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Bachanalia: The Essential Listener's Guide to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier
An offbeat guide to Johann Sebastian Bach's keyboard masterwork, the "Well-Tempered Clavier," presents a series of forty-eight essays--one for each of the piece's fugues--that illuminate the famous musical work
- GenresMusic
352 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1994
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February 22, 2021
AKA the Trainspotter's Guide to the Well-Tempered Clavier.
It does have some use, but if you don't have much musical training, it's a LOT of work. His guides to each of the fugues (but NOT the preludes!) does have the effect of giving the reader a sense through sheer repetition what exposition, subject, stretto (er, mostly), voice, etc. are. And in learning all this, a sense of the form of a fugue. But his focus on using a statistical analysis for music is just soul-numbing. Perhaps it's fun to do with baseball stats, but it makes Bach feel like a musical masturbator.
What I'd love is a nice "biography" of the WTC that really captures its spirit and legacy.
It does have some use, but if you don't have much musical training, it's a LOT of work. His guides to each of the fugues (but NOT the preludes!) does have the effect of giving the reader a sense through sheer repetition what exposition, subject, stretto (er, mostly), voice, etc. are. And in learning all this, a sense of the form of a fugue. But his focus on using a statistical analysis for music is just soul-numbing. Perhaps it's fun to do with baseball stats, but it makes Bach feel like a musical masturbator.
What I'd love is a nice "biography" of the WTC that really captures its spirit and legacy.
Displaying 1 of 1 review