By Alan Hustak on August 6, 2009
Eric Siblin has a foot planted firmly in two musical worlds. A film maker and widely travelled Montreal Free-lance journalist and documentary film maker who cut his teeth as a newspaper pop-music critic, Siblin, 48, has entered the so-called classical sphere with his first book by deconstructing J.S. Bach’s cello suites. It is an extraordinary effort, a free-wheeling literary riff about the art of making music . Like travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Siblin condenses worlds into pages and leaves a reader hungry for more. He became fascinated with the “dark moody tones’‘ of the cello suites nine years ago after hearing them for the first time played at the Royal Conservatory of Music In Toronto .. “I had no reason to be there,” he writes, … “but I might have been searching for something without knowing it. Top 40 tunes had overstayed their welcome in my auditory cortex, and the culture surrounding rock music had worn thin. I wanted music to occupy a central part in my life, but in a different way.”
