic Title 2016’. Her source-based research has raised the awareness of parallel techniques commonly used in the creative arts in Bach’s time, notably the poetical paragram (Bach and the Riddle), the acrostic, inventive use of number and musical alphabets (Bach’s Numbers, Chapter 2). Her ground-breaking theory of proportional parallelism (Bach's Numbers) has been widely welcomed albeit with some pockets of resistance. It has also stimulated the application of modern statistical methods to this area of musicology.

Popular writing has included programme notes and CD liner notes. In 2000 she wrote for Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage (2000), including a series of twelve booklets for Deutsche Grammophon Arkiv Production.

Ruth Tatlow has taught musicology in several institutions, including two years at Royal Holloway College (1998–9, sponsored by a Leverhulme Special Fellowship), Stockholm University (2005-2007), and Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY (2010). Numerous research fellowships and awards have facilitated her research and writing, most recently the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (Spring 2020). She was appointed a Derek Brewer Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, for the Michaelmas Term 2021, and a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, for the calendar year 2023. Her current affiliation is at The Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg.

In 2004 she co-founded Bach Network with Reinhard Strohm and John Butt and has been Chair of the Bach Network Council since 2007. In 2006 she designed and then co-edited twelve annual volumes (2006–2017) of the open access, peer-reviewed journal Understanding Bach and is now co-editor of Discussing Bach. Ruth Tatlow also served on the editorial board of the American Bach Societyfrom 2008 until 2024.

Publications

Books

Recent online talks

Selected peer-reviewed book chapters/articles

  • ‘Symmetry and a Template: Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Opus 28’, in Chopin and the Baroque Tradition, Chopin Institute, Warsaw 2019/2020, 51-86.
  • 'Reading Belief through Compositional Unity: A Lutheran Theology of Proportions and Bach’s Response’. Lutherske perspektiver på liturgisk musikk. Oslo, Novus Forlag, 2019, 115–139.
  • ‘The Use and Abuse of Fibonacci Numbers and the Golden Section in Musicology Today’, Understanding Bach 1 (2006), 69-85. Published in Hungarian as ‘Hogyan használja (ki) napjaink zenetudománya a Fibonacci-számokat és az aranymetszést?’, translated Gergely Fazekas. Magyar Zene. Hungarian Music Journal of Musicology. 4/2017.
  • ‘A Missed Opportunity: Reflections on Written by Mrs Bach,’ Understanding Bach, 10 (2015), 141–157.
  • 'Theoretical Hope: A Vision for the Application of Historically Informed Theory’, Understanding Bach 8 (2013), 33–60.
  • 'Collections, bars and numbers: Analytical Coincidence or Bach’s design?' Understanding Bach, 2 (2007), 37-58.

Personal

Ruth Tatlow is married to conductor and educator Mark Tatlow. They have three children and four grandchildren.

References

  1. "Volume 4 #3". Clarinet & Saxophone. Vol. 4, no. 3. 1 September 1979. Retrieved 3 March 2021.
  2. Tatlow, Ruth Mary (July 26, 1987). "Lusus Poeticus Vel Musicus: Johann Sebastian Bach, the Baroque Paragram and Friedrich Smend's Theory of a Musical Number Alphabet" – via Google Books.
  3. "Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet | Eighteenth-century music". Cambridge University Press.
  4. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4791765877/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i3 (accessed 3 March 2021)
  5. Tatlow, Ruth (July 26, 2015). Bach's Numbers: Compositional Proportion and Significance. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316105061. ISBN 9781316105061.
  6. For example by Mattias Lundberg, see https://musikforskning.se/stm-sjm/node/212 (accessed 3 March 2021)
  7. Melamed, Daniel R. (2021). "Parallel Proportions' in J. S. Bach's Music". Eighteenth-Century Music. 18 (1): 99–121. doi:10.1017/S1478570620000305. S2CID 231810105. Retrieved 3 March 2021.
  8. Alan Shepherd, Let’s Calculate Bach: Applying Information Theory and Statistics to Numbers in Music. Springer Nature Switzerland, 2021. See https://www.amazon.com/author/alan_shepherd (accessed 26 July 2021).
  9. "Bach Cantata Pilgrimage 2000 | Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra". monteverdi.co.uk.
  10. http://www.swedishcollegium.se/subfolders/Fellows/Invited_Fellows/2019-20/tatlow.html (accessed 3 March 2021)
  11. https://www.emma.cam.ac.uk/contact/fellows/visiting/ (accessed 3 March 2021)
  12. https://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Review-2023.pdf p.26 (accessed 9 February 2024)
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