Reading thrillers can increase your understanding of Bach

I've found a new thriller writer, Lee Child.  Imagine my surprise when I found a great passage about playing music in the midst of his fourth book, The Visitor.

The fifth of Bach’s three-part inventions was labelled BWV 791 by scholars and was one of the hardest in the canon, but it was Rita Scimeca’s favourite piece in all the world. It depended entirely on tone, which came from the mind, down through the shoulders and the arms and the hands and the fingers. The tone had to be whimsical, but confident. The whole piece was a confection of nonsense, and the tone had to confess to that but simultaneously it had to sound utterly serious for the effect to develop properly. It had to sound polished, but insane. Secretly, she was sure Bach was crazy.

Her piano helped. It’s sound was big enough to be sonorous, but delicate enough to be nimble. She played the piece all the way through twice, half-speed, and she was reasonably pleased with what she heard…. (p.428)
To play this thing properly, you needed to be in some kind of a trance….She sat down and played it through again, a dozen times, fifteen, twenty, all the way from the first measure to the last. She was note-perfect, but that was nothing. Was the meaning there? Was there emotion in the sound? Thought? On the whole she reckoned there was. She played it again, once, then twice. She smiled to herself…She was making progress. Now all she had to do was bring the speed up. But not too much speed. She preferred Bach played slowly. Too much speed trivialized it. Although it was fundamentally trivial music. But that was all part of Bach’s mind-game, she thought. He deliberately wrote trivial music that just begged to be played with great ceremony. (p.432-433)

Want to hear it?  

So, inspiration is where you find it.  The books are great too, if you like thrillers with a renegade but decent hero.