Reinventing Bach

The Search for Transcendence in Sound

By: Paul Elie

Narrated by: Paul Brion

In Reinventing Bach, his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach's music new in our time, at once restoring Bach as a universally revered composer and revolutionizing the ways that music figures into our lives.

As a musician in eighteenth-century Germany, Bach was on the technological frontier. Two centuries later, pioneering musicians began to take advantage of breakthroughs in audio recording to make Bach's music the sound of modern transcendence. The sainted organist Albert Schweitzer played to a mobile recording unit set up at London's Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach's organ works. Pablo Casals, recording at Abbey Road Studios, made Bach's cello suites existentialism for the living room; Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney made Bach the sound of children's playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike. Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations opened and closed the LP era and made Bach the byword for postwar cool; and Yo-Yo Ma has brought Bach into the digital present. In this book, we see these musicians and others searching, experimenting, and collaborating with one another in the service of Bach.

Reinventing Bach is a gorgeously written story of music, invention, and human passion—and a story that shows great things can happen when high art meets new technology.

©2012 Paul Elie; preface copyright 2025 by Paul Elie (P)2025 Tantor Media