Interactive piano piece
Learn Sinfonia No. 9 in F minor
Three voices sustaining a dark, searching dialogue in F minor across 35 compact bars. The interactive score lets you isolate any of the three voices, loop the most tangled entries at half tempo, and hear the full counterpoint as a synchronized playback.
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Press Play for the full piece, or choose Opening and switch to Wait for note for guided right-hand practice.
About the piece
Three voices in anguished conversation.
Bach composed the fifteen Sinfonias — the three-part companions to the two-part Inventions — by 1723, initially as lessons for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann. Sinfonia No. 9 in F minor is the most emotionally intense of the set, a chromatic lament in 12/8 where all three voices move in overlapping suspensions that never quite resolve before the next dissonance arrives.
F minor was rarely used in Baroque keyboard music because earlier tuning systems made it sound harsh. Bach embraced that harshness deliberately: the chromatic subject that opens the piece descends like a sigh, and the imitative entries that follow pile tension on tension in a way that anticipates the expressive language of Beethoven by nearly a century.
Practice path
Hear three independent singers.
The principal challenge is maintaining the independence of all three voices without letting any one dominate. Isolate each voice in turn — soprano, alto, bass — and sing it aloud before playing it, so your ear learns to follow it through the texture. Once each line is familiar, practice hands together at 50% tempo, listening specifically for the moment each voice enters with the chromatic subject.
Score basis: Generated MusicXML from Mutopia MIDI. Public domain composition; Public Domain (CC0) — Mutopia; MusicXML generated for Pianodemy. Attribution: Mutopia Project (https://www.mutopiaproject.org/cgibin/piece-info.cgi?id=199).
MIDI source: Mutopia Project (https://www.mutopiaproject.org/cgibin/piece-info.cgi?id=199). Public Domain (CC0) — Mutopia.
Questions
Before you practice.
Short answers for learners and for searchers deciding whether this is the right version to start with.
01What is the difference between a sinfonia and an invention in Bach?
Both are short contrapuntal pieces from the same 1723 notebook. The two-part pieces are called inventions; the three-part pieces are sinfonias. The sinfonia adds a middle voice that must remain independent of both the treble and bass.
02How difficult is Sinfonia No. 9 in F minor?
It sits at intermediate level: manageable technically but demanding musically because three-voice independence asks each hand to subdivide its attention between voices.
How to use this V1
Suspensions are the point, not the problem.
Beginners try to smooth over the dissonant suspensions; advanced players lean into them as expressive high points. Use the loop tool on the first four measures to internalize the subject and its answer, then work outward in four-bar blocks. The 12/8 meter should feel like a slow compound pulse, not a hurried 12 separate beats.