Bachanalia: The Essential Listener's Guide to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier [Hardcover]

Eric Lewin Altschuler (Author), Stephen Jay Gould (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1994

By applying what Stephen Jay Gould describes in his preface as a "Bill James" style of statistical analysis of baseball teams to the 48 fugues and preludes in Bach's composition for the harpsichord, the author has created a unique listening guide to this musical composition. Altschuler's essays - one for each fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier - are full of playful, often ingenuous analogies (to baseball teams, horror movies, chocolate chip cookies and sex) that render sophisticated musical concepts with clarity to listeners with little, or no, musical training.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Written as a teaching tool, J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is a cornerstone of Western art music. Each of its two books consists of 24 preludes and fugues in all the keys possible to classical tonal music. From Mozart's time on, the WTC has taught musicians the richness of classical tonality and remained a steady source of inspiration to performers, composers, and music lovers of all types. Definitely a music lover, Altschuler is obsessed with the WTC. The result of lifelong study, Bachanalia combines deep understanding of Bach with an offbeat, lively presentation, based on Bill James' style of statistical analysis of baseball teams, that offers the uninitiated much useful background information on Bach and the WTC and provides a detailed essay on and thumbnail structural schema of each fugue. The approach works fairly well, for, like baseball teams, fugues are generally similar and specifically unique. Altschuler is particularly good at explaining fairly arcane, technical music-theory terms to those without musical training and at showing how a given fugue can be heard employing the techniques described. Exuberantly written, each page testifies to Altschuler's passion. John Shreffler

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co (T); 1st edition (March 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316035297
• ISBN-13: 978-0316035293
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #840,936 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #20 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( B ) > Bach, Johann Sebastian

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bach for bozos, December 4, 2004

By 

Cheese Messiah (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bachanalia: The Essential Listener's Guide to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Hardcover)

I picked up this book with some excitement. Bach's 48 has been for me, as for many others, a great scource of spiritual nourishment. I had hoped for a book that would be enlightening and penetrating. Anything that grandly describes itself as a listener's guide, really should be able to get into the guts of the music. Alas no!
I find it hard to understand why this book was ever written let alone published. It is really quite feeble. Virtually nothing is said about the preludes, except that the author gives us a league table of his favourites, as he does the fugues. The fugues themselves are described in dreary terms of entries of subjects. Rarely is the emotional content mentioned.
The writer describes the charming c minor fugue from book one as the greatest of them all and dismisses the glorious b minor fugue as 'not one of his favourites'. He seems to have derived this opinion from statistical analysis. I doubt if many share his view.
The book is deeply schizophrenic. On one hand it wishes to appear learned and uses terms like stretti and inversion, and on the other, it wants to use expressions derived from baseball and popular culture. The two parts do not gel. The populist parts seem lightweight and the erudition heavy handed.
Ultimately, Bach's achievement in these pieces is greater than merely counting the number of entries of a subject or when it is being inverted, It is music with a heart and soul.
My advise is avoid, and spend your money buying the music itself.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not great, not good, but informative, January 31, 2004

By 

a (The Sun's Inverse Heart) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bachanalia: The Essential Listener's Guide to Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" (Hardcover)

There's a good chance that those who find D. Hofstadter entertaining will like this book: it's very much in the same vein as his works. Those who can't stand Hofstadter, or actually know something about music, will probably hate it. Altschuler just has this grating tone; it's as if he wants you to believe everything he's saying is worth its weight in gold; perhaps it's because he went to an ivy school. Poor boy.

I read some insightful words about Hofstadter's GEB lately, and they apply here as well: "mathematicians find the mathematics almost dangerously oversimplified, but the stuff about music interesting; musicians find the talk about music banal, but the stuff about math interesting." In other words, when you mix two or more branches of knowledge with the intent of coming to some sort of synthetic point of view, you should probably know what you are talking about!

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good resource to better aprreciate Bach, May 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bachanalia: The Essential Listener's Guide to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Hardcover)

The Well Tempered Clavier is a refreshing book which enlightened me to many details of Bach's compositons. Helpful observations on Bach's fugues made reading the Well Tempered Clavier as enjoyable as having a great conversation with a passionate music lover. Alstschuler had a lot of interesting details on compositon and music history. As a songwriter myself, the insights into many of the techniques Bach employed to keep the listener enthralled were especially valuable. It seemed every page was filled with at least one extremely interesting observation. This very good book was a very pleasant reading experience.