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* Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint. By David G. Yearsley. Cambridge University Press (40 W. 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211; 212-924-3900; fax, 212-691-3239; www.cup.org), 2003. 257 pp. Index, bibliography, music examples, black-and-white photographs. Hardcover, $60.00.
No study of eighteenth-century music can ignore the contributions of Johann Sebastian Bach, and no study of Bach or his contemporaries can ignore the use of counterpoint in works intended for performance and in "learned" worksmusical riddles passed among musicians to demonstrate or test contrapuntal ingenuity. David Yearsley provides a fascinating glimpse into the use of counterpoint in Bach's music and the implications that technique had in a time when it was rapidly disappearing in favor of newer styles.
Yearsley's ultimate purpose is to expose the political, intellectual, social, and spiritual connotations that Bach's counterpoint held in eighteenth-century Germany. Where the twenty-first-century mind sees counterpoint mainly as a sign of compositional mastery, the eighteenth-century mind...