My background with the Well-Tempered Clavier Book One is somewhat scattered, as is my whole piano past. Were it not for a childhood experience in Kingston, Jamaica, I would likely not be playing piano today. When I was nine years old my family moved to Jamaica for my parents to be country representatives with Mennonite Central Committee. By then I had completed two years of mediocre piano study (on my part), but my parents had the sense to find me an excellent teacher in Kingston. Mrs. Foster-Davis had huge and scary guard dogs outside her estate, an impressive studio with two grand pianos, and a commitment to the Royal Conservatory of Music piano materials and examination sequence. Although she was nearly blind, she used a magnifying glass effectively to check my hand shape and fingerings. She assigned music that was too difficult for my limited reading skills, but with a slower pace of life allowing lots of time to play piano I gradually rose to the challenge. I left Jamaica a couple years later having completed the R.C.M. Grade Four adjudications and returned to southeastern PA with the awareness that playing the piano was one of my best gifts.
Back home and working with another fine teacher, I learned some of Bach’s two-part inventions and enjoyed them as much as anything that allowed the fingers to fly around quickly. I learned only one piece from the WTC book one in high school, a pair often assigned as one of the easiest, the Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C minor. The prelude is a classic pattern piece, an excellent rotation study for the fingers building to some fun tempo changes and improvisatory moments that nicely set up the fugue to follow.
I found special motivation for the fugue from the 80’s Christian contemporary song “Sing Your Praise to the Lord” made popular by Amy Grant. Composed by Rich Mullins, the song opens with six measures of the fugue and continues with some fragments as the song unfolds. I am not much of a music snob (I went to a Merle Haggard concert last night, for goodness sake) and I loved this fusion of classical and Christian pop. True, I loved it more in 1985 but I still kind of love it.
I found the sheet music and learned my first Bach fugue, or at least part of one, in this format. I sang the song, pretending I had the ascending backup instrumentals supporting me at the piano, and dreamed of being Amy Grant but only better because I could also play the fugue part.
In a future post I will write more about my past experiences with the Well-Tempered Clavier. Now I need to go practice, motivated by something other than wanting to be Amy Grant.
Some Well-Tempered Years 
My son Reuben (17) recently learned this prelude and fugue. He had never heard the Amy Grant arrangement before, so I played it for him. He was aghast, and shook his head muttering something about crazy 70’s Christian music. A 17 year-old musical purist, if you can believe it. Me, I also used to play the Amy Grant sheet music as a teenager but I’ve never learned the whole fugue. I will sometime but can’t do it just yet as Reuben might feel offended at his Dad playing one of his pieces … oh well.