David Yearsley is the author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge, 2002) as well as numerous essays on European musical culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; his scholarly work has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music and Letters, Early Music and Eighteenth-Century Music. Active as a performer on organ and other keyboard instruments, his recordings are available on the Loft and Musica Omnia labels. Yearsley has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a Wenner–Gren Foundation Fellow at Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden. A long-time member of the pioneering synthesizer trio Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company, he is Professor of Music at Cornell University, New York.

• Introduction; 1. Inventing the organist's feet; 2. Harmonies of the feet, visions of the body; 3. Walking towards perfection: pedal solos and cycles; 4. The pedal in the cosmopolitan age of travel; 5. Treading the globe: the world-wide expansion of the German pedal ideal; 6. Bach's feet.

'There is much to enjoy in this compelling study.' Early Music