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The story of a revolution in classical 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.
- Sales Rank: #156651 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published on: 2013-09-17
- Released on: 2013-09-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.17" h x 1.39" w x 5.82" l, .99 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 512 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“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, Barnes and Noble Review
“Thoughtful and elegant . . . Elie remains throughout a thoughtful guide.” ―Guy Dammann, The Guardian
“In Reinventing Bach, Elie weaves . . . several lives together in order to make an effective case that Bach's music, like all classical music, can never be ‘played' exactly, with total fidelity to the source; fidelity isn't even the goal. Performed live, it has always been ‘interpreted' by conductors, musicians, singers, and scholars. In other words, no one plays like anyone else, and everyone's interpretation is inflected by his or her time and character . . . Recording technology is also what makes Elie's story about more than the interpretation and reinterpretation of musical compositions by Bach . . . Passing from shellac discs and the gramophone through LPs, cassette tapes, compressed digital files, YouTube, and smartphones, Elie assembles a satisfying history of audio recording that's as concerned with reasonable explanations of how vacuum tubes work and how to splice tape as it is with a tour of Abbey Road Studios and a description of Glenn Gould's trusty ‘wood-framed, slender-legged' folding chair . . . Conventional wisdom suggests that as a result ‘our lives are half-lives, our experience mediated, and so diminished, by technology.' What holds this new book together is Elie's belief--and here I'm tempted to call it a religious belief--that, ‘to this conviction, the recorded music of Bach is contrary testimony. It defies the argument that experience mediated through technology is a diminished thing.' Our lives are whole lives--a modern reality that recordings of Bach make obvious . . . Having arrived at the end of a several year journey, ‘touching the keys again and again with the ten digits of my two hands,' he writes, ‘putting one word after another in the hope that a couple hundred thousand of them, mastered and sequenced, will amount to a kind of music,' Elie completes what he calls a ‘spirituality of technology': his very own reinvention of Bach.” ―Scott Korb, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“From the stately 'Sheep Shall Safely Graze' and the solemn St. Matthew Passion to the wildly exuberant Fantasia and Gould's Goldberg Variations, the music of Bach often serves as a listener's introduction to classical music. In this brilliant and passionate appreciation, Elie (The Life You Save May Be Your Own) offers not only a brief biography of the great musician but an exceptional study of the ways that numerous musicians have rendered Bach's music through the years through various technologies. Bach's music has been interpreted to suit new inventions, from the 78-rpm record, the LP, and headphones and Walkman to the compact disc and digital file. These inventions have taken the music into new contexts, from the living room to the open road to outer space (Voyager carried a recording of the first prelude of book one of The Well-Tempered Clavier). Bach himself was an inventor, fashioning a new musical instrument, the lautenwerk, or lute-harpsichord, and composing "Inventions," short, tight keyboard pieces. Elie devotes chapters to various artists who used the technologies of their time to reconsider Bach and introduce his music to a new audience. The famed medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, for example, was also an accomplished organist whose biography of Bach as well as his recordings of Bach's Fugue in D Minor on wax-cylinder recordings introduced Bach's music to a world beyond the church. Pablo Casals recorded Bach's cello suites on 78-rpm record albums, bringing Bach into living rooms everywhere. Reading Elie's stately and gorgeous prose is much like losing oneself in Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations, for his study convincingly demonstrates that the music of Bach is the most persuasive rendering of transcendence there is.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003) returns with a tour de force about Johann Sebastian Bach and a description and assessment of the recordings that have made his work an essential part of our culture. Elie, a former senior editor with FSG and now a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, tells a polyphonic tale, weaving throughout his narrative a history of the recording industry and brisk biographies of Bach and the 20th-century performers who first recorded his work for mass audiences, including Albert Schweitzer, Leopold Stokowski, Pablo Casals and Glenn Gould. The author begins with a snapshot of Bach's pervasive presence today, then takes us back to 1935 and Schweitzer's recordings of Bach's organ works on wax cylinders. Throughout the text, Elie moves us forward in the history of technology--from 78s to LPs to tapes to CDs to MP3s, showing how Bach managed to remain relevant. We also follow the careers of his principals; Elie's treatment of the talented and troubled Gould is especially sensitive and enlightening. Occasionally, the author enters the narrative for a personal connection, perhaps nowhere more affectingly than in his account of the time he danced in the rain on the Tanglewood grass while Yo-Yo Ma played a Bach cello suite. Elie also tells us how other cultural figures have employed the music and the man--e.g., Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach, the 1968 album Switched-On Bach and the use of Bach in films and on TV. The author's passion, thorough research and imaginative heart produce one revelation after another.” ―Kirkus (starred review)
“Fascinating and engagingly written, [Reinventing Bach] emphasizes that Bach--whose greatness as a composer, for Mr. Elie, is ‘total and inviolable'--was also a pioneer of technology: not just a master organist but a master organ builder and repairer; a theoretician who investigated the possibilities of a tuning system that changed the way music sounds and is still in use; a composer who embraced the art of transcription and would not have minded at all, and maybe anticipated, that his pieces would one day be reconceived for Moog synthesizers and small ensembles of swinging, scatting singers . . . [Elie] writes beautifully about music . . . the book is a page-turner with astute accounts of Bach's life folded in.” ―Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
“[Reinventing Bach is] erudite, poetic and occasionally provocative . . . Elie, an author and editor, is the kind of listener-enthusiast who once rode a train from New York to Durham, N.C., with no other company than a multidisc set of the St. Matthew Passion and an album by B.B. King. And his enthusiasm is catching.” ―Bill Marvel, The Dallas Morning News
“[Reinventing Bach] is structured around a well-informed and empathetic biography of Bach, intercut with lively accounts of five pioneering performers who made famous Bach recordings: Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Leopold Stokowski, Glenn Gould and Yo-Yo Ma. Linking them through their love of Bach is intriguing, even if in other respects they are slightly strange bedfellows. Elie interweaves their stories, cutting-and-pasting them into a vivid mosaic, though his sudden juxtapositions can be as jarring as they are stimulating. Elie is an acute and passionate listener, writing sensitively about music's impact on him.” ―Susan Tomes, The Independent
“Paul Elie's passionate and grand book . . . is a weave of stories, emulating the play of voices in Bach's music . . . Elie places a lot of faith in recordings, and writes wonderfully about their power and their atmosphere.” ―Jeremy Denk, New Republic
“[Reinventing Bach] is an . . . ultimately impressive testimony to Bach's power to speak to successive generations.” ―The New Yorker
“An appreciation of Bach that is both impassioned and subtle.” ―Ivan Hewett, Reinventing Bach
“Paul Elie's new book on Johann Sebastian Bach is a wonderful piece of writing that's hard to categorize: a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, a history of recorded sound, an analysis of Bach's interpreters over the years, and a virtuoso attempt to explain why Bach is simply the greatest composer of all time . . . None of these descriptions does justice to Elie's Reinventing Bach, which is written like a great piece of music--with its own rhythm, counterpoint, moments of deep reflection, and spectacular flourishes of verbal dexterity. Elie . . . accomplishes all this by following the classic advice to writers: show, don't tell . . . Elie's felicitous word choices make this compendium consistently entertaining . . . Through all these recordings, as he notes, ‘the dead continue to speak,' and Elie's book has brought the composer and his interpreters brilliantly alive.” ―Melinda Bargreen, The Seattle Times
“[Reinventing Bach] is a book of epic sweep, like a novel made up of multiple strands . . . Elie deploys considerable scholarship . . . and he writes beautifully. He makes a strong case that within less than a century a succession of new recording media . . . have brought Bach's music, in multiple versions, to vast numbers of new listeners at the press of a button. It is a luxury previously unavailable even to princes, who in order to enjoy live performances had to employ entire orchestras. Recording technology has made a monarch of everyone. A chapter or two into the book, you will find yourself reaching out for your ‘Goldberg Variations.'” ―The Economist
“Confident and informative, unafraid to judge but never polemical, Elie's big book shows how, and asks why, Bach's works have been so valuable, and so adaptable . . . Elie gives fluent force to Bach's biography . . . You can learn a great deal of music history--and of other history: the wars of religion, the civil war in Spain, the history of television--from Elie, but he has not simply told good stories. Instead, he uses these stories (including Bach's own) to make his own always attentive and sometimes exultant claims about how Bach's compositions work, and about what great performers have done with and for them . . . Elie's ‘gratitude for the music of Bach' (as he puts it), and his attention to others' gratitude, has an inevitable spiritual cast, one consonant with Bach's writings and with Bach's life: if this music, so "manifestly a source of transcendence," does not require us to thank a Creator, its power and its persistence can make us feel glad and grateful nevertheless.” ―Stephen Burt, National Book Critics Circle
“Reinventing Bach is a curious and wonderful book, delightful and challenging at the same time. Among musicologists and classical music lovers, Johann Sebastian Bach's place in the canon of western music is secure, but what Paul Elie demonstrates is that Bach has a place much bigger than that . . . [Elie's prose] is cognate with the musical forms and procedures that Bach used in his own creative and very personal vein. At the end of Reinventing Bach Elie says, '...our experience of the [Bach] recordings, as the recorded life of Bach reveals, has made us fluent in the practices that traditions of the spirit prize: scrutiny of the past, communication across the ages, a reluctance to judge by appearances, and the recognition that the dead continue to speak and the sounds they make, amplified right, are a kind of music.'
This is the meaning of this curiously inventive book, a book that performs a literary counterpoint among the various stories that the author tells to enlighten our hearts and minds with the depth and spirituality of the music of Bach-but not only that. The author imitates in his craft that spirit of invention that he carefully shows characterized the music of the great master. It takes some time before the reader understands why in any deep way the personalities he chooses and their stories are allowed to invade this life of Bach, but eventually the literary invention becomes clear. It is a vehicle to engage the invention of Bach himself. The book itself is not about only the music of J. S. Bach and the effect of his music through the centuries since his death. The book is also a narrative of the technology of recording and how various well-known musicians contributed in astounding ways to the historical narrative around that technology that we usually take for granted . . . [works] are woven into the narrative, but Elie often gives interpretation and commentary that is usually spot on . . .The kaleidoscopic perspective of this book is thrilling and very satisfying.” ―T. Frank Kennedy, S.J., America Magazine
“Elie . . . has the ability to weave together many small stories to narrate a big story . . . Elie's narrative is like a well-crafted oratorio.” ―Christian Century
About the Author
Paul Elie, for many years a senior editor with FSG, is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. His first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle award finalist in 2003. He lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PART I
Revival
>>1>> This, you say to yourself, is what the past sounded like: rougher, plainer, narrower than the present yet somehow more spacious, a place high-skied and open to life.
The pipes ring out once, twice, a third time. Then with a long, low swallow the organ fills with sound, which spreads toward the ends of the instrument and settles, pooling there. The sound is compounded of air and wood and leather and hammered metal, but how the sound is made is less striking than what it suggests: the past, with all its joists and struts and joinery, its sides fitted and pitched so as to last a lifetime.
The organ is a vessel on a voyage to the past, and that opening figure is a signal sent from ship to shore—a shout-out to the past, asking it to tell its story.
Now the sound spreads emphatically from the low pipes up to the high ones and down again, tracing a jagged line of peaks and spires—an outline of the lost city of the past, a message tapped out from the other side.
>>2>> Albert Schweitzer recorded Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on December 18, 1935, at the church of All Hallows by the Tower in London.
He was the world’s best-known organist, although he lived many miles from an organ; he was far better known than Bach himself had ever been, and the fact weighed on him, for he thought of Bach’s music as a refuge from his fame—as the music of an earlier, purer time.
He climbed the steps to the organ loft, took off his coat, and tried to concentrate. For two nights he had played Bach’s preludes and fugues to the empty church. It was the oldest church in the City of London, already seven hundred years old when it was threatened by the Great Fire of 1666. Now the worn stone of its walls and the smoky glass of its windows seemed to echo his fear that European civilization was ending—“beginning to melt away in our hands,” as he put it. The old City was overrun by motorcars. The organ was recent and mechanized, not the trim eighteenth-century type he favored. The windows rattled when he sounded the low pipes. He and his two apprentices took turns climbing a ladder to dampen the loose glass with towels.
Making a recording was complicated, too. The technicians spoke English, a language he had not mastered. He had to stop playing in odd places or repeat whole fugues three and four times. The recording process would never fully capture the sound of the organ in its surroundings—the essence of organ music, in his view—and he would never be a natural recording artist.
Yet as he settled behind the organ he felt at home. After two nights, he was familiar with the two keyboards and the hand-worn wooden stops. He sat upright, exhausted but invigorated, in vest and shirtsleeves, feet on the pedals, arms spread as if to echo the two wings of his white mustache, eyes on the pipes tapering up and out of sight.
Thirty years earlier he had renounced a life in music for one in medicine, training to run a clinic for poor people at the village of Lambaréné in the French Congo—to be a “jungle doctor in Africa,” as the press put it. He had wanted to do “something small in the spirit of Jesus”—to make his life an argument for a way of being that was grounded in what he now called reverence for life. But his act of renunciation had turned into something else: a double life in which he spent half the year in bourgeois Europe describing the poverty of Africa. Was this really the way to be of service—to become a freak, an exhibit of human virtue at its most self-congratulatory? Might it not have been better to do something small the way Bach had done, hunkering down behind the organ in Leipzig and making music that shouted from the housetops about reverence for life?
It might have been. But it was too late. At age sixty, he felt old—“an old cart horse … running in the same old pair of shafts.” He had written an autobiography as a kind of testament. He had made arrangements for the supervision of the clinic after his death. Germany was lost to Nazism. Europe was going to war again, and he was struggling, in a book, to set out the political and social dimensions of his philosophy as a corrective. For the first time in his life, the words would not come.
The recordings offered a way out. The hope of making them had sustained him on long nights in the tropics, as he played Bach on a piano fitted with organ pedals and lined with zinc to ward off moisture. The sale of them, in a pressboard album of shellac discs, would raise money for the clinic—for medicines, lamps, an X-ray machine. More than that, they would do with a few nights’ work what he had striven to do over several years in his book about Bach’s music. They would express his life as a musician and spread it across long distances. They would set the past against the present, and would put forward the music of Bach as a counterpoint to the age, a sound of spiritual unity to counter “a period of spiritual decadence in mankind.”
To his schedule of lectures and recitals, then, he had added these recording sessions at All Hallows. The technicians had brought equipment from the EMI compound in St. Johns Wood, crossing London in a specially outfitted truck, which was now parked in the lane outside. A microphone hung from the ribbed vault in the nave. Electrical cables threaded up the aisle and around the altar to the sacristy, where the disc-recording console stood at the ready.
Now a handbell rang, a signal from the technicians that a fresh cylinder was turning. It was time to make a recording.
The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor: it was in this, the music of Bach, especially, that Schweitzer felt reverence for life—felt the “real experience of life” that had led him to medicine and Africa. Making these recordings, he was fully alive. He straightened his back and began to play, repeating the opening figure once, twice, a third time.
He played for about ten minutes, pausing once while the technicians replaced one disc with another. He played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue the way he had played it in Paris in his student days: as a sermon in sound, an expression of the unity of creation that he feared lost forever.
>>3>> For those ten minutes Schweitzer’s life overlaps with ours. In the music, he is present to us—more so, it seems to me, than he was to most of the people who were actually in his presence while he was alive.
At the peak of his renown Life magazine called him “the greatest man in the world.” Since then he has faltered in the test of time; the adjectives once affixed to him have come unstuck, and the great man—doctor, musician, philosopher, humanitarian, and celebrity all in one—now appears a problematic, compromised figure: his project paternalistic, his methods condescending, his view of the people he worked with in Africa more akin to the crude racial stereotypes in Kipling and Conrad than to any ideal found in the gospels.
But his take on the Toccata and Fugue hasn’t lost its power. The music he made in those ten minutes is still bright, brave, confident in its cause. It beams Bach out into the night with an electric charge, which will outlast us the way it has outlasted him.
The question is: How does that happen? How does a snatch of recorded sound survive? How is it that a little night music made a long time ago can withstand the wear and tear of time?
The obvious explanation is that it is the music of Bach that survives, brought to life in Schweitzer’s performance. That composer, that work, that church, that instrument, that organist, that night—all combined to produce an “inspired” performance, one that (fortunately for us) was recorded.
That is true, but it doesn’t begin to tell the story. The performance is extraordinary, and yet so much of the power of this Toccata and Fugue in D Minor seems to be more than merely technical. The mysteries of that experience of music-making were cut into the grooves of a spinning disc that night, and now they are to be found between the lines of the recording—in the blurred edges, the high notes ground down to points, the surfaces that seem part of the structure, like the rattling windows of All Hallows.
Schweitzer characterized Bach as a technician of the sacred and a representative of a prior epoch in which spirit and technique went hand in hand. “In that epoch, every artist was still to some extent an instrument maker, and every instrument maker to some extent an artist,” he declared, setting the mechanical present against a past in which knowledge and know-how were indistinguishable. But to read Schweitzer on Bach is to recognize Schweitzer too as an exemplar of such an epoch, in which to “play” music was to take up an instrument, and in which examples of the music perfectly played were not near at hand but existed mainly in the imagination.
The Toccata and Fugue recording registers the technique of that age. By professional audio standards, it isn’t a “good” recording. It isn’t clear or accurate; it isn’t high fidelity, not even close. At times the great organ seems to wheeze, its sound as small and fragile as an accordion’s; in range, the recording goes from black to gray, from muddy to soupy, from loud to a little less loud.
This lack of fidelity is the source of its power. Recordings usually become more transparent the more you listen to them, until you feel that the recording is the music itself. Not this one. This is a recording, and it sounds like one: the more you listen to it, the more audible its extramusical qualities become. It is an old recording, and it sounds its age: the dark corners and muddied entrances are pockets of mystery; the hiss of the tape transfer is the sound of the mists of time.
It sounds like the past, that is. It isn’t timeless; ...
Most helpful customer reviews
37 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
Frustrating and fragmented
By B. Abramson
This is several books in one. There is a good biography of J.S. Bach, several biographies of Bach interpreters (Schweitzer, Casals, Gould), a history of the emergence of recording technology, and more. These are woven together but do not form a single fabric. Elie appears to be attempting to connect the way musicians interpret Bach with the way recorded music evolved. This attempt, at least for me, sank under a weighty burden of elaborate metaphors and literary prose. More than anything these sections reminded me of writings about art or literature: I understood every word, the occasional phrase, and not a single sentence. The metaphors are stretched beyond breaking point: a description of the working methods of James Watson and Francis Crick is included simply to show that the working methods of post-war recording engineers were similarly improvised and ad hoc. I frequently found myself asking "What is the point here?" and was rarely able to find a satisfactory answer. Surely the point must be more than "music can be interpreted in different ways and Bach's is particularly open to varied interpretation"? The biography of Bach is welcome, the remainder tries far to hard to make an argument that doesn't seem worth the effort.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Painstakingly researched, lovingly considered, and deftly written
By C.E. Alexander
All that is left of Johann Sebastian Bach is script. He produced over 1,100 individual works but all of it is inert, frozen in place on paper in an age when few of us can read sheet music. The composer's legacy is constantly in flux now, in reinvention, and no single reinvention is more equal than the others. Brace yourself, but there is no essential Bach.
Paul Elie makes this case on nearly every page of his book Reinventing Bach, but it is page 71 before he asks the corollary: "How are we supposed to listen to so much music, all of it so good?" Elie is referring to Bach's compositions for organ-"near three hundred works, every one sublime"-but he could pose the question for all music that predates the gramophone. Bach factored heavily in that technological debut, and has factored in each subsequent advance since then.
Or rather his performers have, those sometimes unwitting celebrities who interpret Bach posthumously and lend him a voice again. It seems like our generation has won an undeserved indulgence; after all, Bach's contemporaries knew him only from weekly, live church performances and palace appearances. Is it not unnatural that modern audiences in North America, Asia, or Africa should know him so much better than Europeans knew him while he lived, over 250 years ago? That is a rewording of Elie's question: how do we listen? Were vinyl and tape-recorded by irascible, sometimes neurotic virtuosos-the best way? Elie's response is an unqualified yes. For some, technological advances such as shellac and tape were as scandalous then as the pirate bays are now. So it is telling that Bach-incredibly prolific, and therefore as subject to unaffiliated recordings as any man or woman who has ever lived-was still dominant.
Those readers coming fresh off of Matthew Guerrieri's The First Four Notes should be prepared for a much wider scope. Reinventing Bach is significantly longer, and Elie introduces far more characters, many of whom do not survive their introduction. The often cruel lives suffered by pre-industrial artists are well-illustrated here, and Guerrieri's Europe-a place without light bulbs or metronomes-is downright pasteurized compared to those of Reinventing Bach. Elie reminds us that, by age ten, Bach had lost two brothers and both parents. When he was 35 he lost a wife and infant son within a year of each other. Ten of his children did not survive to adulthood. It reads as miraculous that the composer survived the pathogens and heartbreak at all, and truly unfathomable that his output was so high, so excellent, with so little duplication between any one piece and the rest.
Neither is Bach is the star of this book. He ages two years here, five years there, and composes hundreds of pieces of music while our backs are turned. Bach's list of posthumous advocates is the true emphasis; Elie introduces the perpetually nostalgic Albert Schweitzer, a German theologian and medical missionary. He presents Pablo Casals, the Spanish cellist and conductor who would become an outspoken protestor of the Franco regime, and who refused to visit in any nation that recognized Franco's leadership. In time we meet Leopold Stokowski, the cultured half of the team behind Fantasia, and soon thereafter we exchange an awkward wave with Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, "some kind of archangel" who took out a Lloyd's of London insurance policy on his hands, and suffered from deep germophobia. Elie reminds us of film score character Walter Carlos, who recorded Bach on an early version of the Moog, which was strictly monophonic and as big as a refrigerator. It is easy to forget that the 78, film soundtracks, multiple recording takes, stereo sound and the analog synthesizer once represented the technological advancement that the smart phone does today-and that some were as controversial as Napster was ten years ago-but Elie patiently, systematically reminds us.
Did all of the pieces fit together snugly? Do they ever? Schweitzer preferred life off of the grid, long before the short-lived Living With Ed. Casals wished his recordings could be sped up "in order to recover the liveliness that was lost during the mechanical process." Gould hated Fantasia and the Beatles-who, with Joni Mitchell, were jointly responsible for the Bachification of popular music-writing them off as "happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless." Gould also couldn't keep from humming during recording takes. Walter's surgical conversion to Wendy Carlos overshadows his (and her) contribution to the Bach legacy. Even Elie himself has reservations about Schweitzer's version of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor: "The sonic boxiness of it-very quality that makes it sound historic-makes it hard to listen for simple enjoyment."
At over 400 pages, the book feels long, especially when the thesis can be expressed so simply: technology only moves in one direction. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. But do the arithmetic: dedicating one written page to every three completed works-so many of them masterpieces-is hardly long-winded. Elie seems unconvinced with his own method of drawing parallels between the lives of J.S. Bach and the lives of his interpreters, a method he abandons just as the reader is getting used to it. Perhaps a better way to describe the narrative shifts from composer to performer and back again is contrapuntal, a musical adjective that no Bach reviewer can reasonably discard. Elie can turn a phrase, but rarely does. Yet again, that leaves us breathless when he chooses to. Take for instance the Luftwaffe bombing of London, which left the church of All Hallows gutted by fire. The reader cannot help but read between the lines:
"The bells, long tied up for the nightly blackouts, were set loose as the ropes burned through, and rang wildly before falling to the ground. The tower stood reverent amid the horror as the great organ, all its lead pipes swelling at once with hot air, screamed with the pain of war and then, the cabinet burning, the pipes melting into the air, went silent."
Does this belie the book's most glaring flaw? It is such a lovely passage and so feverish with nostalgia that there is no chance of his description stopping with objective reporting. The reader is forced to wonder if Elie suffers at least some of the retrogressive longings he so cleanly dismantles when they are voiced by others. Even so, Reinventing Bach establishes Elie as another Bach performer, and for the most part this recording is a painstakingly researched, lovingly considered, and deftly-written book.
20 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
His Master's Voice
By DEKidd
Reinventing Bach is an extremely fluid and enjoyable read. Elie does his readers the greatest service of reminding us that while Bach is frequently the gateway composer for people's classical music experience, he was anything but common--a radical innovator in composition, performance and in the refining and inventing of musical instruments. Elie then uses this portrait of Bach as a framework over which he lays out the innovations in performance, instrumentation and recording of Bach in the modern age. In addition the book gives us remarkable and welcome context in the overall musical recording world that wonderfully explodes what could otherwise be a narrowly focused study. Growing up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, my own first encounters with Bach were delivered by middle-aged, mid-Atlantic or mid-Western church organists who could somehow manage to make a fugue feel like a funeral march. When I first discovered my parents' Switched-On Bach LP, I almost couldn't believe the compositions hadn't be altered. Elie celebrates this idea--that so often our appreciation of music is affected by the medium, time and place of its delivery. The high point of my own journey with Bach and his various innovators came at Carnegie Hall listening to Yo Yo Ma's marathon performance of the Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Many thanks to Mr. Elie for increasing my appreciation for and understanding of that journey!
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