Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century by Andrew Talle (review)

As anyone who has ever encountered Western classical music most likely knows, Johann Sebastian Bach has long occupied a prestigious position in its history. In regard to Bach's continued domination over the musicological canon, Andrew Talle uses Lydia Goehr's definition of an imaginary museum, which refers to "a collection of masterpieces united not by scoring, age, nationality, or style, but rather by the perception of timeless value" (p. 1). The introduction of Beyond Bach offers an account of the space probes Voyager 1 and 2, which in 1977 sent the composer's music into space as a testament to the human race in case any extraterrestrials should happen upon it. The separation of Bach's music from human existence and its continuous thrust upon a pedestal was solidified over the course of the nineteenth century, when a preoccupation with music masters from the recent past was in vogue. But, as Talle writes, by sending this music into space and beyond the planets, the "heavenly isolation" (p. 1) of Bach's music "gave new, physical form to a nineteenth-century ideal: pure music, floating in a perfect vacuum" (p. 2). Talle's book inserts itself into this dialogue, maintaining first and foremost that in order to understand Bach's world, we as scholars and musicians must devote more attention to the lives of ordinary people within Bach's Germany. He pursues this goal through the examination of various amateur and professional musicians, patrons, instrument builders, and audience members. Naturally, the discussion centers on keyboard repertoire, since this instrument played a vital role in the social world of eighteenth-century Germany.

One of the aspects of Bach's music that many of his contemporaries criticized was its relatively heavy infusion of counterpoint and harmonic tension. The critics went on to contend that his music was unnecessarily difficult and seemed more suited to please the eyes with virtuosic physical spectacle rather than the ears (see, for example, the account of Luise and her husband, Johann Christoph Gottsched, in chap. 6). Another related problem was the fact that Bach's music, to many, appeared to fall out of alignment with the aesthetics of the time, namely an emphasis on lightness and ease, also known as galant style. Chapter 1, "Civilizing Instruments," begins with a description of the galant style and its origin in association with Louis XIV of France (the "Sun King"). A galant homme was one who had "the good fortune of possessing a penetrating intellect, an extraordinary body of knowledge, and unusual ability to understand a thing thoroughly and appraise it sharply, a perfect and unaffected politesse, and other pleasant characteristics" (p. 11, quoting Olaf Simons, Marteaus Europa, oder, Der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001], 344).

The craze for the galant style was motivated by the end of a particularly challenging and dreary century that saw such events as the Thirty Years War, bubonic plague, and famine. In celebration of the arrival of prosperity, galant ladies wore hoop shirts that "artificially plumped them to elephantine proportions" and limited their movement (p. 14), which evidently signaled their freedom from the indignity of physical labor. At this time, the visceral character of music was viewed as a potentially uncivilizing force, and any man or woman who considered themselves to be galant did well to distance themselves from nature by resisting music's power to engage the body. Those who made music were encouraged to follow strict rules so as not to transgress the boundary of reason and venture into unbridled movement. Those rules also extended into the genres of music that men and women were expected to perform, such as minuets, bourrées, and gavottes. These genres kept the attention of listeners due to their implication of bodily engagement without crossing the line into actual dance. Finally...