Johann Sebastian Bach

(Christian Encounters Series)

Rick MARSCHALL

161 pages

This book counts for

and for

The 2011 Non-Fiction Challenge

MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book was available for free for review on Booksneeze, and as I had not read anything about musicians for a while, I thought I might give it a try. It is a short book, but actually very interesting; like all books by this publisher, it has a strong Christian orientation, and it focuses a lot on how Lutheran faith intertwined with music in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. It is well written and documented, with excerpts from several biographies, and will appeal both to musicians and Christians. It has a list of technical musical expressions at the end. The author also touches on many musicians contemporary to Bach, and those he influenced after as well. If you need a good short refresher on Bach and his music, this is the perfect book.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT

Christian Encounters, a series of biographies from Thomas Nelson Publishers, highlights important lives from all ages and areas of the Church. Some are familiar faces. Others are unexpected guests. But all, through their relationships, struggles, prayers, and desires, uniquely illuminate our shared experience.

Johann Sebastian Bach is generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time. He enriched his generation, and every generation since, with his prolific ability to survey and bring together the principal musical styles, forms, and national traditions. Himself a Lutheran, he left a corpus of sacred music to cover the entire liturgical year, including Latin Masses written for the Catholic Court of Dresden, and spent much of his working life as a church music director in Germany. Though he was a highly respected organist during his lifetime, he wasn’t recognized as a great composer until the early nineteenth century. Today he is considered one of the most influential ever. [Book description]

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