David Yearsley – författare

At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701-60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history's most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music--long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening--has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity.Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks and their owner, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a multifaceted historical subject--at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow--and visit along the way the coffee house, the raucous wedding feast, and the family home. David Yearsley explores the notebooks' more idiosyncratic entries--like its charming ditties on illicit love and searching ruminations on mortality--against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany, from status in marriage and widowhood, to fulfilling professional and domestic roles, money, fashion, intimacy and sex, and the ever-present sickness and death of children and spouses. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion--for living and for dying.

In Bach's Germany musical counterpoint was an art involving much more than the sophisticated use of advanced compositional techniques. A range of theological, cultural, social and political meanings attached themselves to the use of complex procedures such as canon and double counterpoint. This book explores the significance of Bach's counterpoint in a range of interrelated contexts: its use as a means of reflecting on death; its parallels to alchemy; its vexed status in the galant music culture of the first half of the eighteenth century; its value as a representation of political power; and its central importance in the creation of Bach's image in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Touching on a wide array of contemporary literary, philosophical, critical, and musical texts, the book includes new readings of many of Bach's late works in order to re-evaluate the status and meaning of counterpoint in Bach's work and legacy.

The organist seated at the king of instruments with thousands of pipes rising all around him, his hands busy at the manuals and his feet patrolling the pedalboard, is a symbol of musical self-sufficiency yielding musical possibilities beyond that of any other mode of solo performance. In this book, David Yearsley presents an interpretation of the significance of the oldest and richest of European instruments, by investigating the German origins of the uniquely independent use of the feet in organ playing. Delving into a range of musical, literary and visual sources, Bach's Feet demonstrates the cultural importance of this physically demanding mode of music-making, from the blind German organists of the fifteenth century, through the central contribution of Bach's music and legacy, to the newly-pedaling organists of the British Empire and the sinister visions of Nazi propagandists.

In Bach's Germany musical counterpoint was an art involving much more than the sophisticated use of advanced compositional techniques. A range of theological, cultural, social and political meanings attached themselves to the use of complex procedures such as canon and double counterpoint. This book explores the significance of Bach's counterpoint in a range of interrelated contexts: its use as a means of reflecting on death; its parallels to alchemy; its vexed status in the galant music culture of the first half of the eighteenth century; its value as a representation of political power; and its central importance in the creation of Bach's image in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Touching on a wide array of contemporary literary, philosophical, critical, and musical texts, the book includes new readings of many of Bach's late works in order to re-evaluate the status and meaning of counterpoint in Bach's work and legacy.