Our critics cast their eyes over the latest selection of books on all things music
Becoming Ella Fitzgerald Judith Tick
WW Norton 529pp (hb) £30
Are historians necessarily good biographers? It’s an interesting question, not least because a biography of a nearcontemporary subject might be expected to take their personal legacy into account; to paraphrase the author Angela Carter, a life welllived is akin to planting a tree that will hopefully continue to grow and thrive even when we are no longer alive to nurture it.
For her part, Judith Tick is an academic historian with an interest in music, often from the perspective of female practitioners. Given that the jazz biography sector tends to be dominated by journalists, her approach can only be valuable.
This book scrupulously chronicles the rise of jazz doyenne Ella Fitzgerald from the role of ‘girl singer’ to international acclaim, with meticulous reference to firsthand accounts. While Tick’s style is somewhat detached, this isn’t really a book for casual reading but is perhaps best treated as a detailed go-to reference source.
The downside is that historians study the past, so the book ends with Fitzgerald’s death; some exploration of her stylistic influence on subsequent generations of singers wouldn’t have hurt. Roger Thomas
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: Rehearsing and Performing its 1824 Premiere
Theodore Albrecht
Boydell and Brewer 322pp (hb) £70
It’s 200 years since the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, one of the pinnacles of western classical music. Reams have been written about both composer and work and yet, as Theodore Albrecht demonstrates, there are still new things to say and myths to dispel. He focuses on the premiere and second performance, which took place in Rossini-mad Vienna on 7 and 23 May 1824, following months of political wranglings about which theatre the composer should pick, and endless discussions about concert dates and copyists.
Drawing on his recent landmark translations of Beethoven’s conversation books, Albrecht peppers his day-by-day breakdown with everyday observations that bring the story to life. We learn of Beethoven’s note to make sure he got a haircut before the premiere; his visit with his nephew Karl to the menagerie to see a white fox, a sloth bear and a lioness; and his pleas for the second violins to pay attention.
It’s a book of plentiful footnotes and in-depth appendices and perhaps tells us more about musical life in Vienna than the symphony itself – but is no less fascinating and invaluable for that. Rebecca Franks
Gavin Bryars
David Wordsworth and Leslie East, editors
Kahn and Averill 360pp (hb) £40
When the London Philharmonic Orchestra recently programmed Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, the 1971 piece that features a looped recording of an anonymous homeless man singing a halfremembered hymn, the ensemble had to add a second performance on the same evening due to its popularity. Along with The Sinking of the Titanic, which imagines the ship’s band continuing to play as the vessel plunges under sea, Jesus’ Blood… is well known (Tom Waits recorded a version in 1993), but, as this important new book reminds us, Bryars’s repertoire is wide ranging.
Early interest in Feldman and Cage fuelled Bryars’s own experimentalism (including
‘private music’, where performers access sources unknown to the audience such as headphones or scents) alongside more traditional stageworks such as Medea, the
1982 opera written in Ancient
Greek (perhaps not that traditional, then). Because this book is split thematically (‘Opera’; ‘Dance’; ‘Art School’), with different writers, there is some crossover of content – biographical information is scant and for musicological purposes only. Essential reading for understanding – and playing – Bryars’s music. Claire Jackson
She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music
Gillian Dooley
Manchester University Press 331pp
(hb) £20
Music plays a key part in the writings of Jane Austen, as it did in her life – she bought a piano, played it regularly before breakfast, and copied out ‘very pretty tunes’, according to her niece Caroline. Gillian Dooley has done the burgeoning world of Austen studies a service by cataloguing the manuscripts that survive in Austen’s hand, all noted here following a digitisation process at Southampton University.
The material matches the temper of those times: many minor composers, copious attractive songs, and only occasional glimpses of Mozart, Arne, Grétry and Paisiello.
Dooley seems puzzled by the ambivalence of Austen’s attitude to music in her letters and novels, but unpacks some background to her literary subtlety: Austen was often scathing about empty virtuosity in music-making as a metaphor for superficiality, regarding more reserved performance as showing moral superiority. The interesting open question at the end of Dooley’s attractively presented book is whether ‘the rhetoric of music naturally flowed into the musicality of her prose’. Nicholas Kenyon