Fossil Words

 

[In paleontology, the study of the forms of life existing in prehistoric times, a fossil is any preserved evidence of ancient life, including shells, imprints, burrows, coprolites, and organically-produced chemicals.  This includes the mineralized (converted to a mineral; petrified) remains of an animal or plant.

[Fossil words are words that have largely fallen out of common use but still survive in idioms and set phrases.  Evan Porter, a professional writer with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Towson University (Towson, Maryland), explains how this happens:

Though English has technically existed for well over a thousand years, today’s modern version of the language is nearly unrecognizable from its roots in Old [mid-5th century (around 450 CE) to the late 11th century (around 1066 or 1150 CE)] and Middle English [1100/1150 to 1500].  Over time, words and phrases evolve and transform in both pronunciation and meaning.  New words are created, and many older words die out.

Some antiquated words, however, manage to survive the passage of time even if they're not regularly used in everyday conversation or writing.  How can they hold on without ever actually being used?  By being “fossilized.”

“A fossil word is a word that appears primarily in the context of a specific phrase.  Words can become fossilized either because they grow antiquated or because they're replaced by other words in common speech.  But the phrase in which they appear remains,” says author and etymologist Jess Zafarris in a TikTok video[.]

—“19 nearly-extinct 'fossil words' that only survive hidden inside these specific idioms,”

Upworthy, 10 December 2025

[Etymology, which is an important aspect of the formation and eventual fossilization of fossil words, is the study of the sources and development of words and their components.

[Readers of Rick On Theater may know that I’m both a wordie and a language geek.  (I even contributed a few times to William Safire’s [1929-2009] “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine [1979-2009].)  When I was working on the recent post on “Sign Museums,” and I was looking into the history of Moxie, the soft drink popular in New England, and the etymology of the noun ‘moxie’ that came from the drink’s name, I came across Jess Zafarris’s blog Useless Etymology, I found it attention-grabbing. 

[Oddly perhaps, I’d never heard of fossil words.  After reading Zafarris’s book excerpt on the subject, I decided to share it with ROTters.  So, first, here’s her brief discussion of fossil words, followed by a few additions from other sites I located on the ’Net.]

“ETYMOLOGICAL EXCAVATION: WHAT IS A FOSSIL WORD?”
by Jess Zafarris 

[Posted on Useless Etymology, Jess Zafarris’s blog, on 11 November 2025, this article is drawn from her 2025 book, Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds (Chambers, 2025), an exploration of unusual word histories.]

A fossil word is a word that primarily appears in the context of phrases or idioms. It typically comes attached to other words. The phrase survives even when the word itself becomes antiquated and rarely appears on its own.

Think about the phrase “to and fro.” “Fro” was a preposition and adverb meaning “away” or “backwards.” It almost never appears on its own, but “to and fro” remains in wide use.

Another example is the word “bated” in the phrase “bated breath.” It’s a past participle form of the word “abate” [to make or become less in amount, intensity, degree, etc.] but that form is not typically used in English unless it’s attached to the word “breath.”

Although the word “bide” can still be found independently in some English dialects [to mean ‘to endure,’ ‘stay,’ or ‘wait’], it’s heavily associated with the phrase “bide one’s time” in American English. It’s related to the words “abide” and “abode,” and both are from the Old English bidan, meaning “to stay, live, or remain.”

“Lam” is rare outside of the phrase “on the lam,” and its origin is a bit mysterious. In the Elizabethan era it was both a verb meaning “to beat,” and a noun meaning a heavy blow, so “on the lam” which was originally American crime slang, might imply the same thing as the term “beat it” does when it comes to running away. It’s also thought to be related to the word lambast. To “lambast,” which was originally pronounced and spelled “lambaste” (and still is in some cases, depending on your region) combines that lam verb, to “beat,” with a 17th century sense of the verb “baste,” which comes from Old Norse [spoken across Scandinavia and spread through Viking settlements, including the British Isles, from roughly the 8th to 13th centuries] and also means to thrash someone.

Both spic and span are fossilized in the phrase “spic” and “span.” A spic is a nail, and span is a word for a wood chip. The phrase refers to something that’s freshly cut by a workman’s hands, like a brand-new nail from a smith or perhaps like a fresh cutting from a lumberjack. Both of these are Germanic and probably from Old Norse. “Span new” is recorded as a variation on “brandnew” in the 1600s.

“The whole shebang” is another etymological mystery. We do know that Walt Whitman [1819-92] used the word “shebang” as a word for a shelter in his 1862 prose work “Specimen Days”:

“Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours through the camps, talking with the men, &c. Sometimes at night among the groups around the fires, in their shebang enclosures of bushes.”

It may also be related to various words for taverns; in Irish, Scottish and South African dialects, a speakeasy or illicit tavern might be called a “shebeen.”

The “lo” in “lo and behold” is a generic Old English exclamation. It’s probably an imperative of the word “look” or in Old English loken. But you might also use it as a greeting, or if you’re surprised, or if you need to express joy or grief. Sounds like it’s all about tone of voice.

“Caboodle” is fossilized in the phrases “kit and caboodle” and “the whole caboodle.” The first of these phrases is predated by similar terms such as “kid and cargo” and “kit and boodle.” An earlier version of the phrase “the whole caboodle” was simply ”the whole boodle.” “Caboodle” and “boodle” both mean “collection,” with the ca- on caboodle probably operating as an intensifier, implying a really big boodle. Both are thought to be from the Dutch ter[m] boedel, meaning “property.” The “kit” in “kit and caboodle” is, of course, the modern word for any collection of items used to repair, maintain, or make another item, or all the clothes and equipment needed to perform a task or play a sport [this usage is common in British English]. It too is probably Dutch in origin, from the term kitte meaning a “wooden vessel” or a wooden ship. Hence “kit and caboodle” implies “the whole ship and its cargo.”

Sometimes fossil words are only semi-fossilized. The word “figment” can certainly be used independently to describe something invented, but it most often appears in the phrase “figment of your imagination.” The word “inclement” is rarely used outside of the phrase “inclement weather,” from the Latin [clemens, clementis], “mild, placid.” “Turpitude” rarely appears outside of the phrase “moral turpitude.”  This word is from the Latin turpis meaning vile, foul or ugly. So moral turpitude is utter depravity and vileness.

Another form of semi-fossilization: The word “dint” is a predecessor to the word “dent,” which remains in use as a word for a small indentation or defect. You may have read this word in historical or fictional accounts of people wearing armor; a small indentation in armor is often a dint rather than a dent. Similarly the little indentations in coconuts are often called dints instead of dents. But there’s also the idiom “by dint of,” meaning “by means of,” and in this context dint is fossilized because this is the only scenario in which “dint” has this definition. But both usages have the same origin: A dint (or in Old English, dynt) was a blow dealt in a battle, just like we see in the armor sense, so in the context of the phrase “by dint of” it suggests the force by which a blow or other action is carried out. So, you might receive a dint in your armor by dint of fighting in a battle. “Dent” came along later (early 14th c.) from the same etymological source as “dint,” but “dent” became the preferred spelling in the 15th century due to influence from Latin-derived words like indent and indentation.

Much ado about ado

Another fossil word worth a more detailed excavation is “ado.” Nowadays, it’s most often found in the phrases “without further ado” and “much ado about nothing,” which survived thanks to the name of the Shakespearean comedy. But did you know that the word “ado” is a contraction—and an infinitive?

As you probably know from your grade school grammar lessons, an infinitive is the base form of a verb, the form it takes when it’s not conjugated [to inflect (a verb) for each person, in order, for one or more tenses; to vary the form of (i.e., to inflect) a word to express tense, gender, number, mood, etc.]. In English, we pair unconjugated verbs with the word “to” to create the infinitive.  An infinitive phrase is something like “to walk,” “to go,” “to speak,” or “to do.” The word “to” usually acts as a preposition, but in infinitive phrases, it acts as what we call a particle [known as the sign of the infinitive]. This usage of the word “to” came around in Middle English as an adaptation of the word “to” in the Old English dative case.

[The dative case is the grammatical form for the indirect object of a sentence, the person or thing that receives the direct object or who benefits from the action. Modern English doesn’t have the dative case in the declensions (the inflection of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives); we use the objective case (the accusative case in languages such as Latin, German, and Russian) with a preposition such as ‘to’ or ‘for’ to form a prepositional phrase: I gave the letter to her; or I gave her the letter.

[(In the examples, the pronoun her and the prepositional phrase to her are the indirect objects; the direct object, the person or, in this instance, the thing acted upon, is the noun the letter. In German, the sentence would read: Ich gab ihr den Brief; the word ihr is the dative case of sie, the nominative or subjective case of the pronoun ‘she.’ The phrase den Brief is the direct object and is the accusative or objective case of der Brief.)]

But English also has some influence from Old Norse thanks to the Vikings. For an example of why this matters with the word “ado,” let’s take a look at Norwegian, which is a modern Nordic language. Norwegian infinitives are generally introduced by the particle å, which is cognate with the English word “at.”

So, if Middle English had had more influence from Old Norse, our modern infinitive particle could very well have ended up being “at” rather than “to.” So instead of “to speak” or “to walk,” we could have ended up having “at speak” and “at walk” as infinitives. And that’s exactly what’s happening with the word “ado,” which is a contraction of “at” and “do.”

So why does “ado” mean a commotion or a big deal? Well, you know how sometimes when there’s a lot of drama or commotion, or someone throws a big event, we sometimes say that it’s “a big to-do” or “a whole to-do”? Using this infinitive like this i[t] literally suggests that there is a lot to do or a lot that has to be done.

In the phrase “a big to-do,” the infinitive phrase “to-do” is cosplaying as a noun. “Ado” functions the same way, but it uses that Norse-influenced infinitive structure, with “at” in place of “to,” and then it’s contracted to “ado.” Ado is the older word, first recorded in Norse-influenced areas of northern England, and “to-do” arose later in the 16th century, taking over in a lot of contexts.

[Jess Zafarris’s Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds is available for purchase from various online (Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble) and physical retailers.  It provides an accessible deep dive into etymology for a general audience and covers topics like ‘astronaut’ meaning ‘star-sailor,’ ‘companion’ meaning ‘sharing bread,’ and the etymology of ‘trivia,’ making it an engaging read for word lovers.  

[Zafarris presents this with wit and whimsy, arguing that understanding word origins provides “superpowers” for language.  Reviewers praised it for debunking common myths and highlighting the global, cross-cultural influences on the English language. 

[Zafarris, a popular etymology content creator, is known for her TikTok posts (@jesszafarris) and blog (uselessetymology.com), where she shares similar content.]

*  *  *  *
EXAMPLES OF ENGLISH FOSSIL WORDS

champing

Phrase: champing at the bit (excited for something)

Definition: This is just a variation of “chomping.” Often, people will in fact say “chomping at the bit” instead, but this is considered an eggcorn, which is a language mistake often caused because someone has heard an idiom incorrectly.

vim

Phrase: vim and vigor (full of life)

Definition: Energy, excitement. But you’d never say someone is full of just “vim.”

kith

Phrase: kith and kin (friends and family)

Definition: a person’s friends, acquaintances and basically anyone you know who isn’t covered by “kin.” Kith has also found a second life as the name of a retail establishment.

[Established in 2011 in New York City, Kith (sometimes stylized as KITH) is a lifestyle brand and specialty retailer that offers seasonal collections of men’s, women’s, and children’s apparel, accessories, and footwear. It now has outlets all over New York, the U.S., and the world.]

loggerheads

Phrase: at loggerheads (in a heated, dead-locked dispute)

Definition: a foolish person. Today, the word only survives as the name of a certain breed of turtle, a certain breed of bird and a few locations in England. It’s not entirely clear how “at loggerheads” started referring to two people having a disagreement.

deserts

Phrase: just deserts (to get what one deserves)

Definition: what one deserves. Sometimes — but rarely — someone will refer to “deserts” without the “just,” yet they’re almost always a pairing. The fact that “deserts” (the comeuppance) is pronounced differently from “deserts” (the biome) leads many people to mistake it for “just desserts.”

wedlock

Phrase: out of wedlock (in a state of not being married)

Definition: in a state of being married. This word fell out of fashion because it’s simple enough to say that someone is married or not. But the euphemistic phrase “a child born out of wedlock” (which is still frowned upon in many parts of the world) has kept this word alive.

knell

Phrase: death knell (a sign of the end of something)

Definition: the sound of a funerary bell. Historically, people would literally ring a bell to alert the world that someone has died. Sometimes this was called a “passing bell” or a “death bell.” This isn’t a particularly common practice anymore, but it lives on in this idiom.

dudgeon

Phrase: in high dudgeon (enraged)

Definition: a state of indignation. No one seems to be in low dudgeon anymore, though.

hither

Phrase: hither and thither (all over the place), hither and yon (in disparate directions), come hither (come here, usually seductively)

Definition: toward this place. “Hither” is one of the rare fossil words that has survived in multiple different phrases. In most other contexts, “hither” is pretty easily replaced by “here,” which is similar but not the same. “Here” refers to an exact location, but “hither” refers to a direction toward an exact location.

petard

Phrase: hoist by their own petard (to be destroyed by your own weapon)

Definition: a small bomb. “Hoist” also isn’t particularly common, and it means “to be raised” (usually by pulleys, but sometimes by a petard). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the works of William Shakespeare are the source of a number of idioms that hold fossil words. The phrase “hoist with his own petard” was originally used in a speech in Hamlet (Act 3, scene 4).

[The original spelling of Shakespeare’s line was “hoist with his own petar” (no d).  This may have something to do with the etymology of the word, which is derived from the French word péter, which means ‘to fart.’ It’s a reference to the noise the small bomb makes when it explodes.]

ken

Phrase: beyond one’s ken (outside of one’s knowledge)

Definition: a person’s knowledge. While this word is not very common in English, you’ll find it in Scots as a verb meaning “to know.”

amok: from the Malay word amuk; often seen in the phrase “run amok,” ‘to run about with or as if with a frenzied desire to kill.’ Hard to be amok without running.

ruth: ‘pity’ or ‘compassion’; used in “ruthless,” meaning ‘lacking compassion.’

wreak: ‘to inflict or execute’ (punishment, vengeance, etc.); primarily used in “wreak havoc,” ‘to cause considerable confusion, disorder, or damage.’ Hard to wreak without havoc.

asunder: ‘into separate parts; in or into pieces’; as in “torn asunder,” meaning ‘to be pulled or ripped violently into separate pieces’

bandy: really two words: meaning 1: ‘to pass from one to another or back and forth’; ‘give and take’; ‘trade’; ‘exchange’ as in “bandy about”; meaning 2: from a Scots word, bandy, meaning ‘bowed’ or ‘curved outward,’ “bandy-legged” means ‘bowlegged’

beck: from Middle English bekken meaning ‘to signify’; ‘beckon,’ ‘beck’ means ‘a gesture used to signal, summon, or direct someone’ and appears in the expression “at one’s beck and call”; the verb form “beckon” is still common in non-idiom-specific use

betide: ‘to happen to’; ‘come to’; ‘befall’; as in “woe betide you/us/them”

eke: from Middle English eke (‘to add to,’ ‘augment’; ‘to increase’); used in “eke out,” meaning ‘to obtain with difficulty or effort’

fettle: as in “in fine fettle”; the verb, ‘to fettle,’ originally meant ‘to put things in order,’ ‘tidy up,’ ‘arrange,’ or ‘prepare,’ so to be in fine fettle means to be 'in excellent health, spirits, or condition,'  The original verb remains in specialized use in metal casting ('to remove sand from a casting'; 'to repair the hearth of an open-hearth furnace').

helter skelter: 'in a haphazard manner'; 'without regard for order,' as in “scattered helter-skelter about the office”; Middle English skelten, ‘to hasten’

madding: ‘’making mad’; ‘maddening’ as in “far from the madding crowd”

math: from Middle English, ‘a mowing’; ‘aftermath’: what comes after the mowing, usually of strongly negative connotation, implying a preceding catastrophe

scot: in Middle English, a local tax, originally paid to the lord or ruler and later to a sheriff; historically in Britain, “scot free” meant “exempt from royal tax or imposts.”  By extension, it later came to mean “without consequences or penalties” or “free without payment.”

sleight: an artful trick; sly artifice; a feat so dexterous that the manner of performance escapes observation; the phrase “sleight of hand” refers to the skill in feats requiring quick and clever movements of the hands, especially for entertainment or deception.

shrive: “To hear or receive a confession”; preserved only in inflected forms occurring only as part of fixed phrases: ‘shrift’ in “short shrift,” meaning “to give little and unsympathetic attention to,” and ‘shrove’ in “Shrove Tuesday,” the final day of Shrovetide, which marks the end of the pre-Lenten season; it’s observed in many Christian countries through participating in confession, the ritual burning of the previous year’s Holy Week palms, and finalizing one's Lenten sacrifice

wend: as in “wend your way,” meaning “to proceed on your way,” although its former past tense “went” is still in use as the past tense of “to go”

yore: “time long past,” as in “of yore,” usually (but not exclusively) “days of yore”

[To fill the list out, I added some fossil words from posts from Babbel. Reddit, and Wikipedia.

[I have several other posts on ROT that cover words and etymologies (e.g.: “Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations” [4 July 2010]), as well numerous posts on writing.]

"Who Wrote Bach's Music?"

by Professor Martin Jarvis 

[uncovering a mystery: Why do the six suites for unaccompanied cello, historically attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), sound so different from the sonatas and partitas for solo violin also linked to the German composer?  New evidence shows that Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach (née Wilcke, 1701-60; m. 1721), may have composed the cello suites.  The score of the Cello Suite No. 1 from the historical edition is in Anna Magdalena’s own handwriting.

[Martin Jarvis’s “Who Wrote Bach’s Music?” first appeared in the March 2013 issue (113.3) of Allegro, the magazine of the New York City musicians’ union (AFM Local 802).  ALERT: Readers should be aware that since this article’s appearance, several musicologists, musicians, and Bach scholars have disputed Jarvis’s findings.  I’ve appended sections from two Wikipedia pages below which address this controversy.]

Were some of J. S. Bach’s compositions actually composed by his wife, Anna Magdalena? In this exclusive story for Allegro, Professor Martin Jarvis [b. 1951], from Charles Darwin University in Australia, shares with us the intriguing results of his research, just in time for Women’s History Month (and also Bach’s 328th birthday!)

Johann Sebastian Bach is often referred to as the father of Western music. And as a composer, Bach looms large in the minds of just about every musician I have ever met. Therefore, any suggestion that things might not actually be the way we have come to understand them is not likely to be greeted with great enthusiasm!

But it may be time for a serious upheaval in our understanding of who composed Bach’s works. In my book “Written by Mrs. Bach,” (HarperCollins/ABC Books, [2011;] see www.bit.ly/BachBook), I describe my attempt to uncover the origins of the six cello suites and other works long attributed to Bach.

My search for the truth has taken me on a great and rewarding adventure, including a deep foray into a field of scientific investigation called forensic document examination, which is the study of documents and handwriting for the purpose of demonstrating authenticity. The results are astonishing.

Because space is limited, what I have written here is merely a summary of the journey from my early suspicions that all was not right, to how I reached my conclusions.

My first experience of playing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach was when I began studying Bach’s A-minor violin concerto in my early teens. Later, I won a scholarship to study at the Welsh College of Music in Cardiff with Garfield Phillips, the concertmaster of the BBC Welsh Orchestra. I still remember my lessons with Professor Phillips, where we worked on Bach’s unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas [a term Bach used as a label for collections of musical pieces, a synonym for suite]. He marked up my music with a green ink fountain pen – a very unusual habit!

In 1971, I won a place at the Royal Academy of Music, where I studied violin with the highly respected violinist and teacher Clarence Myerscough. At the same time I also studied viola with Winifred Copperwheat. Professor Copperwheat was only four feet ten inches tall, and I am six feet one inch tall, so I literally towered over this wonderfully insightful and very great musician.

Immediately after I began my studies with Professor Copperwheat, she instructed me to obtain a copy of the six cello suites of Bach, arranged for viola. She was very specific about the edition I was to purchase; she wanted me to get the Lifschey edition, not the Svenky.

What I was not aware of at the time was that in the case of the cello suites, there was a very significant reason for Winifred’s insistence. I was to learn soon that there was no manuscript of the cello suites in Bach’s own hand, and so every editor of the suites (whether for viola or cello) has made decisions about the bowings, and indeed even some of the notes to be played.

These changes were necessary, Winifred informed me, because the only complete manuscript of the suites was in the hand of Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena, and it was, according to tradition, full of inaccuracies and all but illegible.

It is important to know that the matter of the differing editions is very significant indeed. Cellist Dimitry Markevitch, editor of a 1964 edition of the suites and discoverer of the so-called Westphal manuscripts, claimed that he had 61 editions of the six cello suites in his library and stated that there have appeared, since the first printed edition, some 93 editions or versions of the suites.

It must be stressed that these different editions vary substantially one from another. The cellist Uzi Wiesel says that this caused a veritable mishmash of stylistic interpretations when he attended a series of performances in Paris in the 1990s. Further, Wiesel was most critical of those who played the suites using only Anna Magdalena’s manuscript as the source.

This begs a very interesting question: why does Anna Magdalena’s manuscript, as Wiesel says in his review, sound “strange to my ears”?

It is worth pointing out that the chamber music of Bach was not published during his lifetime, and it has been said that it was composed for domestic consumption or performance. So the cello suites are most likely to have been written for someone within the household, rather than an outsider – which is the traditional view, of course.

As well as the undated Anna Magdalena version, there are two anonymous handwritten copies of the suites from the later 18th century, plus a version written out by Johann Peter Kellner [1705-72], one of Bach’s most important copyists, with a suggested date of 1726.

Let’s return to my early lessons at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The following week, I duly turned up to my viola class with the Lifschey edition. As soon as I began to play the prelude, I was struck by the vast differences between the two sets of music I was studying: the unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas on the one hand, and the cello suites on the other.

Visually, the violin works appear complex and intellectually very challenging. By comparison, the prelude of the first suite appears to be rather simple, at least on the surface.

I immediately became certain that I what I was playing was not written by the same person. However, I tried very hard to believe that J. S. Bach was, in fact, the composer. As I practiced the suite, I diligently applied all my knowledge and prior experience of Bach as I worked away at the music. But try as I might I could not feel at ease.

Despite the fact that over the ensuing four years I studied all the movements of some of the cello suites and some movements from others, the thought would not go away. There was something wrong with the sound and the structure of the music, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

When I raised my concerns about the suites with Professor Copperwheat, she told me the story of Pablo Casals’ experience with the cello suites and his long journey to first performing them. The suites were, apparently, “rediscovered” by Casals in 1890 when he was around 14 years old. He and his father, it is said, came across a copy in a music shop. Later, according to a biography by Robert Baldock, “…Casals discovered that, if they were played at all, the Bach suites had been used as academic, technical exercises… For the next twelve years he worked on them in seclusion…at the beginning of his career he began to introduce them into his recital programmes…he performed them on many hundreds of occasions, he never approached them without reverence, humility – and even fear.”

I took heart from that story. Winifred also explained to me that the suites were not performed much, if at all, in concert during the 19th century. As I found out much later, this may be because when they were first published in Paris in 1824, they went under the title “Six Sonates ou Etudes Pour Le Violoncelle Solo” – technical studies for cello! The idea that they were etudes would undoubtedly have led to the perception that they were lesser music.

Even the great 19th-century composer Robert Schumann [1810-56] considered them to be musically incomplete, so he added a piano accompaniment!

Finally, Philipp Spitta [1841-94], the most significant 19th-century biographer of Bach, acknowledged the very different character and proportions of the cello suites, but attributed the difference to what he considered the cello’s limited expressive quality.

All of these reasons may have contributed to the fact that cellists apparently abandoned the suites at that time and why they were not considered an important part of the cellists’ repertoire.

After leaving the Academy in 1975, I first worked as a freelance player with the London Mozart Players and other London-based orchestras before taking up a position with the Halle Orchestra in Manchester. This group was very busy performing all over the world, so there was plenty of time to talk with colleagues about many musical issues, including the cello suites.

The cellists I spoke with had various opinions on the subject. Some believed that the suites were difficult to interpret because there had not been a continuous history of performance, unlike the violin sonatas and partitas. Others believed it was because the suites were not composed by a cellist. Some thought that they were written much earlier than the violin works by a very young J. S. Bach, and this was why they are musically simpler.

But no one could really say conclusively what it was about the cello suites that makes them, as the great Yo-Yo Ma [b. 1955] put it “…considered by many to be the most challenging of the solo repertoire.”

A powerful question kept rattling around in my brain. Was it possible that the cello suites were not actually composed by J. S. Bach?

In 2000, Bärenreiter published a new edition of the suites as part the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. The edition included a facsimile of the Anna Magdalena manuscript of the suites. I was quite stunned by what I saw. The music calligraphy was very beautiful, precise and elegant, and not at all hard to read.

I immediately became convinced as I looked at Anna Magdalena Bach’s supposed “copy” of the cello suites that this was not a copy of someone else’s music – but her own. This was mainly because the music calligraphy appeared to flow easily and to be very self-assured, which is consistent with someone writing out material with which they are very familiar. At the same time it lacked any sense of the slowness of execution that would be consistent with someone working to accurately copy from another source, especially if they are trying to mimic the music calligraphy of the original.

I began the slow process of comparing the cello suites with the violin sonatas and partitas. This involved painstakingly deconstructing both sets of music by analyzing the harmonies used.

I examined the movement structures of the suites and aligned them with the movement structures of the violin partitas. The first thing that stood out to me was the apparent symmetry of the suites, when compared to the very non-symmetrical partitas. Was this just a coincidence, or an exception – or was this something important? I needed to find out.

By the end of 2002 my structural and musical analysis of the cello suites had revealed 17 reasons why they did not musically match any other work of J. S. Bach’s in the same genre. But it was the use of the science of forensic document examination that eventually enabled me to identify Anna Magdalena’s own handwriting and music calligraphy in manuscripts dating back to 1713 – seven years prior to the usually accepted date when Anna Magdalena and J. S. Bach first met. I realized finally that Anna Magdalena’s involvement was much deeper than usually believed.

Finally, if we look at one of the earliest copies of the cello suites from 1727 or 1728, we see the words of the chamber musician Georg Heinrich Ludwig Schwanenberger [1696-1774] on the title page. It says, in French, (“ecrite par Madame Bachen Son Epouse”), “Written by Mrs Bach His Wife.” That convinced me that Anna Magdalena was probably the composer.

So who exactly was Anna Magdalena Bach? The evidence strongly suggests that she was a composition student of J. S. Bach. It is known that she was a trained musician, and that when she was employed at the Cöthen Court at the age of 20 she was the second most highly paid musician. [Anhalt-Köthen was a principality of the Holy Roman Empire; Köthen is now the capital of the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt.] Only Bach was paid more. This begs a number of questions, including why was she paid so highly and why has she not been recognized as a composer before?

I hope I’ve left you with a tantalizing first course. Readers who wish to know more about Anna Magdalena will find answers to these and many more questions in my book.

One postscript. When the early findings of my research were first published in the very early 2000s I had no support from any of my colleagues, except the principal cellist of the Darwin Symphony Orchestra, Rebecca Harris. But over the ensuing years many cellists and other musicians have contacted me to welcome my findings. For example, one cellist wrote to me, “I have become convinced, at least on an emotional level, that the [cello] suites are indeed not by the same composer [as the violin sonatas and partitas] … I do feel somewhat heretical and have not said much of my thoughts on this subject except to my wife!”

[Professor Martin W. B. Jarvis is professor of music and head of the School of Creative Arts and Humanities at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. There he teaches viola, violin and conducting. Professor Jarvis also served as artistic director of the Darwin Symphony Orchestra for 20 years.]

*  *  *  *

[When I first read Martin Jarvis’s “Who Wrote Bach’s Music” in Allegro seven years ago, I found it interesting in the same way that reading the arguments theater and literary scholars use to support claims that William Shakespeare didn’t write his plays and advocating for other claimants to The Bard’s achievement. 

[I know far less about music, let alone Bach, than I do about theater and Shakespeare, but I felt that Jarvis’s “evidence,” as he lays it out in the brief article (I haven’t read Written By Mrs Bach) was largely his impressions and feelings, not to mention his musical intuition.  Since I don’t know Jarvis, even by reputation, I don’t have any idea how much I can rely on that—it’s entirely subjective.

[Since the publication of both Jarvis’s book and the Allegro article, there have been a number of critical responses to his contention that Anna Magdalena Bach was the composer of the cello suites traditionally attributed to Johann Sebastian.  Below, I’m appending two excerpts from the Wikipedia entries on, first, Jarvis, himself (Martin Jarvis (conductor) - Wikipedia), and, second, Anna Magdalena Bach (Anna Magdalena Bach - Wikipedia).] 

From: “Martin Jarvis (conductor)”
Wikipedia 

Research into Anna Magdalena Bach

During his studies at the Royal Academy of Music, his viola teacher Winifred Copperwheat [1905-76] made him aware of problems with the published editions of the six suites for unaccompanied cello commonly attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. After research of his own, Jarvis has controversially postulated, using handwriting analysis heuristics, that the suites were composed by Bach’s wife Anna Magdalena [Lindy Kerin, “Bach’s wife believed to have penned cello works,” The Australian [Surry Hills, Australia] 28 Apr. 2006; Barbie Dutter and Roya Nikkha, “Bach works were written by his second wife, claims academic,” Daily Telegraph [London] 23 Apr. 2006]. Other academics such as Stephen Rose have responded that, while Anna Magdalena may have contributed to the labours on his manuscripts, “there is not enough evidence to show that she single-handedly composed the Cello Suites” [Dutter and Nikkha].

Jarvis was awarded a PhD from Charles Darwin University based on his research [“Wife behind Bach’s cello suites,” The Australian 31 October 2007], and presented his findings at an October 2008 meeting of the International Symposium on the Forensic Sciences in Melbourne [Anna Salleh, “Bach’s wife ‘may have been composer,’” ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] News 4 Oct. 2008; Liz Porter, “The missus was the maestro,” Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald 5 Oct. 2008]. Regarding the generally-accepted portrayal of Anna Magdalena Bach’s role in music history and his own differing views, Jarvis himself has acknowledged, “My conclusions may not be wholly accurate, but the way in which tradition has put Anna Magdalena into this pathetic role [as merely the copyist] ... is rubbish” [Salleh]. Jarvis published the book Written by Mrs Bach in 2011; it was made into a documentary film in 2014 [LOOKSfilm, Written by Mrs Bach, wr. Robert Beedham, Martin Jarvis, and Pamela Kaufman; dir. Alex McCall and Irini Vachlioti; prod. Robert Beedham, Ramona Bergmann, et al.].

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From: “Anna Magdalena Bach”
Wikipedia 

Dismissed claim of composership

Recently, it has been suggested that Anna Magdalena Bach composed several musical pieces bearing her husband’s name: Professor Martin Jarvis of the School of Music at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, claims that she composed the famed six cello suites (BWV 1007-1012) and was involved with the composition of the aria from the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) [1741] and the opening prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier [1722, 1742]. These ideas were also made into a TV documentary Written by Mrs Bach (BBC, 2018).

These claims have been virtually unanimously dismissed by Bach scholars and performers. Christoph Wolff [b. 1940] said:

When I served as director of the Leipzig Bach Archive from 2001 to 2013, I and my colleagues there extensively refuted the basic premises of the thesis, on grounds of documents, manuscript sources, and musical grounds. There is not a shred of evidence, but Jarvis doesn’t give up despite the fact that several years ago, at a Bach conference in Oxford, a room full of serious Bach scholars gave him an embarrassing showdown [Tim Cavanaugh, “Bogus Bach Theory Gets Media Singing,” National Review [New York] 29 Oct. 2014].

Writing in The Guardian, cellist Steven Isserlis [b. 1958] said, “I’m afraid that his theory is pure rubbish,” and continued, “How can anybody take this shoddy material seriously” [Steven Isserlis, “Suite scandal: why Bach’s wife cannot take credit for his cello masterwork,” Guardian [London] 29 Oct. 2014]?

Bach scholar Ruth Tatlow [b. 1956] has written a refutation at length, centred on the TV documentary, in the journal Understanding Bach, where she calls Jarvis’s claims “flawed and untenable” [Ruth Tatlow, “A Missed Opportunity: Reflections on Written by Mrs Bach,” Understanding Bach [Bach Network; Oxford, UK] 10 (2015); www.bachnetwork.co.uk/understanding-bach].