A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love With Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History)

by Paul Morley

Overview

For readers of Mozart in the Jungle and Year of Wonder, a new history of and guide to classical music.

Paul Morley made his name as a journalist covering the rock and pop of the 1970s and 1980s. But as his career progressed, he found himself drawn toward developing technologies, streaming platforms, and, increasingly, the music from the past that streaming services now made available. Suddenly able to access every piece Mozart or Bach had ever written and to curate playlists that worked with these musicians' themes across different performers, composers, and eras, he began to understand classical music in a whole new way and to believe that it was music at its most dramatic and revealing.
In A Sound Mind, Morley takes readers along on his journey into the history and future of classical music. His descriptions, explanations, and guidance make this seemingly arcane genre more friendly to listeners and show the music's power, depth, and timeless beauty. In Morley's capable hands, the history of the classical genre is shown to be the history of all music, with these long-ago pieces influencing everyone from jazz greats to punk rockers and the pop musicians of today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635570267
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	11/10/2020
Pages:	624
Sales rank:	1,114,042
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Paul Morley has worked as a music journalist, pop svengali, and broadcaster. He is the author of a number of books on music-The Awfully Big Adventure: Michael Jackson in the Afterlife; The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference; Ask: The Chatter of Pop; Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City-as well as two acclaimed memoirs. Paul has written for a number of publications, including the New Statesman, the Sunday Telegraph, NME, the Observer, and the Guardian. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

Part 1 The Question - Into the Unknown 1

Part 2 The Learning - What Brought Me Here 33

Part 3 The Beginning - To The Planets and Beyond 59

Part 4 The Playlist - A Few of My Favourite Things 91

Part 5 The Writing - Finding the Right Words 161

Part 6 1973, the Year When - A Playlist With Information; The Persistence of Memory 219

Part 7 The String Quartet - In Four Parts 253

Part 8 The Obscure - Changing Direction 361

Part 9 The Piano - Light and Dark 423

Part 10 The Answer - The Place Where the Story Stops 501

The Coda… Sound Out of Sound - Music to Listen to While Reading a Book 575

Acknowledgements 579

Index 581

Editorial Reviews

09/07/2020

British rock critic and journalist Morley (Words and Music) embraces contemporary classical music at its most outré in this labyrinthine meditation. Morley locates the soul of classical music in a passion for innovation that eclipses now-formulaic pop styles. While he salutes old masters including Mozart as still-relevant revolutionaries, he focuses more on modern compositions that are an arduously acquired tastes, including Luciano Berio’s Sequenza V, written in 1966, an atonal trombone solo performed in a clown getup. The book is a grab-bag, jumbling together playlists, loose-limbed thematic essays, reminiscences of studying composition and writing a string quartet at London’s Royal Academy of Music, and rambling interviews with such composers as John Adams and Sir Harrison Birtwistle. Morley delivers many perceptive, tunefully written passages, but many more that display the music-criticism sins of overintellectualizing, obscure erudition, and restless hungering for an unheralded avant-garde to champion (Harrison Birtwistle, for instance, “imagined an entirely different history of the string quartet” and “his entire music orbits classical history, but never lands”). Cognoscenti may relish Morley’s appreciation of painfully highbrow music, but ordinary classical-music lovers will find most of it a baffling slog. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Morley is a bright writer, and most of his commentary on specific pieces and composers is sophisticated and insightful." - The New York Times Book Review

“A thoughtful work full of fresh observations and strong opinions. . . [Morley's] writing strikes just the right note: erudite but edgy, entertaining but enlightening. An excellent guide for anyone interested in expanding their musical horizons.” —Library Journal

“Morley delivers many perceptive, tunefully written passages” —Publishers Weekly

“An intoxicating journey into classical music. . . [Morley] expertly probes classical composers' agitated minds and collective oeuvres. Adeptly framing observations of pop, rock, and classical music within the context of the industry, Morley also underscores extraordinary changes in our time, highlighting the rapid growth of technology and its impact on music. . . A rich resource for music lovers.” —Booklist

“Morley's expansive present-tense prose flows from the loosening of the superego, his id let out to play in a style that's at times neo-gonzo, at others like an inspired hybrid of Mik Cohn and the Julian Cope of Krautrocksampler. I hold him to be one of the great pop writers. You might even call him the Bowie of rock journalism.” —Barney Hoskyns, The Guardian on THE AGE OF BOWIE

“Morley remains a brilliant conductor – of music, of ideas, of inexplicable flashes of lightning. He knows the score.” —The Sunday Times

"If Morley’s book is a meta-playlist, it includes some fascinating tracks. Among the questions he asks and answers: Unlike classical compositions, why are pop bands more about the brand than the music? Is there a place for music critics now that there are algorithms that can tell you what to listen to next? Why is abstract art sometimes valued in the millions of dollars, when its contemporary—abstract music—is something you can’t own or monetize?" - New York Journal of Books

From the Publisher

09/01/2020

After some four decades writing about pop and rock, Morley (Ask: The Chatter of Pop) dives into the world of classical music, which once again has allowed him to feel the joy of discovery. Here he recounts his experience learning about music history, as well as writing about, listening to, and making music. Morley discusses his favorite pieces and musicians, expounds on how to assemble playlists (he also provides a number of them), and converses with contemporary composers including Harrison Birtwistle, Oliver Knussen, and John Adams. This is a thoughtful work full of fresh observations and strong opinions. Two of its 10 chapters ("The String Quartets—in Four Parts" and "The Piano—Light and Dark") are particularly illuminating and offer unique approaches. His writing strikes just the right note: erudite but edgy, entertaining but enlightening. VERDICT An excellent guide for anyone interested in expanding their musical horizons.—Carolyn M. Mulac, Chicago

Library Journal

2020-08-21
A rock critic grows fond of classical music.

English music critic Morley, acclaimed in the 1970s and early ’80s for his writings about rock, sees the current landscape of criticism vastly changed by the internet and streaming services, with little room for his talents. “The covering of music is all for the consumer now,” he writes, rather than about “the nature and momentum, the wonderful warp and weave, of the culture.” In a digressive memoir characterized by rhapsodic effusions of prose, the author recounts his ambitious search “to find out what might be the final piece of music I would ever listen to” as well as “to analyse the effects of streaming on the form and content of music” and to question “what it is, and how, to write about music, what the motivation is, and what the satisfactions are.” With no training in music theory or composition, hoping to restyle himself as a classical critic, Morley took the opportunity to spend a year at the Royal Academy of Music, an experience documented for a BBC show. He wanted, he writes, “to find ways to demystify a vast, complex world” of music that to him had a “stuffy public image, as if it is a music that belongs only to a conscribed elite…fixed inside an ideologically suspect status quo, lacking the exhilarating suggestion of new beginnings, a pulsating sense of an exciting, mind-expanding tomorrow.” After immersing himself in that vast world, however, he decided that classical music “is not all big, mighty orchestras and epic, overpowering, bloody-minded symphonies, or tarted-up operatic fussiness.” It is “also filled with ravishing and sometimes deliciously haywire intimacy, the small, constantly varied combinations of instruments.” Classical composers, he concludes, were as rebellious and innovative as the musicians he long celebrated. Though Morley’s enthusiasm is convincing, the narrative could benefit from significant trimming.

A rambling memoir enlivened by spirited responses to classical works.

Kirkus Reviews