I picked this up at the Bach Archive in Leipzig when I was attending the Neuroscience and Music II Conference this summer-it is available here in the UK. I'm recommending Johann Sebastian Bach-His life in Pictures and Documents by Hans Conrad Fischer (pub Hanssler). A bit of a mind-bender if, like me, you're hopeless at Maths, but makes the sort of tantalising connections that I'm sure JSB would've loved! Douglas R Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Penguin, new 20th anniversary edition, 2000). Some chapters are admittedly more for musicologists/music theorists than the general reader, but alongside his musical knowledge Dreyfus also displays a humane appreciation of Bach's personality. The first chapter in particular contains a superb discussion of the first Two-Part Invention: only a short and apparently simple keyboard piece, but Dreyfus demonstrates just how rigorously Bach exploits every contrapuntal possibility latent in his theme - and if he could do that within such a small format, you can imagine the astonishing architectural imagination that lies behind the longer fugues. For those interested in reading some close-up analyses of Bach's music, I'd recommend Lawrence Dreyfus's "Bach and the Patterns of Invention".
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