an inventive view of bach

7/28/2019 An Inventive View of Bach

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www.timesunion.com

An inventive view of Bach

Elizabeth Floyd Mai

Author Paul Elie, who grew up in Latham and attended Shaker

High School, recently became a finalist for the National Book

Critics Circle Award. For the second time.

Elie's "Reinventing Bach" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) was

among just five finalists for 2012 in the genre of criticism.

Elie's first book, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An

American Pilgrimage" (FSG, 2003), which focused on four

American Catholic writers, including Thomas Merton and

Flannery O'Connor, was a finalist in biography. It won the

PEN/Martha Albrand Prize.

"Reinventing Bach" is hard to categorize. A biography of Bach ("a

technician of the sacred"), it is also, the author writes, "the story

of the revival of a traditional art through the technology that was

supposed to be its undoing."

Instead, for almost a century, constantly evolving technology from the wax-cylinder recordings by Alfred Schweitzer of Bach's

organ music through 78s, LPs and on through today's CDs and

compressed digital files, "technology has been the means of

classical music's survival." Technology, Elie argues, has only made

Bach's genius more objective.

From his home in New York City, Elie recently answered

questions about his new book.

Q: You write that Bach was "technologically the most advanced

musician of his era." Tell me a little bit about his inventiveness.

A: He was a renowned and sought-after expert in the design and

construction of pipe organs, and the pipe organ (along with the

sailing ship) was the most complex invention of the time.

He invented an instrument called the Lautenwerck a cross


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between a lute and a harpsichord. He wrote the fifth cello suite

for an unusual tuning that made the violoncello essentially a new

instrument and is thought to have had a five-string instrument in

mind, too. He wrote "The Well-Tempered Clavier" as a way of

exploring the "invention" of the tuning system known as "well-

tempered."

And above, or beneath, all this, he conceived of the creative

process as a process of invention and demonstrated this with the

works he called the "inventions."

In the Yale library there's a small book that Bach filled in with

compositions as a gift for his eldest son, and among them were anumber of the inventions. To see this book as I did, in an

episode I describe in the book was to look over Bach's

shoulder and see his process of invention at work. It was a

thrilling experience.

Q: What was one of the most surprising things you learned

during the course of your research for the book?

A: I was surprised to realize that Bach himself probably heard

certain of his works much less often than even the casual listener

hears them today, through recordings and live performances of

the "standard repertory." "The St. Matthew Passion," for example:

Bach led it in performance on Good Friday only twice the time

just after he wrote it and the time a few years later when theliturgical calendar again called for a Passion based on the Gospel

according to St. Matthew.

The cello suites evidently were written with a certain cellist in

mind. The "secular cantatas" were written, many of them, for

onetime civic occasions. Some of the orchestral music was

written for performance at Zimmermann's, a coffeehouse in

Leipzig, where the musicians essentially sight-read the pieces

straight through, over and out. Now that music is heard as

background music on public radio ad infinitum.

Q: Do you have a favorite piece by Bach, or a favorite type

of piece?

A: I am in the position of liking it all: sacred music and chambermusic, vocal and instrumental, old "Big Bach" recordings and

lean, spare "historically informed" ones, Rosalyn Tureck and


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Glenn Gould and Walter Carlos and Keith Jarrett (just to name a

few keyboardists who seem to divide people). To me, the

experience of recordings, the abundance and availability of them,

means we don't have to choose just one over all the others.

I was surprised to realize during Holy Week this year that I own a

dozen different recordings of "The St. Matthew Passion," from the

'30s up to the present. They're all good.

Elizabeth Floyd Mairis a free-lance writer. Reach her at

[email protected].

an inventive view of bach

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