Laurence Dreyfus is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College.
Laurence Dreyfus’s Bach and Patterns of Invention…is the first
study in some time to deal above all with the reasons that music
lovers ought to listen to him or play him. Dreyfus’s writing is
clear and entertaining…and the advantage of [his] approach to Bach
is that it makes us listen to his work as he himself listened to
the music of his contemporaries, and as they would have listened to
his. It does not claim to read the composer’s mind, but it
reconstructs some of the processes through which he had to go to
compose in each case, and it does so by referring to aural
experience, leaving questions of ideology and doctrine temporarily
on the side.
*New York Review of Books*
Johann Sebastian Bach is not the easiest of composers to write
about, for his music can often seem so perfect that it renders
description irrelevant. But Bach and the Patterns of Invention, by
Laurence Dreyfus, a…totally absorbing study of Bach’s processes of
composition, is written with a clarity appropriate to a discussion
of his music and with an enthusiasm that immediately communicates
itself.
*Daily Telegraph*
An original and detailed appraisal of Bach’s achievement… Much of
this book is concerned with detailed analysis that tries to
illuminate, and at least to some extent to recreate, Bach’s
processes of composition. The result is the uncovering of processes
that appear somewhat messy but are convincingly real. This is a
fundamentally imaginative approach to analysis, involving as it
does speculations about the order in which the inventions of the
piece were composed and the role of procedures that were started by
the composer but destined for only partial success due to the
grammar of tonal music… Dreyfus’s ideas should be of interest to
anyone interested in exploring new ways of understanding
18th-century music.
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
Dreyfus’s new analytical study of Bach’s processes of
composition…challenges received ideas about what constitutes a
style, a form and a genre in Bach’s music, showing how the
composer’s individuality stems largely from his writing ’against
the grain’. Dreyfus’s book is not always easy, and neither is
Bach’s music, but few readers—even the more general—of the former
will be left without a better understanding of the latter.
*BBC Music Magazine*
[Bach and Patterns of Invention] stands head and shoulders above
anything else in the field of post-war Bach criticism… Dreyfus
believes that the human side of the compositional process is what
must interest us about Bach, the sense of an intelligence adhering
strictly to the rules he considered God-given, while freely abusing
those that his contemporaries held dear. In this way we might
attain a sense of the very historical nature of Bach’s music—not
merely the generic and formal similarities within the idioms of his
age (often the principal object of modern scholarship), but
particularly the way in which the composer went against the grain
of his age.
*Early Music*
Dreyfus is concerned with how Bach thought in music, but from that
deduces some idea of how he thought about music. A stimulating
book.
*Early Music Review*
This brilliant book sets out to answer one of the enduring
mysteries of music, namely, what was the compositional method that
allowed Bach to write such a vast quantity of music of such
surpassing quality?… It’s a moving and convincing picture of Bach,
and a thoroughly original one, delivered in lucid prose in which
close argumentation is often capped by an illuminating metaphor.
Like Bach’s music, it is rhetorical in the best sense.
*Music Times*
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