The story of a revolution in music and technology, told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach
In
"Reinventing Bach," his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the
electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach's music new
in our time, at once restoring Bach as a universally revered composer
and revolutionizing the ways that music figures into our lives.
As
a musician in eighteenth-century Germany, Bach was on the technological
frontier--restoring organs, inventing instruments, and perfecting the
tuning system still in use today. Two centuries later, pioneering
musicians began to take advantage of breakthroughs in audio recording to
make Bach's music the sound of modern transcendence. The sainted
organist Albert Schweitzer played to a mobile recording unit set up at
London's Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach's organ works to
the world beyond the churches. Pablo Casals, recording at Abbey Road
Studios, made Bach's cello suites existentialism for the living room;
Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney, with "Fantasia," made Bach the sound
of children's playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike. Glenn Gould's
"Goldberg Variations" opened and closed the LP era and made Bach the
byword for postwar cool; and Yo-Yo Ma has brought Bach into the digital
present, where computers and smartphones put the sound of Bach all
around us. In this book we see these musicians and dozens of others
searching, experimenting, and collaborating with one another in the
service of Bach, who emerges as the very image of the spiritualized,
technically savvy artist.
"Reinventing Bach" is a gorgeously
written story of music, invention, and human passion--and a story with
special relevance in our time, for it shows that great things can happen
when high art meets new technology. -- Publisher Marketing
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