An authoritative, lucid chronicle of Bach’s multifaceted musical context.
A close investigation of Bach’s works reveals remarkable transformations.
Eminent musicologist Wolff (Adams University Professor Emeritus/Harvard Univ.; Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune: Serving the Emperor, 1788-1791, 2012, etc.) offers an erudite companion to his biography Johann Sebastian Bach (2000), a Pulitzer Prize finalist, with a detailed examination of the development of Bach’s creative process, goals, and achievements. Because Bach left no theoretical writings, Wolff selects from the composer’s prodigious oeuvre—including keyboard workbooks, toccatas, suites, sonatas, concertos, choral works, and oratorios—to focus on elements of musical design, engagement with other repertoires and genres, reassessment of existing conventions, and innovations. Facsimile pages are excerpted from an online library of Bach manuscripts. Bach, writes the author, “competed with himself constantly,” making “judicious revisions to his own works.” His competitive attitude also led him to pay careful attention to the works of other composers, past and contemporary, as he evaluated his own compositions. Also influencing his musical evolution were the demands of his changing professional duties: town organist, court organist and chamber musician, concertmaster, and cantor and music director in Leipzig, where he also directed the Leipzig Collegium Musicum for more than 10 years. As part of his duties in Leipzig, he was required to offer about 60 cantata performances yearly; although these did not have to be his own compositions, Bach added “a considerable repertoire of his own music” to his growing sacred and secular vocal compositions. Throughout his career, Wolff notes, Bach was “a passionate instrumentalist,” acclaimed for his performances on the organ and harpsichord, and he was frequently invited to give guest concerts. His prowess on the keyboard fed directly into his “pathbreaking approaches” to harpsichord and fortepiano. The author identifies Bach’s intense interest in exploring “all facets of the art of polyphony” as singularly characteristic of the composer’s musical language. For a musically sophisticated reader familiar with Bach’s works, as well as musical terminology and technique, Wolff’s analyses have the potential of enriching the listening experience.
An authoritative, lucid chronicle of Bach’s multifaceted musical context.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-05071-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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