Reinventing Bach

by Paul Elie

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.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Classical Music, Art

518 pages, Paperback

First published September 18, 2012

Reviews

[Andrew Schirmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

"My patience is now at its end," Bach, late in life, told a fellow Leipziger, one Johann Georg Martius, in a note sent from the Thomaskirche.

Mine reached its termination point somewhere near page two hundred of this bloated, overwritten, over-researched mess of a book.

The time for new approaches was at hand. George Orwell, finishing a novel that year, called it 1984, and with the Bachlike transposition of the 4 and the 8 of the current year he made the point (darkly)...

"Bachlike transposition of the 4 and the 8"? Eh? Eh?

This is not an easy review to write. Paul Elie is a writer and non-musician who clearly loves Bach recordings (to be differentiated from Bach's music--Elie goes to few concerts) and wants others to do so as well. This would ordinarily make him a sort of hero in my book. Reinventing Bach attempts to weave together a "golden braid" (sorry, couldn't resist)--strands of Bach's biography, major Bach interpreters, and the narrative of technological progress into a cohesive project. It's an interesting idea, but one that ultimately fails because of a few major foundational errors. In fact, this book is prime evidence of a phenomenon perhaps unique to our time--the conundrum of having all the information close at hand, but little understanding. Elie has drunk deep of Bach recordings and secondary literature, but he has not digested

1. Reach. Elie tries to place his "reinventions" in a larger context, and does so with superfluous detail. Is the discussion aided by knowing that KISS recorded in the same studio where a Bach recording was being made? That U2 was "wide awake in America" while Glenn Gould was doing this or that? That Elie bought B.B. King's Live at the Regal at the same time as a triple-CD set of the the St. Matthew Passion?

2. Techno-worship. It must be said that Elie focuses on the technological advancements facilitating passive enjoyment of Bach's art rather than those pertaining to musical performance. The development of the modern piano is glossed upon, but only. And do the the technological devices such as the turntable, the Discman, and the iPod give us any added insight to Bach's music other than portability? There is nothing wrong with recorded music, it can be a great way to experience and get to know composers and performers. But it does stand out that Elie (and other latter-day acolytes of recordings) often have an Alexandrian library of recordings at their fingertips, but little to show for it. It's a particularly modern malaise. Is the fact that Steve Jobs launched the iPad by playing a Brandenburg concerto relevant to anything but the fact that Steve Jobs liked Bach?

3. Flowery writing, dubious metaphor, and over-generalization. According to the flyleaf biography, Elie has worked as a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I wonder what he would have done, had one of his authors turned in a manuscript with a sentence like this:

His reputation would precede him, like an aria awaiting variations

or this:

Leonard Bernstein was making an instrument of television.

What is the "pattern of the Baroque"? Is is really "...the pattern of sound, the counterpoint, the harmony, the varieties of tempo and emotion, as a cultural pattern, at once arduous and reassuring..."?

I could go on and on, but it became apparent as the book went on that this is Elie's style, and to continue to harp on it would be cruel. Many of these things would be acceptable as blog posts or even program notes--but in a book published by a major firm (FSG), described by others as a non-fiction event of the season...

Finally, in focusing on recordings and the development of technology, Elie managed to miss out on the greater underlying causes for the mass dissemination of the former and the development of the latter. Not trying to be an annoying Marxist, but people should ask themselves--why do we listen to recordings rather than play chamber music with friends? Who has encouraged and benefited economically from the proliferation in recordings?

A word about accuracy. Reinventing Bach is riddled with errors. "Eleanor Rigby" is not played by a string quartet, but by an octet. The German titles of some of Bach's cantatas are mangled in such a way that it would lead one to believe that Elie uncritically transcribed them from his iPod: "Bist du bei mir", "Ruht wohl, ihr heiligen Gebeine".

It's been a long time since I've had such a visceral, negative reaction to a book. I rather expected more, and was disappointed. I wish Mr. Elie no ill will. In fact, I laud him for his interest in Bach and his efforts to bring others to a similar realization. There is indeed some interesting historical information to be gleamed here. Though I disagree with him on Glenn Gould (a personal choice), his choice of recordings is generally excellent.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 3 out of 5]

 
Bach on Record

Our lives are half-lives, our experience mediated, and so diminished, by technology. So we are told by our age's best and brightest […] of the struggle to stay afloat in the sea of artifice, the polluted data-stream.

To this conviction, the recorded music of Bach is contrary testimony. It defies the argument that experience mediated by technology is a diminished thing.

About 35 ago, after largely ignoring him, I discovered Bach as a personal source of intellectual fascination and spiritual solace. The catalyst for me was a recording: the second of Glenn Gould's two recordings of the Goldberg Variations, recorded in 1981. It also came at a time when I was suffering hand pain from working on a big chamber piece by Brahms. Bach's music was not merely something that I could listen to, but also explore on my own. Badly, I know; even his simpler pieces are deceptively difficult. But there has been some Bach score or other on my piano ever since. And playing has led in turn to more listening, in an era in which Bach is available on recordings everywhere, in every medium from solo instrument to giant mass, and in every interpretive style.

So it is a wonderful resource to have this history of Bach recording, and the artists who have laid down milestones along the way: Albert Schweitzer with the organ music, Pablo Casals with the cello suites, Rosalyn Tureck as merely one of a series of Bach interpreters on the piano who include Glenn Gould, of course, right on (though briefly) to Keith Jarrett and Simone Dinnerstein. He deals with Big Bach as promoted by Leopold Stokowski (and opened to vast audiences through Disney's Fantasia) and Ascetic Bach as in Joshua Rifkin's performances of the St. Matthew Passion and B-minor Mass with one singer to a part. He deals with Wendy Carlos playing Bach on a synthesizer, the Swingle Singers adapting instrumental pieces as jazzy vocal scat, and even with some crossovers with the pop world. Elie's musical descriptions are wonderful, but you do not have to rely on them. The glory is that you can sample just about everything he mentions by a click or two on YouTube, proof positive of his first assertion.

So what's not to like? The book contains far too much information about too many subjects, and lacks focus in prioritizing between them. For example, any given chapter may contain:
  • The making of a particular recording.
  • A description of the work performed in that recording.
  • The life of the performer, both before and after.
  • An installment in an ongoing history of the life of Bach.
  • An installment in an ongoing history of sound recording.
  • Parallel events in world history.
  • Further thoughts on artists featured in earlier chapters.

In the first two chapters, focusing on one artist and one work—the D-minor Toccata and Fugue recorded by Schweitzer and the (much longer) Cello Suites by Casals—the intensity of that focus provides a strong enough armature on which to hang all the rest. There is a lot of interest in how these two artists reflected Bach's moral values with a personal asceticism: Schweitzer by working half the year as a doctor in Gabon, Casals through his self-exile and ceaseless work against the Franco regime. But the Stokowski chapter proliferates with a host of non-Bach detail about Disney and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Tureck chapter segues into a long section on Glenn Gould, as though one were merely the back-up player to the other.

I looked in vain for insight on my own twin approaches to Bach, intellectual fascination and spiritual solace. It was there somewhere, I suppose, since Elie is attuned to just about everything, but it was buried in the excess of other information. I learned a great deal about the ubiquity of Bach in our time, but did not get a strong sense of why. But perhaps I need to turn back to the music for that. The thing that moved me most in the book was Elie's account of how my Peabody Conservatory colleague Leon Fleisher turned back to Bach as part of his thirty-year recovery from the loss of function in his right hand. The description moved me to watch his performance of "Sheep May Safely Graze" again on YouTube, and recall how Leon played it at the memorial service for another colleague some years ago. It is a study in quiet beauty: just the pianist almost motionless at the piano, his hands—both hands—gliding over the keyboard without a wasted movement, and that centuries-old message of consolation and peace.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Kathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had been very intrigued by he premise of this book, but when I got it from the library, its size dismayed me. As a person with rheumatoid arthritis who also is spending a lot of time flat on her back because of a pinched nerve, big heavy books are a problem. But it was on the margin, and it was the last library book I had, so I dove in. It was like diving into molasses. The preface was so repetitious and plodding, besides having many passages so florid that it seemed like a parody, I nearly gave up on it. But I soldiered on until I came to this:

"As an adult Bach wrote an account of the 'musical inclination' of his family, and this text became the basis for a hand-drawn family tree. The tree is a grotesquerie, a forest unto itself. From a narrow trunk, the branches are heavy with offspring. The descendants do not descend - they ascend aggressively, rising up shoulder to shoulder, out of the grip of their parents like snakes wriggling free of the underbrush toward the light."

Ouch. That is just painfully bad writing, worthy of the Bulwer-Lytton contest! And it goes on for over four hundred pages! I wanted to heave it across the room, but it doesn't belong to me. I'll just get it back to the library as soon as possible and reread a good book from my own shelves.

[Adosinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 500-page volume 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.

[John Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tough going, but worth it. Learnt a lot about Schweitzer, Casals and Glenn Gould. Learnt a lot about JS Bach. Interesting concept following the recording history of Bach music.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 ½ stars. Right in the middle.

This book is a mess.

Appreciative Enquiry: clearly this book is a labor of love for Elie. He without a doubt loves Bach’s music (especially recordings of it), and goes at great emotional length to recount autobiographical moments of discovery of that music. As a book about the history of recording technology, it’s somewhat interesting. And, particularly early on, there are small handfuls of phrases/sentences/paragraphs that were stirring enough for me to highlight. The opening chapter and a half (or so), describing Albert Schweitzer and the young Pablo Casals, was quite engrossing.

Then it all unravels. What is the book really about? I’m not sure: it’s more like 5 or 6 different books all jumbled together into one without a lot of satisfying connective tissue. I appreciate any effort to bring together disparate strands to highlight the “interconnectedness of all things,” but the end result here is more like a massively long rough draft. Elie gets lost in the weeds so often (especially with the overly-long and ultimately boring recounting of Glenn Gould’s life and antics) — that the reader is left to wonder if the weeds aren’t the main focus of the book. Too many topical cul-de-sacs happen throughout the book to try to mention here.

On a personal irritation note: for a book written in 2012, Elie frustratingly describes the Historical Performance Practice/Period-instrument phenomenon as a caricature, like it’s stuck in the early 1970s, and when he does encounter a performance or recording that seems to go against his preconceptions about that genre, he bafflingly downplays the HIP nature of the performance. But I suppose for someone who loves Glenn Gould as much as Elie does, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Summation: don’t entirely avoid it, but read at your own risk. If you want a book *about* Bach and his music, make a straight line for JE Gardiner’s “Castle of God.” If you want a meandering slog about “diverse people who happened to play Bach’s music and maybe listen to recordings of it,” interspersed with splices of Bach’s biography, and a history of the recording industry between 1910 and 2010 — albeit with occasional good moments — this is for you.

[Bookworks Albuquerque · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm completely absorbed in this book. When I first began reading, I knew I would love it. In the introduction, the author relates a moment at the Musical Instrument Museum in Berlin, when he stood in solemn awe contemplating one of Bach's own instruments, a cembalo (harpsichord), keys worn smooth and yellow by Bach himself, but the strings missing. The instrument is now permanently silent, the music now only a memory, a myth, for we'll never truly know how the instrument sounded to Bach's ears. The very next moment, he realizes the thrill of seeing another instrument, this one being the synth used by Pink Floyd on the album "Wish you were here." This is the author signaling that his new book, ostensibly about Bach, is going to develop his own philosophy of how music exists to him. Music only exists if it is recorded, codified, and able to be held in the hand, studied. He has no patience for performance, unless that performance exists on a recording, able to be replayed and studied. This philosophy of his drives me crazy, and I find myself silently arguing with him, even as I delight in his description of the seminal recordings of Bach over the past century. Elie definitely has a knack for writing descriptively about music. It's inspired me to dig up many of the recordings he describes (thankfully, readily available online), to listen and admire the beautifully poetic way he describes subtle (or not so subtle) differences between, say Yo-Yo Ma's various recordings of the cello suites and Pablo Casals'.--Aaron Cummings, bookseller

[Jeff Crompton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elie's sprawling book is about Bach and his music, but also about the periodic rediscovery, renewal, and reinvention of his music over the years. Besides Bach himself, Elie's main "characters" are Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Leopold Stokowski, and Glenn Gould. Each one of these figures brought Bach into his time and his world, largely through recordings. (I have long been fascinated by the difference between music and recorded music; Elie understands the dichotomy clearly.)

One of the chapters is entitled "A Man in a Room," and that image provides a recurring theme throughout the book - Bach, alone in a room writing music; Casals, alone in a room playing one of the Cello Suites, as was his daily practice; Gould, alone in a room, recording the Goldberg Variations.

Reinventing Bach is 415 pages long - and that's not counting the endnotes. That's maybe a little longer than it should have been, but I'm willing to give Elie the benefit of the doubt, since most of the book is fascinating.

[David Mcnaughton · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable book, a little disjointed, but the style suits the content

Three quotes

From Glenn Gould (p 218)
"Bach was first and last, an architect, a constructor of sound, and what makes him so inestimably valuable to us is that he was beyond a doubt the greatest architect of sound who ever lived"

From Pablo Casals (p 102)
" (In music) the work of preparation ruled by discipline should finally disappear, so that the elegance and freshness of the form should strike us as being spontaneous"

From Albert Einstein (p 169)
" This is what I have to say about Bach's life and work. Listen, play, love, revere - and keep your mouth shut"

[Patrick Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was given this book as a birthday gift. I am not qualified to comment on the scholarship or on Paul Elie's understanding of Bach's lasting impact, but I found the book to be engaging, enlightening, and stimulating. The next time I sing a Bach cantata with our church choir I will do so with a very different perspective.

[Peter Herrmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Am mid-way through this book. It's a real gem. I'm learning so so much from it (e.g. I had no idea, for example, why Leopold Stokowski - or indeed anybody - had transcribed some of Bach's major organ works for ENTIRE ORCHESTRA! [which perhaps shows how little I know]). This book is not simply about Bach ... but about his influence down through the centuries, and of the great musicians (and others) who were inspired by his music. This book is phenomenally well researched, with facts that you will not find in Wikipedia. There are times when the author goes overboard in verbosity, but he can and should be forgiven for that because this book is so penetrating and informative. (BTW, I was looking for something else in the library - unrelated to this book - when it caught my eye; glad it did).

[Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me start by saying that while I enjoyed this book, I would have liked it even better had it contained about 150 fewer pages. Elie's tale is at its best while discussing the circumstances and inventiveness of Bach's compositions, and his embrace of technological advances during his lifetime. Bach's story is interwoven with the stories of his major interpreters, like Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould, Yo-Yo Ma; even Wendy (Walter) Carlos' "Switched-On Bach" makes a brief appearance. The stories of each of these interpreters brings in the technologies that appear during their careers: the wax cylinder (Schweitzer), 78 rpm acetate discs (Casals), 33 1/3 LP vinyl (Gould), digital (Yo-Yo Ma.) For me, Elie's philosophical discussions are overlong and a bit overwrought, but the book's still worth reading.

[Debs Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

An original look at Bach by analyzing how each musical age has reinvented the musical skill of Bach’s compositions to reflect changes in instrumentation, recording and the move from live to recorded music. Each section of the book reveals some of Bach’s life and then examines the music through the life and performance of a different instrumentalist. This provides fascinating observations of the social and cultural context of the performer and how Bach’s music sits within it. It also reveals the enormous range of Bach’s compositions, Patterson, and instruments he composed for. I appreciated being able to listen to many of the musicians and works Elie discussed as I was reading, which added a whole new layer to the experience of both book and music.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

To simplify Elie’s multi-faceted, hugely ambitious, wildly successful and utterly affirmative opus, ‘Reinventing Bach’ locates the composer in time and place in the context of his works, juxtaposing each key moment or composition with a biographical account and psychological profile of some of the most celebrated performers of those works (Schweitzer, Casals, Gould, et al), whilst interwoven through these vignettes is a disquisition on the history, technology and socio-cultural impact of recorded music. But the book’s far more wide-ranging than that.

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive book on the sweeping influence Bach has had over time as the music industry has changed over the years. Densely with information, this book did however take two years for me to finish. Great insights, with excellent references that had me listening to different recordings to better understand what the author was explaining. A good read for anyone seeking to understand the significance of Bach’s music in human history.

[Judy Frabotta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is THE book for contemporary Bach lovers. Very engaging style and I love the juxtaposition of biographical context from Bach's life and biographical context from some of his greatest interpreters. A real delight. I read it slowly, often to sound track's I could find on-line. And I could definitely wring more pleasure out of this book by doing it once again, even slower.

[Betty · Rating 1 out of 5]

In all fairness, I skimmed this book for the bits about Glenn Gould, and from that I could tell it's an absolute piece of trash. The author is fond of stretching the truth in order to add drama to his already melodramatically written story. Awful. Thank goodness I looked at a library copy, rather than buying.

[Andrew Spitznas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative, on the lives of Bach, Schweitzer, Casals, Gould, and Ma, but a slog in places. Elie knows his stuff but is too prolix and florid for his (and our) own good. Still, I'm glad I read it.

[Conrad Leibel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense and broad overview of a substantial portion of musicians, artists and entrepreneurs who have found new ways of making Bach's music.

[Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

First half was great, but the second half felt the same

[Pieter · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had potential, but doesn’t quite deliver. Elie wants to show how the recording era changed our relationship with Bach’s music. That idea is worth exploring. And there are parts of the book that work well, especially the chapters on Casals, Schweitzer, Gould, and Stokowski. They give some insight into how Bach’s music has been reinterpreted across the twentieth century.

But the book tries to do too much. It shifts between biography, personal reflection, cultural commentary, and history of technology, without clear direction. The structure is fragmented. The style is often too florid, with literary analogies that feel forced. Elie brings in names like Steve Jobs, and Hofstadter, but not always with clear relevance.

Late in the book, Elie writes more personally. Those parts are more grounded and emotionally engaging. If the book had started from that place, and stuck with it, it might have been more powerful.

In the end, I respect the effort, but the result is messy and unfocused. A two-star read for me, maybe two and a half if you’re in a generous mood.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book which is as much a biography of some of the more famous modern Bach interpreters as well as old JS. Interesting, if a bit nerdy.

[Kurt Gottschalk · Rating 4 out of 5]

All told, this is a really great book. Unfortunately, since I read the final part last, I'm left with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

Essentially what Paul Elie has written is an account of Bach in the 20th Century. He provides a fair bit of biography of J.S. himself but since there's not much new to report there, he uses junctures in Bach's career as jumping-off points to discuss Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals and Glenn Gould, as well as a particularly fascinating account of the working relationship between Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney in the making of "Fantasia." All of these people helped bring the music of Bach to a much broader audience than it had known in the previous century. The book doesn't provide full bios on any of those figures either, but it's an illuminating read (or, at least, it was for me).

It's when Elie gets to the second half of the 20th Century that things start to unravel. His discussion of Bach in relation to rock music and digital technology, or as a solace against terrorism, falls flat. It's not to say Bach is no longer relevant, only that Elie's narrative no longer is. The inclusion of Yo-Yo Ma as a proponent along the lines of Casals and Gould isn't entirely convincing, or at least doesn't advance the biography of Bach's music. And when, 400 pages in, he starts indulging in his personal Bach discoveries, the reader can be forgiven for flipping to the back in hopes that the notes and index take up the bulk of the remaining pages. (They do, about the last 100.)

"Reinventing Bach" is well worth the read. However, if you're not a compulsive consumer of text it's also worth skipping the final "Postlude" section. The rest is entertaining and informative, and I commend Elie on publishing a nonfiction book without a subtitle.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Spirituality of technology" is one of this book's themes: we've been in the age of recordings since the 1930s or so, and that makes us feel time differently. This book explores that theme through stories of people who have recorded Bach ("the greatest of Protestant musicians").
I read this book because I enjoyed the author's passion for 20th century American Catholic literature in The Life You Save May Be Your Own . The author shares his passion for Bach's music here. He uses religious language to describe the joys of Bach, e.g., p. 72, 'It just doesn't matter how many pieces there are . . . what matters . . . is that you will never get to the bottom of it. Its abundance is not an abstraction, like infinity. A recondite theological term catches the sense of it: supererogatory, which means "more than is necessary for salvation."'
There are also some interesting ideas on how the experience of listening to classical music has changed, e.g., p. 84, the author describes the early days of music recordings: "Record buffs felt the need to defend their habit of solitary listening to the less obsessed, who saw it as idle and anti-social, like drinking alone or snorting cocaine." (the author cites Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude here). I wish the book had more of this stuff. I think it's an interesting practical problem for missionaries about how classical sacred music has been unbundled from the church. We don't need to get our sacred music from the church anymore: we can be spiritual at home thanks to our headphones.

[Renee Lareau · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I loved Paul Elie's first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and I've always loved listening to and performing & playing classical music. It's a beautifully written exploration of how the way people have experienced and/or performed Bach over the decades--from J.S. Bach's church concerts to the first wax cylinder recordings by Albert Schweitzer to the London recording studio on Abbey Road and all the way through the iPod and Yo-Yo Ma. Elie writes,
"Recordings will never be enough—every age needs its own Bach interpreters, who play Bach in certain rooms on certain nights, and who alone know how they will play it."

I especially enjoyed reflections of cellist Pablo Casals on the subversive role of an artist within a given culture and how performing music (or refusing to perform music) can serve as a political statement: "An affront to human dignity is an affront to me; and to protest injustice is a matter of conscience. Are human rights of less importance to an artist than to other men? Does being an artist exempt one from his obligations as a man? If anything, the artist has a particular responsibility, because he has been granted special sensitivities and perceptions, and because his voice may be heard when others are not. Who, indeed, should be more concerned than the artist with the defense of liberty and free inquiry which are essential to his very creativity?"

[Carole · Rating 3 out of 5]

After glancing through multiple reviews of Reinventing Bach, I downloaded a sample and headed to the gym. It took only a few minutes of reading on the treadmill to conclude that the book was going to provide an intelligent, interesting, absorbing experience. Fast forward an hour or so.....I’m in the car on my way home with Satellite Radio tuned to Symphony Hall. What’s playing? Bach’s 1st violin concerto transcribed for guitar. A composer born in 1685 who wrote this wonderful piece of music around 1730, still bringing pleasure nearly 400 years later through the magic of 21st c. technology. I took it as a sign and forged ahead.

Part biography, part history of music technology from the wax cylinder to the digital age with its iPods, iPads, & smart phones, part a recitation of Bach’s influence on 5 famous musicians, (Albert Schweitzer....known as well for his musicianship as his work in Africa, Pablo Casals, Leopold Stokowski...with Walt Disney, Glen Gould, and Yo Yo Ma) Reinventing Bach meanders widely to show how Bach’s music has been adapted by such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Savon Glover, Bobby McFerrin, Steve Jobs, etc. and yet still kept in its purest form by others. My basic criticism is that Elie jumps around too much, leading to a lack of focus, both his & mine. Conclusion: I was ready to listen, not read.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anything but dry, this is the story of recorded music and how it has changed the way music is perceived as well as an entertaining bio of Bach. Warning, it can be an expensive read. I found myself adding many CDs to my collection.

I was delighted when Elise mentioned Pink Floyd early on. This is not a book locked into the past. He gives us an idea of the environment when a Bach piece was created, and contrasts that with the recorded history of the work.

Chapters about Bach are interspersed with portraits of Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glen Gould and other influential Bach interpreters; their lives, their approach to Bach, and how their recordings influence our relationship to Bach.

Elise does tend to make the same point over and over. Recordings make an ephemeral performance permanent. That has changed the way we hear a composition. Some strict editing would make the book tighter but I forgave the repetition for his infectious enthusiasm. I had many little epiphanies as I read, for example, Daniel Barenboim’s conception of music as the shaped air of a certain room on a certain night. I found myself repeatedly reconsidering my relationship to music as I read Reinventing Bach.

[David Rubin · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, Mr. Elie gives us mini-biographies of his twentieth-century performers and musical interpreters. He brings Bach thorough the multiple revolutions (as in "change") in sound technology during the past decades and how well the music has survived and even thrived.

We get biographies of Leopold Stokowski, Glenn Gould, Pablo Casals, and many more. Youtube is great to hear many of the performances mentioned. You will find yourself downloading MP3 files of works you already have in your library, but for which you want to get a performance mentioned in the book.

This book is fairly long, and by the time you are to the final third, you may get a bit tired of Glenn Gould. Nonetheless, this book will likely enhance your appreciation of both Bach's music and the talent of the people through whom the music reaches us.

[Chris Aylott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two-thirds of this book works. The biography of Bach is good, especially for someone like me who doesn't know as much as he should about the man or his music. The history of how Bach has been performed and recorded over the last century is fascinating. Elie traces the ways in which different recording technology changed the experience of playing and listening to Bach.

Elie also tries some music criticism. He should have stuck to the history. His criticism is dull, overblown, and fortunately easy to skip past. I'd much rather spend my time thinking about what the daily experience of music was like in Bach's time, and how much it has changed today and over the last century, and this is a good book for that.