Our critics cast their eyes over a selection of books on classical music and jazz Our expert Chris Haslam gives valuable advice on buying and using your hi-fi
Aaron Copland in Latin America – Music and
Cultural Politics
Carol A Hess
Illinois 344pp (hb) £25.99
‘Standing up for three hours and shaking hands with 80 people is not much fun’. Cultural diplomacy can, it seems, be decidedly tedious. Between 1941-63 Aaron Copland made four US governmentsponsored trips to Latin America, and among the many high-profile lectures, broadcasts and concerts that he gave were a bevy of less stimulating assignments – listening to ‘god-awful’ recitals by local musicians, for instance, or glad-handing at joyless civic receptions. Carol Hess’s wideranging study tracks Copland’s travels as a cultural ambassador in countries such as Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Cuba. He spoke Spanish, which helped, and vigorously promoted the music of Latin American composers (Chávez, Ginastera and Villalobos among them) on returning to the USA. Hess scrupulously charts the often-stressful debates surrounding Copland’s travels. What did ‘national’ music mean? Were his visits condescending?
Was Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour policy more politically than culturally inspired? The detail and extensive footnoting probably suit an academic market more than the general reader, but for reference purposes her book is invaluable. Terry Blain
Beethoven in Russia –
Music and Politics
Frederick W Skinner
Indiana 326pp (pb) £34
No great composer has been so consistently politicised as Beethoven – sometimes even on both sides of a conflict, as in the Second World War when the Nazis had Furtwängler conduct the Ninth Symphony to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, while the Allies adopted the opening of the Fifth Symphony as the ‘V for Victory’ signal.
Frederick Skinner adds to the currently ever-expanding study of reception history with this compendious narrative of Beethoven’s presence in Russian music-making and philosophy. His study has a natural divide in 1917: we follow the impact that Beethoven’s music made on Nikolai Golitsyn with his first complete performance of the Missa solemnis in 1824, through Mikhail Vielgorski’s support for Liszt’s accounts of the Beethoven late sonatas, to the varied responses of Lermontov, Pushkin, Odoevski and Glinka among others.
After the Revolution, Skinner charts the increasing politicisation of the Beethoven repertoire in the service of Stalin’s dictatorship. The difficulty here is to disentangle the canonisation of his music in Russia from that taking place elsewhere. There are many interesting anecdotes and quotes, but too often Skinner takes refuge in lengthy and irrelevant biographical digressions: this is a chronology, but not really an analysis, of Beethoven’s significance. Nicholas Kenyon
Formation – Building a Personal Canon, Part 1
Brad Mehldau
Equinox 300pp (hb) £30
There are many cheerily avuncular jazz autobiographies in which the protagonist simply negotiates the ups and downs of their career then rounds it all off with the equivalent of a satisfied smile of achievement. This isn’t one. Instead, the acclaimed pianist and composer charts his musical development, his philosophical and literary influences and his routinely scarifying personal life as an integrated process, each element impacting on the whole. The results are fascinating and frequently disturbing: at one point he determines that jazz allows you to ‘improvise yourself into another identity’, which sounds perky enough until you realise that this aspect of the music was a significant element in his salvation from his own self-destructive impulses. This volume takes us from his childhood through to his arrival in Los Angeles in the 1990s, with the implication of more to come. The usual life-andtimes element is certainly present within the text, but, like much of his music, Mehldau’s writing style is fluent, detailed, expressive, intense and exceptionally concentrated, and should be approached as such.
Roger Thomas
Quartet – How Four Women Changed the Musical World Leah Broad
Faber 480pp (hb) £20
As concert programmers, broadcasters and record labels diversify their repertoires, Quartet arrives with impeccable timing. A group biography in the manner of Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting or Siân Evans’s Queen
Bees, it interweaves the lives of Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen in a story spanning a century of British cultural life. Broad ranges widely across the composers’ family lives, friendships, relationships, education, travels and compositional landmarks, skilfully evoking the spirit of an era and characterising her four subjects as vividly as heroines in a novel.
Quartet is not a feminist diatribe: the tone of the book is rather cosy – a consequence, perhaps, of referring to the composers by their first names. Nevertheless, Broad is quietly angry at these women’s unfair neglect and with those who conspired to bring it about (Britten emerges as a surprise villain). Ignore the hyperbole about ‘changing the world’ – overused and in this case curiously at odds with the point that these composers have been overlooked – and you will find an accomplished, thoughtful and highly readable book.
Alexandra Wilson