Our critics cast their eyes over this month’s selection of books on classical music
Good Music – What It Is & Who Gets to Decide
John J Sheinbaum
University of Chicago Press 978-0-226-59338-8 320pp (pb) £22.50 Someone recently said: ‘We are living not in an era of change, but a change of era.’ Patterns of thought long taken for granted are coming into question, and the value judgments we place on music are no exception. Why do we admire music that is ‘deep’ over things that are simply fun? Why is it good to be ‘good’?
John J Sheinbaum’s book is simultaneously essential, fascinating and slightly maddening. A fundamentally academic study, its style is potentially indigestible for the general reader ploughing through the intriguing content. In other ways, too, the ivory tower is close by. For example: ‘Long-standing valorisation of seemingly heroic figures who create musical masterpieces resulted in masculinising metaphors that served to marginalise musicmaking by women.’ Yet women were marginalised throughout Western society in many ways, for centuries, with or without metaphors, which should also bear some responsibility.
Nevertheless, here’s a new take on what makes ★andel great, with fine-toothed-comb analyses from Beethoven to The Beatles, and a passionate case for a collaborative, participatory approach to making music . It’s a persuasive argument for reappraising how we integrate this beloved art into our lives.
Jessica Duchen ★★★★
Mozart in Context
Ed. Simon P Keefe
Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-18105-2 350pp (hb) £74.99 The eminent scholar Simon Keefe is joined here by 22 others to take us on a tour of the latest insights into Mozart’s interactions with the wider world. Revised evaluations abound. Mozart did ‘not fall from favour’ in his last years, his death aged 35 was ‘not unusual’ for that era (Schubert died at 31), Salieri’s supposed hatred of Mozart (as portrayed in the film and play Amadeus) was actually directed at his librettist Da Ponte, not the composer, and female singers did not match modern voice production ideals because ‘corset wear’ constricted their diaphragms. Importantly we learn that Mozart’s concept of the work was ‘more closely tied …to the act of performance’ than to a single text (see the various versions of the Piano Concerto K491). Sometimes the contributors disagree: for example, the Vienna chapter reports that his piano pupils were ‘invariably women’ whereas the ‘Instrumentalists’ section names two male students. This book is not simply a set of snapshots of Mozart from different angles, but a glorious grandstand view of 21st-century insights about him in his cultural settings. Anthony Pryer ★★★★★ The Music of Charlie Chaplin Jim Lochner
Mcfarland 978-0-786-49611-2 256pp (pb) £43.50
Charlie Chaplin was a worldwide icon of cinematic pantomime, a writer, actor, director and… composer? That his gifts extended to music often surprises many, and this thoroughly researched book serves to set the record straight about his musical world. Jim Lochner takes us through the life, work and music of Chaplin in what is part biography and part in-depth analysis. It’s an exhaustive text that plots Chaplin’s every musical move – from amateur musician and discerning film programmer to songwriter and composer of some 18 original film scores. Music obviously came very naturally to him, and without formal training or any technical skill. As a composer, he relied on arrangers and conductors to bring his musical visions to life, but it wasn’t an easy process for those he deemed suitable for the task. What comes across, though, is that Chaplin loved music and foresaw what it could do for film; in his own way, he helped shape what the art form would become. There are some fascinating insights here into a life that was anything but black and white. Michael Beek ★★★★
The Rite of Spring – The Music of Modernity
Gillian Moore
Head of Zeus 978-1-786-69682-3 288pp (hb) £18.99
No piece of music ever cast a longer shadow than The Rite of Spring: Moore surveys the huge number of treatments it has received – and is still receiving – at the hands of choreographers, jazz musicians, pop musicians, and film-makers as well as conductors. She sets it in the context of the Russian intelligentsia’s drive to rediscover its roots; how to connect with ‘Russianness’ was the predominant theme of literature, painting and music throughout the 19th century, whether that Russianness was real or imagined. Indeed, the work’s ‘ancient’ rite never existed; Roerich and Stravinsky simply felt that its sanguinary conclusion would suit their need for lurid drama.
With its fascinating illustrations and welcoming tone, this is a non-specialist guide by a writer who tells a rattling good tale.
Moore deals expertly with the myths surrounding the premiere; Diaghilev and his producer Gabriel Astruc were delighted with the first-night riot. Moore’s musical and choreographic commentaries are jargon-free and accessible, and her judgments adroit: the sacrificial victim’s climactic dance was ‘chilly, robotic, inexorable – a pagan ritual for the machine age’. Michael Church ★★★★★