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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two centuries later, pioneering musicians began to take advantage of breakthroughs in audio recording to make Bach\'s music the sound of modern transcendence.
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.
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
