Tag: Bach

September 12, 2024

Bach Music in the Castle of Heaven

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Free Download Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven By John Eliot Gardiner
2013 | 672 Pages | ISBN: 0375415297 | EPUB | 6 MB
Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque-and occasionally so intemperate? John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents’ house, where it hung for safety during World War II. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as one of the composer’s greatest living interpreters. The fruits of this lifetime’s immersion are distilled in this remarkable book, grounded in the most recent Bach scholarship but moving far beyond it, and explaining in wonderful detail the ideas on which Bach drew, how he worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects-and what it can tell us about Bach the man. Gardiner’s background as a historian has encouraged him to search for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and fruitfully coalesce. This has entailed piecing together the few biographical shards, scrutinizing the music, and watching for those instances when Bach’s personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Gardiner’s aim is "to give the reader a sense of inhabiting the same experiences and sensations that Bach might have had in the act of music-making. This, I try to show, can help us arrive at a more human likeness discernible in the closely related processes of composing and performing his music." It is very rare that such an accomplished performer of music should also be a considerable writer and thinker about it. John Eliot Gardiner takes us as deeply into Bach’s works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists.

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June 6, 2024

From Bacteria to Bach and Back The Evolution of Minds [Audiobook]

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Free Download From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (Audiobook)
English | February 07, 2017 | ASIN: B01N25FKSU | M4B@64 kbps | 15h 44m | 428 MB
Author: Daniel C. Dennett | Narrator: Tom Perkins
What is human consciousness, and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett’s brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture.
Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett’s legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought. In his inimitable style – laced with wit and arresting thought experiments – Dennett shows how culture enables reflection by installing a bounty of thinking tools, or memes, in our brains. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. The result, a mind that can comprehend the questions it poses, emerges from a process of cultural evolution.

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April 25, 2024

Bach in Berlin nation and culture in Mendelssohn’s revival of the St. Matthew Passion

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Free Download Bach in Berlin : nation and culture in Mendelssohn’s revival of the St. Matthew Passion By Bach, Johann Sebastian; Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix; Applegate, Celia
2005 | 288 Pages | ISBN: 080144389X | PDF | 2 MB
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is universally acknowledged to be one of the world’s supreme musical masterpieces, yet in the years after Bach’s death it was forgotten by all but a small number of his pupils and admirers. The public rediscovered it in 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn conducted the work before a glittering audience of Berlin artists and intellectuals, Prussian royals, and civic notables. The concert soon became the stuff of legend, sparking a revival of interest in and performance of Bach that has continued to this day. Mendelssohn’s performance gave rise to the notion that recovering and performing Bach’s music was somehow "national work." In 1865 Wagner would claim that Bach embodied "the history of the German spirit’s inmost life." That the man most responsible for the revival of a masterwork of German Protestant culture was himself a converted Jew struck contemporaries as less remarkable than it does us today-a statement that embraces both the great achievements and the disasters of 150 years of German history. In this book, Celia Applegate asks why this particular performance crystallized the hitherto inchoate notion that music was central to Germans’ collective identity. She begins with a wonderfully readable reconstruction of the performance itself and then moves back in time to pull apart the various cultural strands that would come together that afternoon in the Singakademie. The author investigates the role played by intellectuals, journalists, and amateur musicians (she is one herself) in developing the notion that Germans were "the people of music." Applegate assesses the impact on music’s cultural place of the renewal of German Protestantism, historicism, the mania for collecting and restoring, and romanticism. In her conclusion, she looks at the subsequent careers of her protagonists and the lasting reverberations of the 1829 performance itself

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January 23, 2024

Johann Sebastian Bach The Learned Musician

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Free Download Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff
English | September 17, 2001 | ISBN: 0393322564 | True EPUB | 599 pages | 1.7 MB
Finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, this landmark book was revised in 2013 to include new knowledge discovered after its initial publication.

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January 22, 2024

Johann Sebastian Bach The Learned Musician [Audiobook]

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Free Download Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (Audiobook)
English | January 22, 2019 | ASIN: B07MM2KSWX | M4B@64 kbps | 21h 29m | 585 MB
Author: Christoph Wolff | Narrator: John Pruden
Finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, this landmark book was revised in 2013 to include new knowledge discovered after its initial publication.
Although we have heard the music of J. S. Bach in countless performances and recordings, the composer himself still comes across only as an enigmatic figure in a single familiar portrait. As we mark the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, author Christoph Wolff presents a new picture that brings to life this towering figure of the Baroque era. This engaging new biography portrays Bach as the living, breathing, and sometimes imperfect human being that he was, while bringing to bear all the advances of the last half-century of Bach scholarship.

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January 22, 2024

Bach’s Musical Universe The Composer and His Work [Audiobook]

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Free Download Bach’s Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work (Audiobook)
English | April 14, 2020 | ASIN: B086K3N8K1 | M4B@128 kbps | 13h 23m | 788 MB
Author: Christoph Wolff | Narrator: Paul Heitsch
A concentrated study of Johann Sebastian Bach’s creative output and greatest pieces, capturing the essence of his art.
Throughout his life, renowned and prolific composer Johann Sebastian Bach articulated his views as a composer in purely musical terms; he was notoriously reluctant to write about his life and work. Instead, he methodically organized certain pieces into carefully designed collections. These benchmark works, all of them without parallel or equivalent, produced a steady stream of transformative ideas that stand as paradigms of Bach’s musical art.

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