THE LIFE OF MUSIC

NEW ADVENTURES IN THE WESTERN CLASSICAL TRADITION

As managing director of London’s Barbican Centre, a former director of the Proms, controller of Radio 3 and music critic of the Observer, Sir Nicholas Kenyon is eminently well suited to write a magisterial overview of western classical music.

In the Guardian, Fiona Maddocks noted that Kenyon navigated the ‘current muddle’ as to definitions and ‘generously embraces all, reminding us that “western music” began some four centuries before Bach and introducing us to composers, several of them women, born in the 1980s’. Although the ‘transforming power of digital music’ is central to the book, Kenyon begins his story with the silver trumpets found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. For Maddocks, ‘With its myriad threads of history and argument, the book is an open dialogue between past and present, composer, performer and performance.’

In the Times, Neil Fisher thought Kenyon was an admirably confident if slightly-old-fashioned guide: ‘Let Kenyon hold your hand as he travels from ancient Greek theatre music to medieval masses, Renaissance madrigals to Mozart symphonies, and Brahms piano concertos to 20thcentury serialist brain scramblers.’ And in the Literary Review, Matthew Lyons simply loved it: ‘Throughout Kenyon is alert to how contemporaries heard the music of their peers, and how they thought about it – and to how that music is received today. This is always a book about music-in-performance, and about the art of listening. I can think of no higher praise than, at almost every turn, this reviewer wanted to stop reading and listen to the music Kenyon described – and consistently felt enriched and rewarded for doing so.’