num_pages: 512
description: The story of a revolution in music and technology told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian BachIn Reinventing Bach his remarkable second book Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bachs 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 frontierrestoring 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 Bachs music the sound of modern transcendence. The sainted organist Albert Schweitzer used wax-cylinder recordings to broadcast Bachs organ works beyond the churches. Pablo Casals cutting 78s at Abbey Road Studios made Bachs cello suites existentialism for the living room; Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney with Fantasia made Bach the sound of childrens playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike. Glenn Goulds 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 passionand a story with special relevance in our time for it shows that great things can happen when high art meets new technology. 
language: English
title: Reinventing Bach
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux