Beyond Bach
Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Illinois Press
Published:7th Apr '17
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£23.99(9780252083891)
Reverence for J. S. Bach's music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public. Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals--amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners--inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced recreation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works.
"This book is an outstanding contribution to and expansion of our factual knowledge base regarding eighteenth-century German musical life, with emphasis on the keyboard." --BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute
"Beyond Bach is a treasure trove of information about the place of music making in the daily lives of ordinary people in J.S. Bach's Germany. Andrew Talle's careful selection of citations from his fascinating source materials is woven together by easy-to-read prose, resulting in an entertaining and enjoyable read. . . . [Beyond Bach] deserves a place among the classics."--Swedish Journal of Music Research
"This is a fascinating, readable, and well-documented book. . . . Recommended."--Choice
"Talle's Beyond Bach is rich in tales of those living and working within a vibrant but largely forgotten musical culture who loved this music by Bach and others, and who then recreated it by means of a box of taut strings and ingenious levers."--Limelight Magazine
"This is a book whose chief strength lies not in the conclusions it draws but in the sheer documentary richness which it delivers, and in bringing vividly to life dimensions of music and music-making which have often been neglected."--British Clavichord Society Newsletter
"Andrew Talle provides a richly textured discussion of the roles music played in the everyday." --Journal of the American Musicology Society
"Beyond Bach is a treasure trove of information about the place of music making in the daily lives of ordinary people in J.S. Bach's Germany. Andrew Talle's careful selection of citations from his fascinating source materials is woven together by easy-to-read prose, resulting in an entertaining and enjoyable read. . . . [Beyond Bach] deserves a place among the classics."--Swedish Journal of Music Research
"Talle's Beyond Bach is rich in tales of those living and working within a vibrant but largely forgotten musical culture who loved this music by Bach and others, and who then recreated it by means of a box of taut strings and ingenious levers."--Limelight Magazine
ISBN: 9780252040849
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 51mm
Weight: 794g
376 pages