Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) was far more famous than his father, Johann Sebastian Bach, during the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century, the two reputations were reversed: Sebastian attained a lofty and permanent place in the canon; Emanuel was forgotten except for a few compositions. The early twentieth century saw a gradual return of interest in Emanuel Bach's music, and since the middle of the century there has been a rapid increase of attention to his works. To coincide with the three hundredth anniversary of Bach's birth David Schulenberg has published The Music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, as part of the series Eastman Studies in Music, supplemented online by information about Bach's life and music and by musical examples. Schulenberg acknowledges in his Preface that he has had an advantage that two previous substantial accounts of Bach's works lacked (Carl Heinrich Bitter, Wilhelm Friedemann und Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und deren Brüder (Berlin: Wilhelm Müller, 1868) and Hans-Günter Ottenberg, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Leipzig: Reclam, 1982)). That advantage is access to much information about Bach's compositions and their origin from the Gesamtausgabe currently in progress: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works, a series with more than sixty-five volumes published by the Packard Humanities Institute since 2005. Schulenberg writes that he has attempted ‘to say something useful about every major composition and all those that are frequently performed, as well as minor works that must be examined if we are to understand Bach's compositional choices’ (x). Although he does not call his book a life-and-works, Schulenberg describes the circumstances that motivated the composition of much of Bach's oeuvre. And since most of these circumstances include biographical information, this book contains frequent and helpful elements of a life-and-works study. Thus, within its two covers and with its additional online material, Schulenberg's book contains more information about Emanuel Bach's music than does any other single published volume to date. It might be regarded as a summation of all that has been written about the composer's works in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, augmented by Schulenberg's own contributions.

The amount of information constitutes a problem as well as a strength. Bach's career as a composer did not proceed in a tidy manner: he experimented erratically, producing curious mixtures of genres, and he revised frequently, sometimes obsessively, meaning that an account of his oeuvre is difficult to organize. Schulenberg has chosen to examine Bach's works in groups of chapters that are roughly chronological. Following a first chapter in which he touches briefly on ‘context’, he divides Bach's career into three periods: years as a neophyte in Leipzig and Frankfurt an der Oder (c1731–c1740; chapters 2–4); employment as a keyboardist at the court of Friedrich II, ‘Frederick the Great’, of Prussia (1741–1768; chapters 5–9); and tenure as Music Director of the city churches in Hamburg (1768–1788; chapters 9–12).

The division into chronological groups is not entirely strict, however. Chapter 8, entitled ‘Berlin and After’, contains a discussion of all of Bach's lieder, including those composed in Hamburg, as well as in Berlin. Schulenberg likewise discusses all of the symphonies (1741 to 1776) in an uninterrupted essay. I find these two presentations instructive and cogent. Schulenberg's account of the modulating rondos (in the chapter entitled ‘The Later Keyboard Music’), which appears to present the entire history of these unique pieces, would have profited from similar treatment – a history of the modulating rondo from the rondo-like movements of the Berlin sonatas and chamber music to the final rondo of the Kenner und Liebhaber collections (composed in 1786) would have been informative. (Schulenberg does compare a rondo movement within a sonata in the first Kenner und Liebhaber collection with the rondos in subsequent volumes of this Hamburg series, but he does not mention earlier movements that show the development of the modulating rondo during the course of Bach's career.)

Schulenberg does not discuss either the keyboard concertos or the keyboard sonatas in a single essay. The works in these two genres are the most numerous among Bach's compositions, and their dates of origin range from his Leipzig years to the last year or two of his life. To describe either genre in ample detail in one essay would have been very challenging, if not impossible. Schulenberg keeps his discussions of these two genres within the chronological chapter groups he has established for them, and has much that is enlightening to say about the evolution of each. He acknowledges the importance of the concertos and sonatas within Bach's oeuvre at the end of chapter 4, where he describes them as the two genres for which Bach ‘would eventually become famous’, and notes that ‘by the mid-1740s, the keyboard sonata was a serious type of piece . . . becoming, like the keyboard concerto, a genre in its own right’ (57). Yet this announcement of the importance of these two genres is inconspicuous. The concertos and sonatas include Bach's most imaginative, original and varied works. I would like to have seen a prominent, even if brief, overview of the evolution of each of these genres, perhaps at the end of the book. Schulenberg seems wary of praising these works inordinately, though he does not hesitate to question the merits of others (for example, his remarks about the ultimate worth of Bach's Heilig (294)).

Schulenberg fulfils his promise to write about as many of Bach's works, significant and insignificant, as possible. Although the complete edition is not yet finished, Schulenberg has been able to see enough of the published works and sources for the unpublished works to make a reasonable extrapolation about the composer's style in works to which he has limited access. Schulenberg's most original contribution to this history of Bach's music is his comparison of Emanuel's style with those of Sebastian Bach, Telemann and Handel, and Emanuel's deliberate decision to reject various elements of earlier forms and styles in the works of those composers. He also makes comparisons between Emanuel's music and that of composers who were more nearly contemporary with him: Johann Joachim Quantz, Johann Adolf Hasse, Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun, Gottfried August Homilius and Georg Benda.

Schulenberg seeks to evaluate Bach's music on its own terms, avoiding what he regards as judgmental pitfalls. He does not avail himself of the critical theories that have occupied many historians – including, belatedly, musicologists – since the last quarter of the twentieth century: psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, various shades of Marxism, and so forth. In his introductory chapter and in his closing statement he rejects the teleological view of Bach's music as a transition between two coherent, monolithic styles (the music of Sebastian Bach and Viennese Classicism). He also dismisses the use of metaphorical categories such as the sublime, the picturesque, empfindsamer Stil and rhetoric as means of assessing Bach's works. He refuses to provide an explanatory philosophical framework for the ‘irregularities and disjunctions’ in Bach's works. But although Schulenberg takes a negative view of much that has been written in explanation of Emanuel Bach's eccentric style, the contribution that The Music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach makes is a positive one. Avoidance of any overt interpretative system has allowed Schulenberg to focus intensely on Bach's music itself and to view the development of Bach's style as a response to the circumstances of his musical career – the revision of many works during the 1740s, for example, as an effort to attain the Italianate style of the musical establishment of Frederick the Great. The book is an essential addition to the literature. Its value lies not only in the abundance of information about Bach's works that it contains, but in its generous description of the compositional choices available during his lifetime.