Bach & the Patterns of Invention - Hardcover

Dreyfus, Laurence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674060059 ISBN 13: 9780674060050

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Dreyfus's writing is clear and entertaining... and the advantage of [this] approach to Bach is that it makes us listen to his work as he himself listened to the music of his contemporaries, and as they would have listened to his. It does not claim to read the composer's mind, but it reconstructs some of the processes through which he had to go to compose in each case, and it does so by referring to aural experience, leaving questions of ideology and doctrine temporarily on the side." - Charles Rosen, New York Review of Books; "An original and detailed appraisal of Bach's achievement... Much of this book is concerned with detailed analysis that tries to illuminate, and at least to some extent to recreate, Bach's processes of composition." - Barry Mitchell, Times Higher Education Supplement"

About the Author:

Laurence Dreyfus is Thurston Dart Professor of Performance Studies and Head of the Music Department at King's College, London. He is the author of Bach's Continuo Group from Harvard University Press and a noted viola da gambist and cellist.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0674060059
• ISBN 13: 9780674060050
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 276