- Guinea
- Herbert, George
- Paperback
- PowerBuilder
- Project Planning & Management
- Environmentalism
- Armenian
- Esperanto
- OS-2 Warp
- Cullen, Countee
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Holocaust
- Psychosomatic Medicine
- Low Salt
- Nonfiction
- Paperback
- Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds
- Hardcover
- Bengali
- Soutine, Chaim
- Fiji
- General
- Elric
- Fusion & Fission
- Marriage & Divorce
- Card, Orson Scott
- Jewish American
- Verge, Lisa Ann
- Hanh, Thich Nhat
- Limnology
- Some of our other sites:
- Books
- Clothing, Shoes and Accessories
- Baby Clothes and Accessories
- Cosmetics, Beauty Products and Fragrances
- Cellphones, Call Plans and Accessories
- Video Games
- DVDs
- Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- Health and Personal Care
- Home and Garden
- Home DIY
- Jewelry
- Magazines and Newspapers
- Music Downloads
- Musical Instruments
- Office Equipment and Supplies
- Software and Games
- Sporting Goods
- Toys and Games
- Watches
- UK Books
- UK Video Games
- UK Home and Garden
- UK Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- UK Baby Clothes and Accessories
- UK Software and Games
- UK Sporting Goods
- UK Toys and Games
Books : Biographies & Memoirs : People, A-Z : ( B ) : Bach, Johann Sebastian
-
-
Presents a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach
-
Through hundreds of letters, family papers, anecdotes, and records, the Bach Reader established a new approach to biography by offering original documents in impeccable translations. In The New Bach Reader, Christoph Wolff has incorporated numerous facsimiles and added many newly discovered items, reflecting the current state of scholarship about the composer's life and music. The readings in this volume provide an accurate and vivid picture of Bach's world and of his far-reaching influence.
-
Peter Wiliams approaches afresh the life and music of arguably the most studied of all composers, interpreting both Bach's life by deconstructing his original Obituary in the light of new information, and his music by evaluating his priorities and irrepressible creative energy. How, though belonging to musical families on both his parents' sides, did he come to possess so bewitching a sense of rhythm and melody, and a mastery of harmony that established nothing less than a norm in western culture? In considering that the works of a composer are his biography, the book's title 'A Life in Music' means both a life spent making music and one revealed in the music as we know it. A distinguished scholar and performer, Williams re-examines Bach's life as an orphan and a family man, as an extraordinarily gifted composer and player, and an energetic and ambitious artist who never suffered fools gladly.
-
Volume 2 of 2-volume set. This stimulating narrative traces Bach's life; discusses contemporary artistic and philosophical movements; assesses the work of his predecessors Schutz, Scheidt, Buxtehude, etc., analyzes Bach's own work; and passes on brilliant recommendations for performance — tempo, phrasing, accentuation, dynamics, etc. Translated by Ernest Newman.
-
Two hundred and fifty years after his death, Johann Sebastian Bach remains one of the most compelling figures in the history of classical music. In this major study of the composer's life and work, Martin Geck follows the course of Bach's career in rich detail--from his humble beginnings as an organ tuner and self-taught court musician to his role as Kapellmeister and cantor of St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig. Geck explores Bach's relations with the German aristocracy, his position with regard to the Church and contemporary theological debates, his perfectionism, and his role as the devoted head of a large family.The focus in this comprehensive, thoroughly researched book is on the extraordinary work that came of the composer's life. From the Goldberg Variations to the Brandenburg Concertos to the Art of the Fugue, Geck carefully analyzes Bach's innovations in harmony and counterpoint, placing them in the context of European musical and social history. Always fresh and stimulating, this definitive work reintroduces Bach's enormous oeuvre in all its splendor.
-
A long time ago, a boy named Sebastian was born into a family of musicians. He heard music everywhere, especially in his own head, and he wrote down what he heard. Sebastian married, raised a family, and wrote more than a thousand pieces of music. He also created a little book of music especially for his wife, Anna Magdalena, so that in the evenings the whole family could make music together. Hundreds of years after his death, Bach’s music is heard and played all over the world. Many people think it is some of the most glorious music ever written. And today young students--like Bach’s own children--can learn to play the music from Anna Magdalena’s notebook.
-
In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two groundbreaking claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian worldview. Until this historical moment, as Berger illustrates in his analysis of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, music was simply "in time." Its successive events unfolded one after another, but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, was not central to the way the music was experienced and understood. But after the shift, as he finds in looking at Mozart's Don Giovanni, the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; the cycle of time unbends and becomes an arrow. Berger complements these musical case studies with a rich survey of the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period.
-
In this major new interpretation of the music of J. S. Bach, we gain a striking picture of the composer as a unique critic of his age. By reading Bach's music "against the grain" of contemporaries such as Vivaldi and Telemann, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach's approach to musical invention in a variety of genres posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics.
"Invention"--the word Bach and his contemporaries used for the musical idea that is behind or that generates a composition--emerges as an invaluable key in Dreyfus's analysis. Looking at important pieces in a range of genres, including concertos, sonatas, fugues, and vocal works, he focuses on the fascinating construction of the invention, the core musical subject, and then shows how Bach disposes, elaborates, and decorates it in structuring his composition. Bach and the Patterns of Invention brings us fresh understanding of Bach's working methods, and how they differed from those of the other leading composers of his day. We also learn here about Bach's unusual appropriations of French and Italian styles--and about the elevation of various genres far above their conventional status.
Challenging the restrictive lenses commonly encountered in both historical musicology and theoretical analysis, Dreyfus provocatively suggests an approach to Bach that understands him as an eighteenth-century thinker and at the same time as a composer whose music continues to speak to us today.
-
-
A journey through the music and lives of the most influential classical musicians, these illustrated biographies include a CD and fragments of the musicians' most iconic compositions. These books introduce young children to music and to the historical figures who most impacted the medium.Un recorrido por la vida de los compositores clásicos a través de su música, estas biografías ilustradas incluyen un CD y fragmentos de las composiciones más famosas de estos músicos. Estos libros introducen a los niños a la música y a las figuras históricas de mayor impacto en este campo.
-
Step into the classroom with Christoph WolffJohann Sebastian Bach holds a singular position in the history of music. A uniquely gifted musician, he combined outstanding performing virtuosity with supreme creative powers and remarkable intellectual discipline. More than two centuries after his lifetime, Bach's work continues to set musical standards.
The noted Bach scholar Christoph Wolff offers in this book new perspectives on the composer's life and remarkable career. Uncovering important historical evidence, the author demonstrates significant influences on Bach's artistic development and brings fresh insight on his work habits, compositional intent, and the musical traditions that shaped Bach's thought. Wolff reveals a composer devoted to an ambitious and highly individual creative approach, one characterized by constant self-criticism and self-challenge, the absorption of new skills and techniques, and the rethinking of riches from the musical past.
Readers will find illuminating analyses of some of Bach's greatest music, including the B Minor Mass, important cantatas, keyboard and chamber compositions, the Musical Offering, and the Art of Fugue. Discussion of how these pieces "work" will be helpful to performers--singers, players, conductors--and to everyone interested in exploring the conceptual and contextual aspects of Bach's music. All readers will find especially interesting those essays in which Wolff elaborates on his celebrated discoveries of previously unknown works: notably the fourteen "Goldberg" canons and a collection of thirty-three chorale preludes.
Representing twenty-five years of scholarship, these essays--half of which appear here in English for the first time--have established Christoph Wolff as one of the world's preeminent authorities on J. S. Bach. All students, performers, and lovers of Bach's music will find this an engaging and enlightening book.
-
-
In this concise and accessible volume, a noted keyboard artist and Bach specialist takes a fresh look at the performance of J. S. Bach's keyboard music. Addressing the nonspecialist player, Richard Troeger presents a wide range of historical information and discusses its musical applications. The author shares accounts of the musical styles Bach employed and the instruments he knew. In direct and pragmatic terms, he clarifies the importance of notational and style details as guides to the composer's intentions, particularly emphasizing changes in notational norms between Bach's time and the present. Troeger offers core information on dynamics, articulation, tempo, rhythm, ornamentation and accompaniment. He considers controversial issues as well, establishing the importance of the clavichord in Bach's milieu and examining the link between baroque music and rhetoric - a dramatic relationship that can bring great vitality to performance.
-
-
The "Notes on ..." series by distinguished music critic Conrad Wilson illuminates the music of some of history's greatest composers in relation to their private lives. In each volume Wilson selects twenty crucial works of a given composer, discusses these masterpieces with insight and verve, and tells why these particular works are fundamental to understanding the composer.Wilson's vast musical expertise and succinct, polished prose style permeate these pages. Meant for any general reader interested in music, these guidebooks are ideal for dipping into as well as reading straight through.
For many music lovers, Bach is a perpetually sober and serious composer, frowning out of pictures on book and CD covers. Wilson reminds listeners that one who only heard Bach's music might imagine him as vivacious, even romantic, and shows why Bach continues to intrigue and influence the music scene.
-
-
Like Shakespeare, J.S. Bach is known largely by his works. Peter Williams asks many questions in this examination of the man as well as the composer. What was Bach like as a youth, father, and, eventually, church elder? What music did he know and how did he compose and perform such an amazing amount? Ultimately, Williams questions the effects of unremitting acclaim on objective evaluations of J.S. Bach.
-
-
Monumental 3-volume study of Bach, foundation of all later scholarship. Detailed information on almost everything known about Bach's life and family; also perceptive analyses of all important compositions — over 500 pieces — with more than 450 musical excerpts. Scholarly, yet can be read with profit by any serious music lover.