Beyond Bach : Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century

This book investigates the musical life of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Germany from the perspectives of those who lived in it. The men, women, and children of the era are treated here not as extras in the life of a famous composer but rather as protagonists in their own right. The primary focus is on keyboard music, from those who built organs, harpsichords, and clavichords, to those who played keyboards recreationally and professionally, and those who supported their construction through patronage. Examples include: Barthold Fritz, a clavichord maker who published a list of his customers; Christiane Sibÿlla Bose, an amateur keyboardist and close friend of Bach’s wife; the Countesses zu Epstein, whose surviving library documents the musical interests of teenage girls of the era; Luise Gottsched, who found Bach’s music less appealing than that of Handel; Johann Christoph Müller, a keyboard instructor who fell in love with one of his aristocratic pupils; and Carl August Hartung, a professional organist and fanatical collector of Bach’s keyboard music. The book draws on published novels, poems, and visual art as well as manuscript account books, sheet music, letters, and diaries. For most music lovers of the era, J. S. Bach himself was an impressive figure whose music was too challenging to hold a prominent place in their musical lives. Reverence for J. S. Bach's music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public. Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals—amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners—inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced recreation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works.| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments A Note on Currency Introduction 1. Civilizing Instruments 2. The Mechanic and the Tax Collector 3. A Silver Merchant's Daughter 4. A Dark-Haired Dame and Her Scottish Admirer 5. Two Teenage Countesses Color plates 6. A Marriage Rooted in Reason 7. Male Amateur Keyboardists 8. A Blacksmith's Son 9. May God Protect This Beautiful Organ 10. How Professional Musicians Were Compensated 11. The Daily Life of an Organist Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index | "This book is an outstanding contribution to and expansion of our factual knowledge base regarding eighteenth-century German musical life, with emphasis on the keyboard." — BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute " Beyond Bach is a treasure trove of information about the place of music making in the daily lives of ordinary people in J.S. Bach's Germany. Andrew Talle's careful selection of citations from his fascinating source materials is woven together by easy-to-read prose, resulting in an entertaining and enjoyable read. . . . [ Beyond Bach ] deserves a place among the classics."— Swedish Journal of Music Research "This is a fascinating, readable, and well-documented book. . . . Recommended."— Choice "Talle's Beyond Bach is rich in tales of those living and working within a vibrant but largely forgotten musical culture who loved this music by Bach and others, and who then recreated it by means of a box of taut strings and ingenious levers."— Limelight Magazine "This is a book whose chief strength lies not in the conclusions it draws but in the sheer documentary richness which it delivers, and in bringing vividly to life dimensions of music and music-making which have often been neglected."— British Clavichord Society Newsletter "Andrew Talle provides a richly textured discussion of the roles music played in the everyday." — Journal of the American Musicology Society |Andrew Talle teaches musicology at the Peabody Conservatory and is a Gilman Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the editor of Bach Perspectives, Volume Nine: Bach and His German Contemporaries. "Reverence for J.S. Bach's music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public. Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals--amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners--inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced recreation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works."--Jaquette