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The Way of Bach: Three Years with the Man, the Music, and the Piano
A tale of passion and obsession from a philosophy professor who teaches himself to play Bach on the piano.
Dan Moller grew up listening to heavy metal in the Boston suburbs. But something changed when he dug out his mother's record of The Art of the Fugue, inexplicably wedged between 16 ABBA Hits and Kenny Rogers. Moller became fixated on Bach and his music, but only learned to play it for himself as an adult.
In The Way of Bach, Moller draws us into the strange and surprisingly funny world of the composer and his scene. Did you know The Goldberg Variations contain a song about having to eat too much cabbage? Or that Handel nearly died in a duel he fought while conducting an opera?
Along the way, Moller takes up such questions as, just what is so special about Bach’s music? What can Americans—steeped in pop culture—learn from European craftsmanship? And why do some people see a connection between Bach's music and God?
By turns witty and thought-provoking, Moller infuses The Way of Bach with insights into music, culture, and philosophy alike.
Dan Moller grew up listening to heavy metal in the Boston suburbs. But something changed when he dug out his mother's record of The Art of the Fugue, inexplicably wedged between 16 ABBA Hits and Kenny Rogers. Moller became fixated on Bach and his music, but only learned to play it for himself as an adult.
In The Way of Bach, Moller draws us into the strange and surprisingly funny world of the composer and his scene. Did you know The Goldberg Variations contain a song about having to eat too much cabbage? Or that Handel nearly died in a duel he fought while conducting an opera?
Along the way, Moller takes up such questions as, just what is so special about Bach’s music? What can Americans—steeped in pop culture—learn from European craftsmanship? And why do some people see a connection between Bach's music and God?
By turns witty and thought-provoking, Moller infuses The Way of Bach with insights into music, culture, and philosophy alike.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published November 3, 2020
14 people are currently reading
136 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
September 30, 2024
Dan Moller, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland, describes his experiences with Bach and, more specifically, learning to play Bach on the piano, despite never having had a piano lesson.
How hard can it be? His goal is to play the C minor fugue from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
This is generally considered one of Bach's easier fugues, but “easy” is relative, especially for a beginner who still needs to learn the notes on the piano.
Dan Moller writes with plenty of humor and self-deprecation. As a bumbling amateur pianist, much of what he goes through feels very familiar.
At times, he comes across as arrogant and contrarian, and I wasn’t always sure if his opinions were genuine or if he was just trying to be provocative.
For example, he expresses disdain for the Brandenburg Concertos, the harpsichord, and the recorder. While he does so humorously, you can’t help but wonder if he's just seeking attention with such blunt criticism.
Especially his certainty about some interpretations of specific works (like BWV 582) comes across as pompous and preachy.
I do, however, agree with his observations about Gould. His recordings are indeed benchmarks, but at some point, the constant humming can become tiring.
Despite some reflections coming off as pretentious, he does offer "food for thought." He rails against the idea that all classical music is good just because it is classical music. When he applies this to Bach, he ultimately concludes that not all of Bach’s music is great either. His arguments, however, don’t go much further than a personal dislike for the harpsichord, the recorder, and major keys, which seem to reflect personal taste more than sound reasoning.
This doesn’t detract from the enjoyment though. I read this little book with pleasure, and I can recommend it to anyone with an interest in piano and Bach in particular.
And it made me revisit the C minor fugue, for that alone I thank the author.
Rating: 3.5 stars.
How hard can it be? His goal is to play the C minor fugue from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
This is generally considered one of Bach's easier fugues, but “easy” is relative, especially for a beginner who still needs to learn the notes on the piano.
Dan Moller writes with plenty of humor and self-deprecation. As a bumbling amateur pianist, much of what he goes through feels very familiar.
At times, he comes across as arrogant and contrarian, and I wasn’t always sure if his opinions were genuine or if he was just trying to be provocative.
For example, he expresses disdain for the Brandenburg Concertos, the harpsichord, and the recorder. While he does so humorously, you can’t help but wonder if he's just seeking attention with such blunt criticism.
Especially his certainty about some interpretations of specific works (like BWV 582) comes across as pompous and preachy.
I do, however, agree with his observations about Gould. His recordings are indeed benchmarks, but at some point, the constant humming can become tiring.
Despite some reflections coming off as pretentious, he does offer "food for thought." He rails against the idea that all classical music is good just because it is classical music. When he applies this to Bach, he ultimately concludes that not all of Bach’s music is great either. His arguments, however, don’t go much further than a personal dislike for the harpsichord, the recorder, and major keys, which seem to reflect personal taste more than sound reasoning.
This doesn’t detract from the enjoyment though. I read this little book with pleasure, and I can recommend it to anyone with an interest in piano and Bach in particular.
And it made me revisit the C minor fugue, for that alone I thank the author.
Rating: 3.5 stars.
October 24, 2021
This may be the best book I've read on music and the experience of music. Hilarious at times, a little too uneven at times, still brilliant. More should come. As literature.
November 27, 2022
A book of narrative nonfiction by a philosopher who is learning to play Bach on the piano? Sounds right up my alley, and it was. I loved it. Though at times too erudite for my taste, on the whole I found it inspiring, funny, poignant, honest, and just a lot of fun to read. If I ever write a book, this is exactly the sort of book I’d want to write - something deeply thoughtful and personal, but genre-defying, offered to the world with the hope that it might resonate with a handful of people, but without really worrying so much if it doesn’t.
August 3, 2022
Thank God that’s over.
March 29, 2021
many exquisite metaphors and musical imagery that captured my imagination. I grew to appreciate the less-accessible works of Bach.
I wish I’d heard this one on audio. I wonder sometimes if the self-aggrandizement and self-absorption was a humorous choice, or just a fact that isn’t fully cloaked...
I wish I’d heard this one on audio. I wonder sometimes if the self-aggrandizement and self-absorption was a humorous choice, or just a fact that isn’t fully cloaked...
July 4, 2025
Lunatic Obsessions
Dan Moller’s The Way of Bach reminds me of the opening essay in neurologist Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, where a regular guy literally gets struck by lightning, develops an obsession to learn the piano, then starts channeling Mozart. Dan Moller’s obsession begins while perusing his parents’ record collection and stumbling on “Glenn Gould’s recording of The Art of Fugue wedged between Kenny Rogers and ABBA…”
This encounter with Bach was an unlikely lightning strike if we are to take him at his word.
Dan Moller has it hard because he is learning piano as an adult, spending hours every day like some kind of mentally ill lunatic in front of the piano ineptly practicing easy pieces over and over. He writes,
Can you imagine? (I practice on an electric keyboard with headphones on. This keeps my mistakes and awkward tempi private and allows people to regard me more as a madman than a victim of mental illness. Moller is practicing on an actual physical piano, an instrument that can be heard by those across the street and even several houses distant which allows the inept no such pretense.)
In the beginning, he doesn’t even know how to read music, so he buys books to help figure things out, and starts in on the baby stuff for beginner pianists. While dreaming in counterpoint and listening to The Goldberg Variations, he is stuck with trying to learn “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” on the piano. Oh, and the piano he just purchased for $15,000.
Anyone familiar with the human learning process knows how difficult it is to learn certain things when you are an adult. Language, reading music—really difficult. Also learning the motor skills required to get your fingers on the right keys on the piano. Difficult enough in music that mostly just chords (simultaneous notes), yet practically impossible when playing multiple lines of music threading itself between the fingers of two hands.
Moller is very frank about what it’s like being an adult playing Bach’s little-kid level Inventions even while being obsessed with mastering the slightly-older-kid level c-minor fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Scaler runs on the piano and things like trills and those sorts of ornaments respond well to young motor skills, but not so much for fat-finger adult ones.
But Bach, aside from being one of the most complex Western composers, was also a great keyboard pedagogue. He was a loving and generous mentor to his first students, his sons, who were destined to become keyboardists and composers just like daddy. We have a complete graduated set of learning material from little kid level (The Inventions), through Master of the Universe level (Goldberg Variations, and Preludes and Fugues for pipe organ). On a compositional level, Bach’s Art of Fugue is a kind of sacred text where a simple theme is folded on itself like an MC Escher graphic in a set of 14 separate pieces. This work is itself a product of Bach’s own lunatic obsession and was never completed. A laboriously collected published edition sold only 30 copies and it waited 172 years before it was actually performed in its entirety.
Well, obsession is the point. You can't understand Bach without being obsessed with Bach and understanding Bach's own obsession. What makes a person compose 14 fugues with one theme that stretches and folds itself upside down for performance on no particular instrument or set of instruments is the same thing that makes an adult play baby Bach endlessly on a piano just in an effort to become part of the music, part of the world that that obsession creates.
Moller is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, so wouldn’t you know it this book about his obsessions and seemingly impossible struggles with learning to play Bach is about the Meaning of Life, being lost, being found, being discouraged, and coming to new realizations--being human. Or am I reading too much into this? In any case, very thought-provoking.
So, this book isn’t for everyone, this book isn’t so much about Bach (although it is) as it is about being human even if that means becoming an obsessed lunatic. You don’t really need to know about music or Bach in specific, but that probably helps. If not you need to have, or have had some kind of analogous obsession or at least be curious about such. And I have to say it: I’ve never read anything like this before. If it rings a bell, you really need to read it.
Dan Moller’s The Way of Bach reminds me of the opening essay in neurologist Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, where a regular guy literally gets struck by lightning, develops an obsession to learn the piano, then starts channeling Mozart. Dan Moller’s obsession begins while perusing his parents’ record collection and stumbling on “Glenn Gould’s recording of The Art of Fugue wedged between Kenny Rogers and ABBA…”
This encounter with Bach was an unlikely lightning strike if we are to take him at his word.
“I had been raised, like most Americans, as a semiliterate peasant, directed mainly toward athletics and the practical knowledge required to make money.”Despite that, he encounters Bach’s Fugue in c-minor from the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier and decides as an adult that he must learn how to play it. Moller seems to have become enraptured with the composer renowned for dense, difficult, and complex weaves of polyphony.
Dan Moller has it hard because he is learning piano as an adult, spending hours every day like some kind of mentally ill lunatic in front of the piano ineptly practicing easy pieces over and over. He writes,
“Once I kept playing when Lauren came home, and I could hear her silence as I continued awhile, and when I went out to investigate, there she was, softly weeping.”
Can you imagine? (I practice on an electric keyboard with headphones on. This keeps my mistakes and awkward tempi private and allows people to regard me more as a madman than a victim of mental illness. Moller is practicing on an actual physical piano, an instrument that can be heard by those across the street and even several houses distant which allows the inept no such pretense.)
In the beginning, he doesn’t even know how to read music, so he buys books to help figure things out, and starts in on the baby stuff for beginner pianists. While dreaming in counterpoint and listening to The Goldberg Variations, he is stuck with trying to learn “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” on the piano. Oh, and the piano he just purchased for $15,000.
Anyone familiar with the human learning process knows how difficult it is to learn certain things when you are an adult. Language, reading music—really difficult. Also learning the motor skills required to get your fingers on the right keys on the piano. Difficult enough in music that mostly just chords (simultaneous notes), yet practically impossible when playing multiple lines of music threading itself between the fingers of two hands.
Moller is very frank about what it’s like being an adult playing Bach’s little-kid level Inventions even while being obsessed with mastering the slightly-older-kid level c-minor fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Scaler runs on the piano and things like trills and those sorts of ornaments respond well to young motor skills, but not so much for fat-finger adult ones.
But Bach, aside from being one of the most complex Western composers, was also a great keyboard pedagogue. He was a loving and generous mentor to his first students, his sons, who were destined to become keyboardists and composers just like daddy. We have a complete graduated set of learning material from little kid level (The Inventions), through Master of the Universe level (Goldberg Variations, and Preludes and Fugues for pipe organ). On a compositional level, Bach’s Art of Fugue is a kind of sacred text where a simple theme is folded on itself like an MC Escher graphic in a set of 14 separate pieces. This work is itself a product of Bach’s own lunatic obsession and was never completed. A laboriously collected published edition sold only 30 copies and it waited 172 years before it was actually performed in its entirety.
Well, obsession is the point. You can't understand Bach without being obsessed with Bach and understanding Bach's own obsession. What makes a person compose 14 fugues with one theme that stretches and folds itself upside down for performance on no particular instrument or set of instruments is the same thing that makes an adult play baby Bach endlessly on a piano just in an effort to become part of the music, part of the world that that obsession creates.
Moller is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, so wouldn’t you know it this book about his obsessions and seemingly impossible struggles with learning to play Bach is about the Meaning of Life, being lost, being found, being discouraged, and coming to new realizations--being human. Or am I reading too much into this? In any case, very thought-provoking.
So, this book isn’t for everyone, this book isn’t so much about Bach (although it is) as it is about being human even if that means becoming an obsessed lunatic. You don’t really need to know about music or Bach in specific, but that probably helps. If not you need to have, or have had some kind of analogous obsession or at least be curious about such. And I have to say it: I’ve never read anything like this before. If it rings a bell, you really need to read it.
March 16, 2021
A solid memoir filled with relatable experiences of the highs and lows of striving towards unattainable goals. It was especially inspiring for me as my life has recently had similar background features: I have an MA in philosophy and thought I'd go the academic route for a while (Moller is a philosophy professor); I encountered Bach as a teenager and have only recently been re-enamored with his work; I recently started playing piano again and was really only interested in playing Bach, I've been dealing with chronic pain (which has moreso limited me from playing guitar but still causes some problems on piano); I've suffered grief and anxiety at my limited abilities and limited time; and I've felt resentment towards work getting in the way of practicing. So reading Moller's memoir was deeply personal and inspiring. For that I give it 5 stars. However, this is a pretty niche set of interests and Moller doesn't do anything genre-defining and so I've given it a more modest and objective 3 stars.
November 18, 2022
This book started ON FIRE. Mr. Moller referenced Metallica and Bach in the same sentence and I was ready to GO with this book. By the end, the fire had petered out to that just-won't-let-it-go philosophical wrangling around a campfire and I was less enthralled.
All of that being said, I liked the book. I am a classically-trained pianist, it's what I do, it's what I teach, it's most of the music that I play for choirs and instrumentalists and vocalists and I really do love it. I also really love metal, and I love to go to metal shows and bang my head and I have no trouble with these two end points of the musical spectrum, nor do these two disparate musical genres give me any cognitive dissonance because whatever music speaks to you is what's best for you. I love, really, how Mr. Moller LOVES Bach and wants to understand Bach like he wants to dissect any other music he loves and listens to and I am here for that.
So yeah, I recommend it for a decent read.
All of that being said, I liked the book. I am a classically-trained pianist, it's what I do, it's what I teach, it's most of the music that I play for choirs and instrumentalists and vocalists and I really do love it. I also really love metal, and I love to go to metal shows and bang my head and I have no trouble with these two end points of the musical spectrum, nor do these two disparate musical genres give me any cognitive dissonance because whatever music speaks to you is what's best for you. I love, really, how Mr. Moller LOVES Bach and wants to understand Bach like he wants to dissect any other music he loves and listens to and I am here for that.
So yeah, I recommend it for a decent read.
November 17, 2020
Enjoyed going along on Moller's personal journey to understand Bach and tto learn to play his music: specifically "The Art of the Fugue". Not only does Moller explain his fascination with this particular piece of music and Bach but he generously exposes his thoughts, feelings and his life.
I will say that with regard to musicology and Bach, it was information overload at times. But in a general way I found it extremely interesting. Moreover, I greatly enjoyed Moller's wry humor and sardonic with along with his disparaging remark about his own life as a professor of Philosophy. It is a memoir of triumph over many hurdles with much self-searching thrown in for good measure. I recommend it.
I will say that with regard to musicology and Bach, it was information overload at times. But in a general way I found it extremely interesting. Moreover, I greatly enjoyed Moller's wry humor and sardonic with along with his disparaging remark about his own life as a professor of Philosophy. It is a memoir of triumph over many hurdles with much self-searching thrown in for good measure. I recommend it.
December 6, 2022
Here's a book which one is guaranteed to have a strong reaction to if nothing else. To be precise, Moller covers Bach superiority (obviously), Melville, liturgics, Kafka's Castle, education and friendship, math. It hit me right where it hurts, and was absorbing and excellent most of the time. The middle chapter speculating on Johann Sebastian himself drags - It's there that the misanthropy is hard to read with a light heart - and the philosophy in the last handful of pages is fluffy in all the wrong ways. But with those caveats in mind I was inspired by Moller's voice and passion for the composer. Sometimes I think I can buy that we, like music, are time: That is one way to give us the room to develop.
July 10, 2022
Excellent inspirational memoir of a man whose love of Bach impels him to take up the piano at a mature age. Moller recounts his struggle with the piano over a three year period, while treating us to a mediation on why Bach is considered by many to be the greatest composer in Western history. He has some idiosyncratic views that some might disagree with - for example, he is not a big fan of the Brandenburg Concerti, and prefers counterpoint to harmony to the point where he sometimes is dismissive of fabulous composers like Mozart and Beethoven - but his passion for Bach is authentic and beautifully expressed.
September 21, 2022
A very good read
Dan writes in an engaging manner and really opens up his heart regarding the trials and tribulations of taking up an interest in one’s ‘middle years.’ His acquired knowledge of Bach’s life and music is incredible and I’m sure that his efforts to learn to play have been amply rewarded. His book has inspired me to buy a piano and take up the challenge, and I’m in my seventies! An excellent read for the musically inclined.
Dan writes in an engaging manner and really opens up his heart regarding the trials and tribulations of taking up an interest in one’s ‘middle years.’ His acquired knowledge of Bach’s life and music is incredible and I’m sure that his efforts to learn to play have been amply rewarded. His book has inspired me to buy a piano and take up the challenge, and I’m in my seventies! An excellent read for the musically inclined.
November 26, 2024
Classical music lovers will enjoy this unique book, a rare glimpse into the mind of a Bach lover, written with flair by a philosophy professor who could also be a literature professor.
Ps. Does anyone see any whooshing F in the last chapter? I only see a whooshing A flat...?
Ps. Does anyone see any whooshing F in the last chapter? I only see a whooshing A flat...?
August 12, 2025
ha! fascinating, hilarious, so smart, very endearingly human, made me feel closer to myself, but not corny, super sharp and poetic. love an obsession with beauty, with a bit of a defiantly masochistic bent, and very well researched. great headchange of a book, highly recommend!
May 30, 2023
I have a lot of thoughts on the book but not much time to write them out though.
August 18, 2024
Excellent. Hard to put down. One of the best books on Bach I’ve read.
March 15, 2025
If you play the piano and like Bach this is an interesting read. I had to keep stopping to listen to the music!
December 29, 2020
Ornate and precise descriptions of both music and life.
August 27, 2021
Memoirs of an amateur pianist liberally sprinkled with thoughts about “America” and “Americans” of the “what we should be doing better” variety although, let’s be honest here, it’s more “what you guys should be doing better”. Anyway, you’ve got to root for anyone sincerely wrestling with the muses, although some of the narrative gets so caught up in itself one wonders if even Mr. Moller knew what he was talking about. Must make allowances for philosophy professors, I guess. Did like the general thrust of his thoughts along the line of “craftsmanship” versus “genius.” And sympathized greatly with his hand injuries. Music is hard enough all by itself.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews