Dan Moller grew up listening to heavy metal in the Boston suburbs. But something changed when he dug out his mother's Art of the Fugue, inexplicably wedged between 16 ABBA Hits and Kenny Rogers.
In The Way of Bach, Moller draws us into the strange and surprisingly funny world of JS Bach and his scene. Did you know The Goldberg Variations contain a song about having to eat too much cabbage? Or that Handel nearly died in a duel he fought while conducting an opera?
Along the way, Moller takes up such questions as, just what is so special about Bach’s music? What can Americans—steeped in pop culture—learn from European craftsmanship? And why do some people see a connection between Bach's music and God?
“Intellectual rigor yielding pure musical art. Will move anyone seeking to grasp the power of music in human existence.” -- Booklist, starred review
“A superb biographical vignette. Alternately scholarly and effusive. An eccentric, adoring tribute to Bach.” -- Kirkus Reviews
“Highly personal, beautifully written, hugely inspiring.” -- Jerrold Levinson, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics
"A bright, honest, and refreshing reminder that the most worthy pursuits in life are not those that come easily, but those that come from painstaking craftsmanship and devotion. Anyone who has ever pursued a passion will find joy in this story.” -- Audrey Wright, Associate Concertmaster, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
"Moller’s encounter with Bach’s music faces him off with an entity as stubborn and searching as he is. In this confrontation, the piano becomes a tool of spiritual and physical struggle, a glorious contraption that elicits from its player philosophical reflections not just on music but on work, art, love, teaching, learning, God, humanity, life and death. -- David Gaynor Yearsley, professor of music at Cornell, author of Bach and the Meaning of Counterpoint
From the book:
Oddly, I loved Bach and the way he sounded on the piano, but I hated the Baroque and anything that sounded Baroque, and above all the harpsichord—oh God, not the harpsichord! The moment I heard that metallic clanging, the thin rattling of a child tinkling into a jar, I reached for the off button. It sounded like musty old wigs and the wrong ideas of the past. That sound was perfectly appropriate to old composers in wigs whose ideas were in fact wrong, like Telemann, whose mediocre essence was transmitted quite adequately by recorders and the harpsichord, but not to Bach.
But now I started to feel that there was something deeper still in the carousel of departures and homecomings, of absurd, distempered voyages into anarchy (midway through The Art of Fugue one starts thinking of Werner Herzog movies about mad men lost in the jungle, or of Magellan speared on the shores of Mactan) that nevertheless strain back always for a home that is either lost or so irrevocably altered as to feel more like a point of departure for another cycle than genuine rest.
And so the naïve listener approaches Bach searching for signs of the sublime, while the connoisseur—sadder, wiser—listens for signs of the diminution in Bach’s incidental fees and for the machinations of the bureaucracy, a dissonant chord signifying a health wave or a marriage outside the city limits, a stretto indicating the many letters required to settle some dispute with the consistory. If music carried its true meaning on its sleeve, instead of letting us project one all our own, however distant from the thoughts and feelings that inspired what we now convert to private uses, who knows if we should wish to listen at all?
Listen to the music
Chinese version
My relatives use the book as a coaster–cover is designed to accommodate aesthetically pleasing water stains. Can be used for swatting bugs, pressing leaves, etc.
