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Rating: 
Summary: Trainspotters guide to Bach
Review: Eric Lewin Altschuler loves lists. At the back of this book, and referred to throughout the text, are lists of his top ten preludes and fugues, and even his top ten subjects and episodes. This self-confessed "disk jockey for Bach" can't help trivializing the music with his tone of forced jocularity and "delightfully irreverent" analogies to such subjects as football games, sex and horror movies. It's not all bad, however. The essays could provide an entry point for those nervous of getting to know this wonderful music alone. The basic analysis is good, and the summaries of form are an easy way of following what's going on in the fugues. Grown up alternatives? Donald Tovey's short analysis pieces are still the best. Cecil Gray's book on the 48, although grumpy and quirky like the author, is interesting. Both are hard to get hold of, though. Altschuler's book can be found in second hand stores - just look out for the gaudy cover.
Rating:
Summary: Trainspotters guide to Bach
Review: Eric Lewin Altschuler loves lists. At the back of this book, and referred to throughout the text, are lists of his top ten preludes and fugues, and even his top ten subjects and episodes. This self-confessed "disk jockey for Bach" can't help trivializing the music with his tone of forced jocularity and "delightfully irreverent" analogies to such subjects as football games, sex and horror movies. It's not all bad, however. The essays could provide an entry point for those nervous of getting to know this wonderful music alone. The basic analysis is good, and the summaries of form are an easy way of following what's going on in the fugues. Grown up alternatives? Donald Tovey's short analysis pieces are still the best. Cecil Gray's book on the 48, although grumpy and quirky like the author, is interesting. Both are hard to get hold of, though. Altschuler's book can be found in second hand stores - just look out for the gaudy cover.
Rating: 
Summary: Bach for bozos
Review: I picked up this book with some excitement. Bach's 48 has been for me, as for many others, a great scource of spiritual nourishment. I had hoped for a book that would be enlightening and penetrating. Anything that grandly describes itself as a listener's guide, really should be able to get into the guts of the music. Alas no!
I find it hard to understand why this book was ever written let alone published. It is really quite feeble. Virtually nothing is said about the preludes, except that the author gives us a league table of his favourites, as he does the fugues. The fugues themselves are described in dreary terms of entries of subjects. Rarely is the emotional content mentioned.
The writer describes the charming c minor fugue from book one as the greatest of them all and dismisses the glorious b minor fugue as 'not one of his favourites'. He seems to have derived this opinion from statistical analysis. I doubt if many share his view.
The book is deeply schizophrenic. On one hand it wishes to appear learned and uses terms like stretti and inversion, and on the other, it wants to use expressions derived from baseball and popular culture. The two parts do not gel. The populist parts seem lightweight and the erudition heavy handed.
Ultimately, Bach's achievement in these pieces is greater than merely counting the number of entries of a subject or when it is being inverted, It is music with a heart and soul.
My advise is avoid, and spend your money buying the music itself.
Rating: 
Summary: Good resource to better aprreciate Bach
Review: The Well Tempered Clavier is a refreshing book which enlightened me to many details of Bach's compositons. Helpful observations on Bach's fugues made reading the Well Tempered Clavier as enjoyable as having a great conversation with a passionate music lover. Alstschuler had a lot of interesting details on compositon and music history. As a songwriter myself, the insights into many of the techniques Bach employed to keep the listener enthralled were especially valuable. It seemed every page was filled with at least one extremely interesting observation. This very good book was a very pleasant reading experience.
Rating:
Summary: Not great, not good, but informative
Review: There's a good chance that those who find D. Hofstadter entertaining will like this book: it's very much in the same vein as his works. Those who can't stand Hofstadter, or actually know something about music, will probably hate it. Altschuler just has this grating tone; it's as if he wants you to believe everything he's saying is worth its weight in gold; perhaps it's because he went to an ivy school. Poor boy.I read some insightful words about Hofstadter's GEB lately, and they apply here as well: "mathematicians find the mathematics almost dangerously oversimplified, but the stuff about music interesting; musicians find the talk about music banal, but the stuff about math interesting." In other words, when you mix two or more branches of knowledge with the intent of coming to some sort of synthetic point of view, you should probably know what you are talking about!
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