Johann Sebastian Bach – celebrated pipe organist, court composer and master of sacred music – was also a technical pioneer. Working in Germany in the early eighteenth century, he invented new instruments and carried out experiments in tuning, the effects of which are still with us today. Two hundred years later, a number of extraordinary musicians have utilised the music of Bach to thrilling effect through the art of recording, furthering their own virtuosity and reinventing the composer for our time. In Reinventing Bach, Paul Elie brilliantly blends the stories of modern musicians with a polyphonic account of our most celebrated composer’s life to create a spellbinding narrative of the changing place of music in our lives. We see the sainted organist Albert Schweitzer playing 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, and Pablo Casals’s Abbey Road recordings of Bach’s cello suites transform the middle-class sitting room into a hotbed of existentialism; we watch Leopold Stokowski persuade Walt Disney to feature his own grand orchestrations of Bach in the animated classical-music movie Fantasia – which made Bach the sound of children’s playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike – and we witness how Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations made Bach the byword for postwar cool. Through the Beatles and Switched-on Bach and Godel, Escher, Bach – through film, rock music, the Walkman, the CD and up to Yo-Yo Ma and the iPod – Elie shows us how dozens of gifted musicians searched, experimented and collaborated with one another in the service of a composer who emerged as the prototype of the spiritualised, technically savvy artist.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for “Reinventing Bach”
“This intelligent, wide-ranging book brings Bach’s eternal music into conjunction with the forces of history. Paul Elie makes us realize how even great music, if it is to last over time, must change in order to stay the same.” –Wendy Lesser
“By juxtaposing the LP and the iPod, Elie reminds us of how technology has democratized and universalized Bach . . . Elie has many strengths and strands: detailed and beautifully described moments of listening, engagingly narrated summaries of scholarship, alert attention to telling facts, and a loving knowledge of many different kinds of music, including Robert Johnson and Led Zeppelin. There’s plenty of audiophile information–wax cylinder, recording, mono, stereo, different kinds of tape, 78s, long-playing records, CD’s, iPods–and a lot on the placement of microphones. Wearing his learning lightly (with wonderful endnotes as a ground), Elie is polyphonic and contrapuntal . . . Elie’s book is held together by chain of voices following one other as they make an entrance, step back, overlap, and enter again to reveal a new aspect against the changing conversation: Schweitzer to Casals to Stokowski to Gould to Ma. Other voices too move in and out, filling out the progressions: Tureck, Schoenberg, Einstein, Jobs, even the musically fantastic Mickey Mouse. The voice hovering over all is Elie’s own, modest, serious, attuned to the whole . . . It is a pleasure to read such a serious and inventive book on Bach, and that’s saying something.” –Alexandra Mullen
About the Author
PAUL ELIE is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. He is a senior fellow with Georgetown University, based in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. Elie lives in New York City.
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