A Pulitzer Prize–winning critic’s “lyrical and haunting” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) reflection on the meaning and emotional impact of a Bach masterwork. As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn’t seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach’s music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer’s greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood. He describes the joys of mastering some of the piano pieces, the frustrations that plague his understanding of others, the technical challenges they pose, and the surpassing beauty of the melodies, harmonies, and counterpoint that distinguish them. While exploring Bach’s compositions he sketches a cultural history of playing the piano in the twentieth century. And he raises two questions that become increasingly interrelated, not unlike a contrapuntal passage in one of the variations itself: What does it mean to know a piece of music? What does it mean to know another human being?

A collection of exercises for each movement of the first three of Bach's six cello suites. Each exercise includes discussion, as well as a facsimile of the original manuscript on the facing page. A separate booklet includes the exercises in alto clef for viola.

Rory and her friends are determined to stop the Snow Queen once and for all in this thrilling conclusion to the Ever Afters series, which Kirkus Reviews calls a “fast-paced combination of middle school realism and fairy-tale fantasy.” How will this tale end? The whole fairy-tale world is on high alert. The Snow Queen and her minions are targeting Characters, and Ever After School is the only safe refuge left. Rory Landon knows a final confrontation is inevitable, and she worries about the safety of her family and friends—particularly Chase, who has been acting very strange lately. Will Rory be able to count on Chase when she needs him most? Is she strong enough to put an end to the Snow Queen’s terrible reign once and for all? Only one thing is certain: it’s time for Rory to find out if her tale ends in happily-ever-after.

The monumental work of J. S. Bach--some 250 cantatas, 280 organ compositions, the great Passions, oratorios and masses, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Art of the Fugue--stands as a high-water mark of Western civilization. Yet that work is understandable only in light of Bach's profound Christian faith, asserts Hans Conrad Fischer. Born under the shadow of Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther in seclusion had translated the New Testament into German, Bach saw his work as a daily engagement with Christian mysteries, often signing his manuscripts SDG--soli deo gratia or for God's glory alone. This lavish volume celebrates Bach unabashedly. The engrossing text, enhanced with dozens of portraits, photos of locales and artifacts, maps and manuscripts, brings Bach, his faith, and his achievements directly to the reader. So too does the accompanying CD-ROM, including 17 key selections sampling Bach's best-known pieces from each genre and period of his life. It conclusively presents J. S. Bach's genius as not only musical but also religious, one that still effectively presents Christian faith to today's largely secular public.

Reverence for J. S. Bach's music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public. Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals--amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners--inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced re-creation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works.