Reinventing Bach
Paul Elie's serious and inventive book asks: How has Bach in our time become a Godlike being whose center is everywhere?
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I have been singling out technological contemplations, but Elie has many strengths and strands: detailed and beautifully described moments of listening, engagingly narrated summaries of scholarship, alert attention to telling facts, and a loving knowledge of many different kinds of music, including Robert Johnson and Led Zeppelin. There's plenty of audiophile information – wax cylinder, recording, mono, stereo, different kinds of tape, 78s, long-playing records, CD's, iPods – and a lot on the placement of microphones.
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Wearing his learning lightly (with wonderful endnotes as a ground), Elie is polyphonic and contrapuntal. In counterpoint, as Nicholas Slonimsky defines it, "each voice has a destiny of its own." Elie's book is held together by chain of voices following one other as they make an entrance, step back, overlap, and enter again to reveal a new aspect against the changing conversation: Schweitzer to Casals to Stokowski to Gould to Ma. Other voices too move in and out, filling out the progressions: Tureck, Schoenberg, Einstein, Jobs, even the musically fantastic Mickey Mouse. The voice hovering over all is Elie's own, modest, serious, attuned to the whole.
Among the wonder of Bach's music, according to Elie, is that "it sounds inventive, it doesn't finish the musical thought so much as keep it aloft." Above all it is this aspect of keeping a musical idea in play, Elie feels, that has inspired so many musicians to enter into this long conversation.
It's a conversation that has technical or professional aspects, but that also welcomes interested amateurs like Elie and me. Here are two signs of my engagement provoked by this book: first, the number of comments I've made in the margins, often disagreements over the role of technology; second, the number of times I've turned to CDs, DVDs, iTunes, and YouTube to listen to something he mentioned. Both a benefit and a quandary indeed. The perfection of recordings can be transcendent, yes, but also inhibiting for sublunary amateurs. From a technical point of view, Gould's Apollonian super-perfection is now an every-day occurrence thanks to the ability to drop in a single-note retouch for a flub. (I'll leave autotune alone.) For example, I particularly like something Elie doesn't mention perhaps because he doesn't: the domestic intimacy of overhearing Gould hum in the background of, say, the English Suites. But I've been entranced by some of the YouTube videos he does mention that make the power of Bach visible, from vibrating graphic animations to a Japanese performance of the Matthew Passion to Mstislav Rostropovich playing at the Berlin Wall – in front of exuberant Western graffiti including (Elie strikingly fails to mention given his eye for recurrence) Mickey Mouse.
It is a pleasure to read such a serious and inventive book on Bach, and that's saying something.
Alexandra Mullen writes for The Hudson Review (where she is also an Advisory Editor), The New Criterion, and The Wall Street Journal.
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