Paralells or not?

[SimenN]

I was playing the piano the other day, Bach's partita in b-flat major, prelude : the last bar has paralell octaves in the bass, both written as seperate voices.
My question is why?

You can find the score here:

http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/b/bf/IMSLP00789-BWV0825.pdf

SimenN

[palestrina64]

I was playing the piano the other day, Bach's partita in b-flat major, prelude : the last bar has paralell octaves in the bass, both written as seperate voices.
My question is why?

You can find the score here:

http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/b/bf/IMSLP00789-BWV0825.pdf

SimenN

Hey!

That's nothing more than a reinforcement of the bass, of course. They are written as separate voices - like always in baroque AND Bach - because they ARE two different voices, although the bottom one is doing nothing else than reinforcing the other, and therefore, in theory, they only count as one voice. Confusing enough? :-) You find a lot of this kind of keyboard 8ves written as separate voices (Scarlatti has a ton of them). UNLESS the edition is a modern one, where keyboard (or even string) 8ves are written with one stem only.