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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2012
On Sale: September 18, 2012
512 pages
ISBN: 0374281076
EAN: 9780374281076
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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