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.

| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments A Note on Currency Introduction 1. Civilizing Instruments 2. The Mechanic and the Tax Collector 3. A Silver Merchant's Daughter 4. A Dark-Haired Dame and Her Scottish Admirer 5. Two Teenage Countesses Color plates 6. A Marriage Rooted in Reason 7. Male Amateur Keyboardists 8. A Blacksmith's Son 9. May God Protect This Beautiful Organ 10. How Professional Musicians Were Compensated 11. The Daily Life of an Organist Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index |"This book is an outstanding contribution to and expansion of our factual knowledge base regarding eighteenth-century German musical life, with emphasis on the keyboard." —BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute
"This is a fascinating, readable, and well-documented book. . . . Recommended."—Choice
"This is a book whose chief strength lies not in the conclusions it draws but in the sheer documentary richness which it delivers, and in bringing vividly to life dimensions of music and music-making which have often been neglected."—British Clavichord Society Newsletter
|Andrew Talle is Associate Professor of Music Studies at the Bienen School of Music of Northwestern University. He is the editor of Bach Perspectives, Volume Nine: Bach and His German Contemporaries.