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A Sound Mind
- How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite Its Entire History)
- Narrated by: Paul Morley
- Length: 24 hrs and 44 mins
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A Sound Mind
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Summary
Music critic and writer Paul Morley weaves together memoir and history in a spiralling tale that establishes classical music as the most rebellious genre of all.
Paul Morley had stopped being surprised by modern pop music and found himself retreating into the sounds of artists he loved when, as an emerging music journalist in the 70s, he wrote for NME. But not wishing to give in to dreary nostalgia, endlessly circling back to the bands he wrote about in the past, he went searching for something new, rare and wondrous – and found it in classical music.
A soaring polemic, a grumpy reflection on modern rock, and a fan’s love note, A Sound Mind rejects the idea that classical music is establishment; old; a drag. Instead, the book reveals this genre to be the most exciting and varied in music. A Sound Mind is a multi-layered memoir of Morley’s shifting musical tastes, but it is also a compelling history of classical music that reveals the genre’s rich and often deviant past – and, hopefully, future.
Like a conductor, Morley weaves together timelines and timeframes in an orchestral narrative that declares the transformative and resilient power of classical music from Bach to Shostakovich, Brahms to Birtwistle, Mozart to Cage, travelling from eighteenth century salons to the modern age of Spotify.
Critic reviews
"An alternately funny and moving book about the most important art form on Planet Earth. Destined to become a classic (pun intended)." (Jarvis Cocker)
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Bob Knowles
- 30-11-20
..he fell in love with late 20th C Classical Music
There is a lot of enthusiastic writing here about modern late 20th Century composers; as someone who 'switched' from rock to classical after punk I can only admire the breadth of modern music he covers encouraging me to listen to more of Bartok, Shostakovich and 2nd Viennese school than I already know and dozens of post war composers, many of whom I didn't previously know at all. He's also particularly strong on chamber music, especially the String Quartet.
But I think the summary is very misleading because he talks very little in comparison about the 18th & 19th Century repertoire that forms the core of what your local orchestra is likely to play. Debussy & Ravel get a lot of coverage because he clearly liked them before he got into classical seriously, and Bach, Mozart & Beethoven get a reasonable mention, though apart from Mozart they are mainly as influences on the modern 20th C composers he most wants to talk about.
It's only a really useful guide for crossing over from Rock to Classical if you primarily like Beefheart, Can, Faust, Zappa & the Velvets and don't consider anything easier worthy of you. I do like those bands and spent plenty of time and effort working them out but I also like the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Joni & the Who and I don't think this very big book does enough justice to pointing the early dabbler in Classical Music towards the 'core greats'. He also largely ignores Opera except to goto Glyndebourne in his trainers and sneer (try the ENO, WNO, SO, Opera North, or even Glyndebourne Touring Paul, you'll be fine in jeans & t-shirt), in fact he hardly talks about live performances of any classical music.
A practical frustration is that this is an audiobook with lots of lists of potentially interesting things to try but no PDF, if, like me you spend most of your audiobook listening time driving, exercising or walking the dog this is pretty useless so you just get annoyed because he's listed 3 pieces by Babbitt and zero by Bruckner.
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4 people found this helpful