Johann Sebastian Bach
- celebrated pipe organist court composer & master of sacred music
- was also a technical pioneer. Working in Germany in the early eighteenth century he invented new instruments & carried out experiments in tuning the effects of which are still with us today. Two hundred years later a number of extraordinary musicians have utilised the music of Bach to thrilling effect through the art of recording furthering their own virtuosity & reinventing the composer for our time. In Reinventing Bach Paul Elie brilliantly blends the stories of modern musicians with a polyphonic account of our most celebrated composer's life to create a spellbinding narrative of the changing place of music in our lives. We see the sainted organist Albert Schweitzer playing to a mobile recording unit set up at London's Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach's organ works to the world beyond the churches & Pablo Casals's Abbey Road recordings of Bach's cello suites transform the middle-class sitting room into a hotbed of existentialism; we watch Leopold Stokowski persuade Walt Disney to feature his own grand orchestrations of Bach in the animated classical-music movie Fantasia
- which made Bach the sound of children's playtime & Hollywood grandeur alike
- & we witness how Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations made Bach the byword for postwar cool. Through the Beatles & Switched-on Bach & Godel Eschel Bach
- through film rock music the Walkman the CD & up to Yo-Yo Ma & the iPod
- Elie shows us how dozens of gifted musicians searched experimented & collaborated with one another in the service of a composer who emerged as the prototype of the spiritualised technically savvy artist.