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In "The Great Transformation of Musical Taste," William Weber traces the development of the musical canon we revere today – music, for the most part, composed by creative geniuses long dead. Audiences today prefer old works to new. How did this change come about?...MORE | SHOP William Weber
In books like "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" and "An Anthropologist on Mars," the physician Oliver Sacks has given us some compelling and deeply moving portraits of patients in predicaments so odd, so vexing, so metaphysically curious that they read like something out of a tale by Borges or Calvino. In his latest book, "Musicophilia," Sacks focuses on people afflicted with strange musical disorders or powers — "musical misalignments" that affect their professional and daily lives.
Alex Ross has produced an introduction to twentieth-century music that is also an absorbing story of personalities and events that is also a history of modern cultural forms and styles that is also a study of social, political, and technological change. The Rest Is Noise is cultural history the way cultural history should be written: a single strong narrative operating on many levels at once. What more do you want from a book? That it be intelligently, artfully, and lucidly written? It’s those things, too.” —Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club “You don't have to be an aficionado of modern music to love this book: Alex Ross’s extraordinary gifts as a writer, his deep knowledge of music, and his fresh forays into cultural history make The Rest is Noise a complete delight.” —Jean Strouse, author of Morgan: American Financier “The Rest Is Noise reads like a sprawling, intense novel, one of utopian dreams, doom, and consolation, with the most extraordinary cast of characters from music and history alike. A great, inspiring ride.” —Osvaldo Golijov
Irving Fine (1916-1962) was a gifted composer, an excellent pianist and a notable educator. His death at the age of 46 deprived us of an important creative talent; the fact that no serious book about him has appeared until recently is rather surprising. Philip Ramey’s book fills this gap admirably. | BUY The Book
After Beethoven died, many Viennese music fans were able to clip a keepsake of a lock of his hair, but only one has been preserved with all the proper provenance to show it as authentic. The story of that lock of hair is the backbone of a riveting slice of history in _Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved_ (Broadway Books) by Russell Martin. Martin has told three stories in his book, intercalating them in chapters that come to a pleasing whole. The first story is a fine capsule biography of Beethoven himself. Within the biography, Martin tells us much about the composer's medical problems, increasing our wonder of how such an afflicted man could have produced works of such profound concentration and joy. The second story within the book is about the fate of the wandering lock of hair as it passed to the heirs of the young musician who clipped it, and how it formed part of the story of the Holocaust, turning up in Denmark in 1943. Eventually it was sold at Sothebys in 1994, to a couple of non-musician fans of Beethoven, one of whom donated his share to the university Beethoven center he had started, and one who made his strands available for medical testing. The hair snipped by Beethoven's young friend was able to tell its story a hundred and seventy years later, giving a probable explanation for Beethoven's ailments.BUY Beethoven's Hair
Two new novels exploring the lives of classical musicians living under Nazi rule in WWII-era Germany are raising eyebrows in the dual worlds of music and literature. At the heart of both books is the chilling conflict of great art in the face of great evil, and the inescapably human decisions that must be made in such situations. ...MORE NYTimes “The Savior” (Simon & Schuster), Eugene Drucker
“Variations on the Beast” (Dragon Press), Henry Grinberg
Biography of Russian composer Alexander Borodin, member of 'The Five'
or 'The Mighty Handful,' successful chemical scientist with equal
passion for classical music. Borodin is famous for his opera Prince Igor
which he left unfinished ...moreBORODIN BIO and CDiscography
| B and N: BOOKS about BORODIN | AMAZON: BORODIN BOOKS
(Eminent Lives)This addition to the Eminent Lives Series by Pulitzer-winning biographer Morris (Theodore Rex; Dutch) does not disappoint. The author provides a close analysis of only one cantata, the early (written at 19) and relatively obscure Joseph II, but leaves no doubt he could easily do the same for the more radical and magisterial works, which are "bothersome to orthodox opinion" about Beethoven's time, were the ground not so well trodden.
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