Back to Bach

Listen to certain Preludes of Bach. They do not say much; there is a short motif repeated; then insistent variations in no higher relief than that of a medal by Roty.  But what a level…

The Beatitude of Playing Bach

Arnold Steinhardt, Violin Dreams, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006 Like the hundreds of other people who had gathered at Saint Pius V Church for Dan Horkheimer’s funeral last August, I was moving between despair and disbelief…

Bach/Gould/Said

Bach’s music was for [Glenn] Gould an archetype for the emergence of a rational system whose  intrinsic power was that it was, as it were, crafted resolutely against the negation and disorder that surround us…