Our critics cast their eyes over the latest selection of books on all things music
Composing Myself
Andrzej Panufnik
Toccata Press 300pp (pb) £60
The lively and engaging memoirs of the Polish-born, British-domiciled composer Andrzej Panufnik (1914-91) have long been out of print. So their reappearance under the Toccata Press imprint is welcome, more especially as this handsomely produced book is the first of two projected volumes, with a second devoted to articles and programme notes from the Panufnik archive due to follow. The new edition features copious (and rare) illustrations plus detailed footnotes, augmenting the sometimes broad-brush impressions left by an author who protested he was not a man of words and addressing details such as those (queried by the musicologist Adrian Thomas) of his dramatic defection from communist Poland.
Originally published in 1987, the book is also brought up to date with a final chapter by the composer’s widow Camilla Panufnik, completing the story of his last few years. His 75th birthday celebrations are included, plus the composition of the Tenth Symphony and Cello Concerto (for Mstislav Rostropovich), the latter written in a race against developing cancer. The story of his emotional return to Warsaw in 1990, after a 36-year absence, brings Panufnik’s life full circle. John Allison ★★★★
Leokadiya Kashperova (Cambridge Elements – Women in Music)
Graham Griffiths
Cambridge 82pp (pb) £17
Once remembered as the young Stravinsky’s principal piano teacher, Leokadiya Kashperova was prerevolutionary Russia’s sole major female composer, admired by Rimsky-korsakov and Balakirev. Her career and life’s work, effectively buried after the Revolution, have been partially recovered by British scholar Graham Griffiths – enough to secure the launch last year of a new edition of Kashperova’s music by Boosey & Hawkes, and a Radio 3 Composer of the Week. Griffiths has published elsewhere on this remarkable pianist-composer, but now offers more in this deceptively slim volume – deceptive, as its richest treasure is offered not within its covers but as an online appendix: Kashperova was one of Anton Rubinstein’s last and most highly regarded pupils, and her memoir of her former teacher, translated into English for the first time (by Roger Cockrell) and published there, includes a highly detailed recollection of Rubinstein’s playing of specific works by Schubert and Beethoven – virtually a masterclass in itself. Alas, since completing the book in early 2022, Griffiths’s hopes for further research and recovery of Kashperova’s life and career have almost literally gone up in smoke. Daniel Jaffé ★★★★
Song & Self
Ian Bostridge
Faber 128pp (hb) £14.99
Tenor Ian Bostridge’s deep dive into musical identity and what he calls ‘hidden histories’ may be a slender volume, but it’s a dense read – the words ‘mystagogical’ and ‘phenomenologically’ inhabit the same sentence; Monteverdi’s Combattimento ‘challenges the tropes of heteronormativity’; while Ravel’s Chansons madécasses disclose ‘a story of power relations, violence, and European attitudes to the perceived “other”’. Bostridge de-coupled himself from academia some three decades ago but at times these lectures (fruits of the pandemic delivered at the University of Chicago in 2021) read like an application for re-admittance. Don’t be put off, though.
Beyond the scattered thickets of university-speak lie rolling vistas of telling aperçus, insights born out of the enriching experiences of an inquisitive performer, not to mention vivid phrase-making. Monteverdi through to Britten via Schumann’s problematic Frauenliebe und -leben, Bostridge probes works that have exercised a particular resonance on him.
The final lecture examining the omnipresence of death across much of Britten’s output is particularly illuminating (especially in relation to John Donne); and following a lucid potted disquisition on French colonialism Ravel’s Chansons madécasses divulge a fascinating backstory. Paul Riley ★★★★
Tuning the World
Fanny Gribenski
Chicago 280pp (hb) £44
When the oboist plays an A for the orchestra to tune to, the chances are that note is set to 440 Hz. This uniformity is a recent phenomenon, as Fanny Gribenski – assistant professor of music at New York University – explains in Tuning the World. During the 19th century, there were concerns that pitch was gradually changing upwards, and would, in time, corrupt the classics and cause problems for singers.
But, as Gribenski explains in granular detail, standardising tuning was not straightforward. When, for example, France responded to the problem by fixing A at 435 Hz (a measure known as the diapason normal), new woodwind and brass instruments were required. Eventually, in 1939, an international consortium agreed that A = 440 Hz would be the global norm, with the BBC launching the explainer series ‘Can We Have An A’ in 1947. Gribenski presents a detailed, albeit dour, account of this underexplored topic. I would have liked more about the conspiracy theories that claim Goebbels enforced the use of 440 Hz as it increases anxiety – a proposition far too silly for this rigorously researched book.
Claire Jackson ★★★★