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An inventive view of Bach

Elizabeth Floyd Mai

Author Paul Elie, who grew up in Latham and attended Shaker High School, recently became a nalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. For the second time. Elie's "Reinventing Bach" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) was among just ve nalists for 2012 in the genre of criticism. Elie's rst book, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage" (FSG, 2003), which focused on four American Catholic writers, including Thomas Merton and Flannery O'Connor, was a nalist in biography. It won the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize. "Reinventing Bach" is hard to categorize. A biography of Bach ("a technician of the sacred"), it is also, the author writes, "the story of the revival of a traditional art through the technology that was supposed to be its undoing." Instead, for almost a century, constantly evolving technology from the wax-cylinder recordings by Alfred Schweitzer of Bach's organ music through 78s, LPs and on through today's CDs and compressed digital les, "technology has been the means of classical music's survival." Technology, Elie argues, has only made Bach's genius more objective. From his home in New York City, Elie recently answered questions about his new book. Q: You write that Bach was "technologically the most advanced musician of his era." Tell me a little bit about his inventiveness. A: He was a renowned and sought-after expert in the design and construction of pipe organs, and the pipe organ (along with the sailing ship) was the most complex invention of the time. He invented an instrument called the Lautenwerck a cross

between a lute and a harpsichord. He wrote the fth cello suite for an unusual tuning that made the violoncello essentially a new instrument and is thought to have had a ve-string instrument in mind, too. He wrote "The Well-Tempered Clavier" as a way of exploring the "invention" of the tuning system known as "welltempered." And above, or beneath, all this, he conceived of the creative process as a process of invention and demonstrated this with the works he called the "inventions." In the Yale library there's a small book that Bach lled in with compositions as a gift for his eldest son, and among them were a number of the inventions. To see this book as I did, in an episode I describe in the book was to look over Bach's shoulder and see his process of invention at work. It was a thrilling experience. Q: What was one of the most surprising things you learned during the course of your research for the book? A: I was surprised to realize that Bach himself probably heard certain of his works much less often than even the casual listener hears them today, through recordings and live performances of the "standard repertory." "The St. Matthew Passion," for example: Bach led it in performance on Good Friday only twice the time just after he wrote it and the time a few years later when the liturgical calendar again called for a Passion based on the Gospel according to St. Matthew. The cello suites evidently were written with a certain cellist in mind. The "secular cantatas" were written, many of them, for onetime civic occasions. Some of the orchestral music was written for performance at Zimmermann's, a coeehouse in Leipzig, where the musicians essentially sight-read the pieces straight through, over and out. Now that music is heard as background music on public radio ad innitum. Q: Do you have a favorite piece by Bach, or a favorite type of piece? A: I am in the position of liking it all: sacred music and chamber music, vocal and instrumental, old "Big Bach" recordings and lean, spare "historically informed" ones, Rosalyn Tureck and

Glenn Gould and Walter Carlos and Keith Jarrett (just to name a few keyboardists who seem to divide people). To me, the experience of recordings, the abundance and availability of them, means we don't have to choose just one over all the others. I was surprised to realize during Holy Week this year that I own a dozen dierent recordings of "The St. Matthew Passion," from the '30s up to the present. They're all good. Elizabeth Floyd Mair is a free-lance writer. Reach her at elizabethoydmair@gmail.com.