MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M

Glencore’s $22B assets shift sets stage for mining mega-merger

Cecilia Jamasmie | May 29, 2025 |  

The Newlands coal mine produced thermal and metallurgical coal for export for 40 years, ending its mine life in February 2023. (Image courtesy of Glencore Australia.)

Glencore (LON: GLEN) has transferred almost $22 billion in foreign assets into its Australian subsidiary in a sweeping global restructure, laying the groundwork for a future mega-merger with a rival mining heavyweight.

The move, disclosed by the Australian Financial Review, means the total assets held by Glencore’s Australian entity have doubled to $42 billion. The shift required $3.8 billion in internal cash transfers and $614 million in intra-company share issuances to facilitate the asset migration.

The restructure consolidates coal mines in Canada, South Africa and Colombia, a major copper project in Argentina, and South African manganese, chrome and vanadium operations under Glencore Investment Pty Ltd, its Australia-based entity. 

The strategic transfer of assets to Glencore’s Australian entity likely signals more than just operational streamlining. Investors say it positions the company squarely for a future merger. By centralizing key assets in a single jurisdiction, which is close to Asian markets, Glencore creates a more attractive and simplified structure for potential partners – or a mega-merger.

“Glencore coal assets would trade at a much higher multiple in Australia than London. There won’t be much reason to go to London other than cricket if Glencore and Anglo get knocked off,”  Ben Cleary, a portfolio manager at Tribeca Investment Partners, told AFR.

Market observers noted the asset realignment follows months of behind-the-scenes discussions with Rio Tinto (ASX, LON: RIO), marking a dramatic shift in tone from earlier failed efforts. In 2014, Rio rejected a merger proposal outright, sparking a very public standoff between then-CEO Ivan Glasenberg and Rio’s leadership. But Glencore’s 2024 outreach met a warmer reception. Outgoing Rio chief Jakob Stausholm remained hesitant, but several senior executives, one of whom may succeed him, according to the AFR, were reportedly more receptive to the idea.

Despite shelving earlier plans to spin off its coal division, which delivered 38% of Glencore’s earnings last year, chief executive officer Gary Nagle has centralized all coal operations within the Australian unit. That includes its Canadian subsidiary Elk Valley Resources, which operates four steelmaking coal mines in British Columbia: Elkview, Fording River, Greenhills, and Line Creek. EVR also holds a 46% stake in Neptune Terminals, a key bulk export facility.

In Colombia, Glencore owns the Cerrejón open-pit coal mine. In South Africa, it controls the Impunzi thermal coal complex and holds stakes in the Mokala manganese mine, the Glencore–Merafe Chrome Venture, and the Rhovan-Bakwena Vanadium Venture. Joining the list of transferred assets is the MARA copper project in Argentina, which it acquired from Pan American in 2023.

The Australian arm also holds the company’s thermal and metallurgical coal assets in New South Wales and Queensland.

Doubling down on critical minerals

As merger speculation simmers, Glencore is also deepening its presence in Australia’s critical minerals sector. The Swiss miner and commodities trader has inked a three-year supply agreement with Cobalt Blue (ASX: COB) to provide cobalt hydroxide feedstock for the Kwinana refinery in Western Australia, which is set to become the country’s first cobalt refinery.

The deal will see Glencore supply up to 50% of the refinery’s cobalt input, starting once the facility begins commercial operations. It guarantees a minimum of 3,750 tonnes of cobalt hydroxide over the contract period, with 750 tonnes in the first year and 1,500 tonnes annually in the second and third years. The feedstock will come from Glencore’s operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, specifically Kamoto Copper Company, in which it holds a 75% stake, and Mutanda Mining SARL.

The assets shift and cobalt supply deal show Glencore positioning itself for consolidation and growth, with Australia at the heart of its strategy.

CMB.TECH and Golden Ocean Finalize Merger Terms to Create Shipping Giant

After the merger with Golden Ocean, CMB.TECH will be one of the largest publicly traded diversified shipping groups (Golden Ocean)

Published May 29, 2025 3:52 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

A month after announcing the intent to merge their shipping operations, the Saverys family reported that terms have been reached for the combination of Golden Ocean into the family company CMB.TECH. The resulting combination is set to create one of the largest publicly traded diversified maritime groups.

The transaction is valuing Golden Ocean, the largest listed owner of large-size dry bulk vessels, at approximately $1.4 billion. Under the agreed terms, the shareholders will receive .95 shares of CMB.TECH. After the merger, CMB.TECH shareholders will own approximately 70 percent of the shares of the combined company which will continue as CMB.TECH with Golden Ocean becoming an operating subsidiary.

Presenting the rationale for the combination, management cites the creation of a diversified shipping company that will be more resilient and positioned to lead in the industry’s decarbonization efforts. CMB.TECH currently has more than 160 vessels, including, 30 dry bulk carriers as well as tankers, containerships, offshore wind, and workboats. Golden Ocean has more than 90 dry bulk vessels with an aggregate capacity of approximately 13.7 million dwt. With a fleet of more than 250 vessels and a projected market cap of $3.2 billion, the combined company will rival Frontline as the largest publicly traded shipping company and dwarf other shipping companies.

The deal, however, has been called into question by analysts and investors after pressures emerged on the dry bulk sector. Golden Ocean reported a week ago a net loss of $44 million for the first quarter of 2025.

“Our first quarter results reflect a weaker market environment, with softer charter rates and lower trading activity impacting our performance, in addition to our current intensive drydocking schedule. These headwinds were not unexpected given the seasonal slowdown and increased macroeconomic uncertainty, including the disruption caused by recently announced trade tariffs,” said Peder Simonsen, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Godel Ocean. 

He however asserted that the fundamentals underpinning of dry bulk shipping remain intact, in particular for the Capesize segment. He points to limited fleet growth, shifting trade patterns, and infrastructure-led demand in key regions as continuing to support a constructive medium-term outlook for the group. 

Alexander Saverys, who will remain CEO of the combined company, has in the past spoken of a strategy of using conventional shipping to drive the company's efforts to become a leader in ammonia and hydrogen as maritime fuels. CMB.TECH has established ammonia and hydrogen fuel offerings and some of the first ships to operate on the emerging alternative fuels. 

The merger remains subject to customary conditions, including regulatory approval and a vote by Golden Ocean shareholders. The companies report they expect to complete the merger in the third quarter of 2025.
 

 

Online misinformation most likely to be believed by ideological extremists, new study shows

Findings reveal the importance of quickly addressing the spread of falsehoods

New York University

Political observers have been troubled by the rise of online misinformation—a concern that has grown as we approach Election Day. However, while the spread of fake news may pose threats, a new study finds that its influence is not universal. Rather, users with extreme political views are more likely than are others to both encounter and believe false news. 

“Misinformation is a serious issue on social media, but its impact is not uniform,” says Christopher K. Tokita, the lead author of the study, conducted by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP).

The findings, which appear in the journal PNAS Nexus, also indicate that current methods to combat the spread of misinformation are likely not viable—and that the most effective way to address it is to implement interventions quickly and to target them toward users most likely to be vulnerable to these falsehoods.

“Because these extreme users also tend to see misinformation early on, current social media interventions often struggle to curb its impact—they are typically too slow to prevent exposure among those most receptive to it,” adds Zeve Sanderson, executive director of CSMaP. 

Existing methods used to assess the exposure to and impact of online misinformation rely on measuring views or shares. However, these fail to fully capture the true impact of misinformation, which depends not just on spread, but also on whether users actually believe the false information.

To address this shortcoming, Tokita, Sanderson, and their colleagues developed a novel approach using Twitter (now “X”) data to estimate not just how many users were exposed to a specific news story, but also how many were likely to believe it. 

“What is particularly innovative about our approach in this research is that the method combines social media data tracking the spread of both true news and misinformation on Twitter with surveys that assessed whether Americans believed the content of these articles,” explains Joshua A. Tucker, a co-director of CSMaP and an NYU professor of politics, one of the paper’s authors. “This allows us to track both the susceptibility to believing false information and the spread of that information across the same articles in the same study.”

The researchers captured 139 news articles (November 2019-February 2020)—102 of which were rated as true and 37 of which were rated as false or misleading by professional fact-checkers—and calculated the spread of those articles across Twitter from the time of their initial publication. 

This sample of popular articles was drawn from five types of news streams: mainstream left-leaning publications, mainstream right-leaning publications, low-quality left-leaning publications, low-quality right-leaning publications, and low-quality publications without an apparent ideological lean. To establish the veracity of the articles, each article was sent to a team of professional fact checkers within 48 hours of publication. The fact-checkers rated each article as “true” or “false/misleading.” 

To estimate exposure to and belief in these articles, the researchers combined two types of data. First, they used Twitter data to identify which users on Twitter were potentially exposed to each of the articles; they also estimated each potentially exposed user’s ideological placement on a liberal-conservative scale by using an established method that infers a user’s ideology from the prominent news and political accounts they follow. 

Second, to determine the likelihood that these exposed users would believe an article to be true, they deployed real-time surveys as each article spread online. These surveys asked Americans who are habitual internet users to classify the article as true or false and to provide demographic information, including their ideology. From this survey data, the authors calculated the proportion of individuals within each ideological category that believed the article to be true. With these estimates for each article, they could calculate the number of Twitter users exposed and receptive to believing the article to be true. 

Overall, the findings showed that while false news reached users across the political spectrum, those with more extreme ideologies (both conservative and liberal) were far more likely to both see and believe it. Crucially, these users, who are receptive to misinformation, tend to encounter it early in its spread through Twitter.  

The research design also allowed the study’s authors to simulate the impact of different types of interventions designed to stop the spread of misinformation. One takeaway from these simulations was that the earlier interventions were applied, the more likely they were to be effective. Another was that “visibility” interventions—whereby a platform makes flagged misinformation posts less likely to appear in users’ feeds—appeared more likely to reduce the reach of misinformation to susceptible users than did interventions aimed at making users less likely to share misinformation.

“Our research indicates that understanding who is likely to be receptive to misinformation, not just who is exposed to it, is key to developing better strategies to fight misinformation online,” advises Tokita, now a data scientist in the tech industry.

The study’s other authors included Kevin Aslett, a CSMaP postdoctoral researcher and University of Central Florida professor at the time of the study who now works as a researcher in the tech industry, William P. Godel, an NYU doctoral student at the time of the study and now a researcher in the tech industry, as well as CSMaP researchers Jonathan Nagler and Richard Bonneau.

The research was supported by a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation (DGE1656466).

# # #

 

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Journal

PNAS Nexus

DOI

10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae396 

Method of Research

Survey

Article Title

Measuring receptivity to misinformation at scale on a social media platform

Evaluating the truthfulness of fake news through online searches increases the chances of believing misinformation

Surprising study results show limits of using recommended steps to debunk false content

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Conventional wisdom suggests that searching online to evaluate the veracity of misinformation would reduce belief in it. But a new study by a team of researchers shows the opposite occurs: Searching to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing misinformation.

The findings, which appear in the journal Nature, offer insights into the impact of search engines’ output on their users—a relatively under-studied area.

“Our study shows that the act of searching online to evaluate news increases belief in highly popular misinformation—and by notable amounts,” says Zeve Sanderson, founding executive director of New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and one of the paper’s authors.

The reason for this outcome may be explained by search-engine outputs—in the study, the researchers found that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.

“This points to the danger that ‘data voids’—areas of the information ecosystem that are dominated by low quality, or even outright false, news and information—may be playing a consequential role in the online search process, leading to low return of credible information or, more alarming, the appearance of non-credible information at the top of search results,” observes lead author Kevin Aslett, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida and a faculty research affiliate at CSMaP. 

In the newly published Nature study, Aslett, Sanderson, and their colleagues studied the impact of using online search engines to evaluate false or misleading views—an approach encouraged by technology companies and government agencies, among others.

To do so, they recruited participants through both Qualtrics and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—tools frequently used in running behavioral science studies—for a series of five experiments and with the aim of gauging the impact of a common behavior: searching online to evaluate news (SOTEN). 

The first four studies tested the following aspects of online search behavior and impact:

• The effect of SOTEN on belief in both false or misleading and true news directly within two days an article’s publication (false popular articles included stories on COVID-19 vaccines, the Trump impeachment proceedings, and climate events)
• Whether the effect of SOTEN can change an individual’s evaluation after they had already assessed the veracity of a news story
• The effect of SOTEN months after publication
• The effect of SOTEN on recent news about a salient topic with significant news coverage—in the case of this study, news about the Covid-19 pandemic

A fifth study combined a survey with web-tracking data in order to identify the effect of exposure to both low- and high-quality search-engine results on belief in misinformation. By collecting search results using a custom web browser plug-in, the researchers could identify how the quality of these search results may affect users’ belief in the misinformation being evaluated.

The study’s source credibility ratings were determined by NewsGuard, a browser extension that rates news and other information sites in order to guide users in assessing the trustworthiness of the content they come across online. 

Across the five studies, the authors found that the act of searching online to evaluate news led to a statistically significant increase in belief in misinformation. This occurred whether it was shortly after the publication of misinformation or months later. This finding suggests that the passage of time—and ostensibly opportunities for fact checks to enter the information ecosystem—does not lessen the impact of SOTEN on increasing the likelihood of believing false news stories to be true. Moreover, the fifth study showed that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.

“The findings highlight the need for media literacy programs to ground recommendations in empirically tested interventions and search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified by this research,” concludes Joshua A. Tucker, professor of politics and co-director of CSMaP, another of the paper’s authors.

The paper’s other authors included William Godel and Jonathan Nagler of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, and Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School.

The study was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (2029610).

# # #

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-023-06883-y 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

20-Dec-2023

GODEL'S PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

Stick to your lane: Hidden order in chaotic crowds

Mathematical research from the University of Bath in the UK brings new understanding of crowd formation and behaviour

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BATH

 

IMAGE: TILTED LANES CAPTURED IN A HUMAN-CROWD EXPERIMENT. THE LANES ARE FORMED BY TWO GROUPS OF PEOPLE MOVING IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS. THE INCLINATION RESULTS FROM A `PASS ON THE RIGHT’ TRAFFIC RULE. view more 

CREDIT: K. BACIK. B. BACIK, T. ROGERS

Have you ever wondered how pedestrians ‘know’ to fall into lanes when they are moving through a crowd, without the matter being discussed or even given conscious thought?

A new theory developed by mathematicians at the University of Bath in the UK led by Professor Tim Rogers explains this phenomenon, and is able to predict when lanes will be curved as well as straight. The theory can even describe the tilt of a wonky lane when people are in the habit of passing on one side rather than the other (for instance, in a situation where they are often reminded to ‘pass on the right’).

This mathematical analysis unifies conflicting viewpoints on the origin of lane formation, and it reveals a new class of structures that in daily life may go unnoticed. The discovery, reported this week (Friday, March 3) in the prestigious journal Science, constitutes a major advance in the interdisciplinary science of ‘active matter’ – the study of group behaviours in interacting populations ranging in scale from bacteria to herds of animals.

Tested in arenas

To test their theory, the researchers asked a group of volunteers to walk across an experimental arena that mimicked different layouts, with changes to entrance and exit gates.

One arena was set up in the style of King’s Cross Station in London. When the researchers looked at the video footage from the experiment, they observed mathematical patterns taking shape in real life.

Professor Rogers said: “At a glance, a crowd of pedestrians attempting to pass through two gates might seem disorderly but when you look more closely, you see the hidden structure. Depending on the layout of the space, you may observe either the classic straight lanes or more complex curved patterns such as ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas”.

Lane formation

The single-file processions formed at busy zebra crossings are only one example of lane formation, and this study is likely to have implications for a range of scientific disciplines, particularly in the fields of physics and biology. Similar structures can also be formed by inanimate molecules, such as charged particles or organelles in a cell.

Until now, scientists have given several different explanations for why human crowds and other active systems naturally self-organise into lanes, but none of these theories have been verified. The Bath team used a new analytical approach, inspired by Albert Einstein’s theory of Brownian motion, which makes predictions that can be tested.

Encouraged by the way their theory agreed with the numerical simulations of colliding particles, they then teamed up with Professor Bogdan Bacik – an experimentalist from the Academy of Physical Education in Katowice, Poland – and ran a series of experiments (such as the one modelled on King’s Cross) using human crowds.

Lead author Dr Karol Bacik said: “Lane formation doesn’t require conscious thought – the participants of the experiment were not aware that they had arranged themselves into well-defined mathematical curves.

“The order emerges spontaneously when two groups with different objectives cross paths in a crowded space and try to avoid crashing into each other. The cumulative effect of lots of individual decisions inadvertently results in lanes forming.”

The researchers also tested the effects of externally imposed traffic rules – namely, they instructed the participants to pass others on the right. In agreement with the theoretical prediction, adding this rule changed the lane structure.

“When pedestrians have a preference for right turns, the lanes end up tilting and this introduces frustration that slows people down,” said Dr Bacik.

“What we’ve developed is a neat mathematical theory that forecasts the propensity for lane formation in any given system,” said Professor Rogers, adding: “We now know that much more structure exists than previously thought.”

 

Parabolic lane formation captured in a human crowd experiment. The red group crosses the experimental arena ‘south to north’, and the blue group targets a narrow gate on the side. In agreement with the theory, the crowd spontaneously self-organizes into lanes shaped as (confocal) parabolas.

CREDIT

Credit: K. Bacik. B. Bacik, T. Rogers

Pedestrians finding order in a [VIDEO] 

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JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.add8091 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Lane nucleation in complex active flows

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Mar-2023

SEE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for GODEL 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY 

WAITING FOR GODEL
Do we live in a rotating universe? If we did, we could travel back in time


Paul Sutter
Mon, February 6, 2023 

Does the universe rotate?

We know that planets rotate, but what about the universe as a whole? No, the universe doesn't appear to rotate; if it did, time travel into the past might be possible.

Although people throughout antiquity had argued that the heavens rotate around the world, in 1949, mathematician Kurt Gödel was the first to provide a modern formulation of a rotating universe. He used the language of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity to do so, as a way of honoring his friend and neighbor at Princeton, Einstein himself.

But this process of academic "honoring" went in a different direction than you might suspect, because Gödel used the example of a rotating universe to show that general relativity was incomplete.

Related: Was Einstein wrong? The case against space-time theory

Gödel's model of a rotating universe was rather artificial. Besides the rotation, his universe contained only one ingredient: a negative cosmological constant that resisted the centrifugal force of that rotation to keep the universe static.

But the artificial nature of that universe didn't bother Gödel. Instead, his main point was that general relativity allowed for the possibility of a rotating universe at all. And Gödel used his rotating universe to show that general relativity allowed for time travel into the past, which should be forbidden.
Taking the universe out for a spin

Living in a rotating universe would be strange indeed. For one, all observers would consider themselves the center of rotation. This means that if you parked yourself somewhere and ensured that you were absolutely still, you would see the universe wheeling around you. But if you picked up and moved anywhere else, even to a distant galaxy, you would always still see the universe rotating around your new position.

This is incredibly hard to visualize, but it's not much different from the idea that in an expanding universe, all observers see themselves as the center of expansion.

The farther you go from any one observer, the greater the rate of rotation. And this isn't merely a rotation of stuff but a rotation of space-time itself. This means that light, which is always forced to follow the curvature of space-time, makes for some strange journeys. A beam of light sent out from an observer will curve away as it gets swept up in the rotation of space-time. At some distant point, the rotation will be too much, and the light will turn around and return to the observer.

This means there's a limit to how far you can see in a rotating universe, and beyond that, all you'll observe is duplicate images of your own past self.

This strange behavior doesn't apply only to light. If you were to get in a rocket and blast off through a rotating universe, you, too, would get caught up in the rotation. And because of that rotation, your movement would double back on itself. When you returned to your starting point, however, you would find yourself arriving before you had left.

In a manner of speaking, a rotating universe would be capable of rotating your future into your own past, allowing you to travel back in time.
Sitting still

This was Gödel's major objection to general relativity. That theory, being our ultimate understanding of space and time, should not allow for backward time travel, because time travel into the past violates our notions of causality and introduces all sorts of nasty time-travel paradoxes. The fact that relativity did not automatically make time travel impossible signaled to Gödel that Einstein's theory was incomplete.

Thankfully, we see no signs that we live in a rotating universe. If the cosmos were rotating, then light coming from opposite directions of the sky would be redshifted in one direction and have an equivalent amount of blueshifting in the other. Astronomers have applied this test to surveys of distant galaxies and even to the cosmic microwave background, which is the light left over from when the cosmos was only 380,000 years old. The conclusion of these tests is that if the universe is rotating, it's doing so at a rate of less than 10^-17 degrees per century.

Related stories:

— Is time travel possible?

— Why time-traveling tachyons probably don't exist

— What is the grandfather paradox?

But Gödel's objection still stands. Since 1949, physicists have concocted other ways for general relativity to allow for backward time travel, wormholes, faster-than-light-speed "warp drive" (known as Alcubierre drive), and special paths around infinitely long cylinders. But all those contrivances rely on some sort of exotic physics that breaks our understanding of how the universe works, like matter with negative mass.

But Gödel's rotating universe is simply a matter of observational test, not a fundamental break with known physics. We could have found ourselves in a rotating universe just as easily as we find ourselves in an expanding one. There's nothing in our knowledge of physics that prevents this kind of universe from existing, so there's nothing in our knowledge of physics that prevents backward time travel.

Perhaps Gödel is right, and we have more to learn about the universe.

Learn more by listening to the "Ask A Spaceman" podcast, available on iTunes and askaspaceman.com. Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.

300 years of Johann Sebastian Bach's 'Well-Tempered Clavier'

The legendary German composer's creation is the most influential piano work in music history, played to this day by musicians who want to perfect their technique.

Bachfest Leipzig 2022 celebrates the iconic composer's most influential work

Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Shostakovich: They all studied Johann Sebastian Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier." 300 years ago, Bach published what is probably the most influential piano work in the history of music. 

Bach composed 24 preludes and the related 24 fugues in all major and minor keys for this "practice book," which was "for the benefit and use of the musical youth eager to learn," as Bach wrote in the explanatory note. To this day, aspiring pianists worldwide perfect their technique by playing the work. 

"It was part of the musical armory, what you had to know. Robert Schumann called it 'the work of all works,'" said Michael Maul, artistic director of the Leipzig Bach Festival.

On June 16, Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff performed all 48 pieces from the first part of the "Well-Tempered Clavier" in Leipzig.  

"I love them dearly," said Schiff of the preludes and fugues, adding that the prelude and fugue in B minor are "just colossal." 

Watch video 02:26 Bachfest's Michael Maul explains Bach's 'Well-Tempered Clavier'

Bach Medal for Andras Schiff

Performing in Leipzig's Gewandhaus, Schiff received a standing ovation for his latest Bach interpretation. He was subsequently awarded the Bach Medal of the City of Leipzig for his cultivation of Bach's works. 

"Unfortunately, I have no talent for composing, but if you know what makes a great composer like Bach, you also know what not to do, which is to compose something mediocre," Schiff said in his acceptance speech.

The second best thing, therefore, is to become a good Bach interpreter, he said. "I will continue to play Bach every day on the clavichord in my living room," the 68-year-old added.

Andras Schiff is presented with the Bach Medal

The art of 'beautiful' instrument tuning

Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach once wrote that his father's harpsichord was tuned "so purely and correctly that all keys sounded beautiful and pleasing." 

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the intervals between different notes within a key was not yet as uniform as it is today, with all notes a semitone apart.  

But 300 years ago, harpsichords were tuned to sound "pure," as the younger Bach so admired. Playing a different key with the same tuning could sound off, meaning you had to tune the instrument differently for each key you wanted to play.

Today however, all 48 pieces can be played on one standardized tuning, notes Michael Maul.

In Eisenach, where Bach was born in 1685, an exhibition at the Bach Haus (running July 1 through November 6) allows visitors to recreate the tunings common at that time on a synthesizer.

One of them is the "Well-Tempered Tuning," which the theorist and organist Andreas Werckmeister designed in the 17th century. 

"In the 'Well-Tempered Clavier', no key is tuned purely, and that's the trick; it's a compromise through which all keys are playable," explains Jörg Hansen, director of the Bach Haus in Eisenach.

This trick gave composers to freedom to create without restrictions, Hansen added.

'Well-Tempered Clavier' composed in prison?

Twenty years after Part 1, Johann Sebastian Bach composed another 48 preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. The more extensive work was performed by Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt at the Leipzig Bach Festival.

According to legend, Bach began composing the "Well-Tempered Clavier" during four weeks in a prison cell in Weimar in 1717 — his crime was wanting to leave the service of Duke Wilhelm Ernst.

8 REVOLUTIONARY MUSICAL PIECES
Music for the revolution
In many countries, composers wrote works to support a revolution. The French Revolution in 1789 found its way into numerous compositions. Other uprisings have also influenced musicians. The motto of this year's Beethovenfest, held in Bonn from September 9 through October 9, is "Revolutions" - and some of these pieces are on the playbill
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In 1790, the German composer and author Ernst Ludiwg Gerber wrote that Bach composed his defining work "in a place where discontent, long hours and a lack of any kind of musical instruments made this pastime difficult for him."

This could have been the prison cell, but the exact location is not mentioned.

"Another theory leads to Karlsbad," said Jörg Hansen, referring to the period when Bach was Kapellmeister (master of the chapel choir or orchestra) for Prince Leopold — ruler of the principality of Anhalt-Köthen in what was then the Holy Roman Empire. The theory goes that on a visit with the court orchestra to the spa town in the current-day Czech Republic in 1720, Bach was "bored" and spent his spare time composing.

Bach's musical guiding light

While Bach's passion works and cantatas initially lost importance after his death, his organ and piano works set standards that are still maintained.

The pianist and composer Hans von Bülow called the "Well-Tempered Clavier" "the Old Testament for piano players."

Russian 19th and 20th century composers Dmitri Shostakovich, who wrote 24 preludes and fugues, and Alexander Scriabin, who also composed 24 preludes using every key and designed colors to go with them, were were heavily inspired by Bach.

"It has influenced the idea of the relationship of the keys," says Jörg Hansen of the formative influence of the "Well-Tempered Clavier."

"It is the guiding work of our idea of classical music." 

This article was originally written in German.

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