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Narrated by Andrew Garman, David Byrne
David ByrneUnabridged — 13 hours, 10 minutes
Narrated by Andrew Garman, David Byrne
David ByrneUnabridged — 13 hours, 10 minutes
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This is a decidedly generous book—welcoming, informal, digressive, full of ideas and intelligence—and one has the pleasant sense that Byrne is speaking directly to the reader, sharing a few confidences he has picked up over the years. It is part autobiography, part how-to guide, part history and part prognostication…Byrne and his book make for good company.
—Tim Page
Most books that attempt to explain music's mysteries have been technical or historical in nature and concerned primarily with classical music. What's best about How Music Works is that Byrne concentrates on his own experience…His prose style is not very elegant…And yet his personality shines indelibly through this book, just as it does through all his varied albums…certainly a must for the many fans of David Byrne and perhaps others, too, those who wish to follow him down his own personal rabbit hole of speculation and explication.
—John Rockwell
In this fascinating meditation, Talking Heads frontman Byrne (Bicycle Diaries) explores how social and practical context, more than individual authorship, shaped music making in history and his own career. Touching on everything from bird-song and mirror neurons to the scene at CBGB, his wide-ranging treatment analyzes the effect of music venues (he theorizes that terrible stadium acoustics bias arena-rock bands toward plodding anthems), technology (sound recording induced opera singers to add vibrato), finances (he proffers balance sheets for two of his albums), and much else on the music we hear. He draws extensively from his own experiences, as his music shifted from the minimalism of early Talking Heads (“no ‘oh, babys’ or words that I wouldn’t use in in daily speech”) to complex theatricality; his chapters on Heads recording sessions are some of the most insightful accounts of musical creativity yet penned. The result is a surprising challenge to the romantic cliché of musical genius: rather than an upwelling of authentic feeling, he insists, “making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener.” Byrne’s erudite and entertaining prose reveals him to be a true musical intellectual, with serious and revealing things to say about his art. Photos. (Sept. 21)
Endlessly fascinating, insightful, and intelligent.”
Byrne’s knack for paradox and passion carries his erratic narrative…To How Music Works’ credit, that same joy—of singing and playing, of thinking and dancing, of listening and wondering—renders almost every page a song.”
How Music Works, is as engaging as it is eclectic: a buoyant hybrid of social history, anthropological survey, autobiography, personal philosophy, and business manual, sometimes on the same page.”
Both deeply personal and intellectually adventurous, this unique, stimulating book invites us to contemplate the diversity of experience we can learn to hear.”
David Byrne deserves great praise for How Music Works. It is as accessible as pop yet able to posit deep and startlingly original thoughts and discoveries in almost every paragraph…This book will make you hear music in a different way.”
A decidedly generous book—welcoming, informal, digressive, full of ideas and intelligence—and on has the pleasant sense that Byrne is speaking directly to the reader, sharing a few confidences he has picked up over the years…Byrne and his book make for good company.”
Byrne explores a whole symphony of argument in this extraordinary book with the precise, technical enthusiasm you’d expect…It’s fascinating.”
An accomplished celebration of an ever-evolving art form that can alter how we look at ourselves and the world…A meticulously researched and hugely absorbing history of music.”
David Byrne is a brilliantly original, eccentric rock star, and he has written a book to match his protean talents…Full of sharp, glancing insights.”
Creators of all stripes will find much to inspire them in Mr. Byrne’s erudite musings on the biological and mathematical underpinnings of sound, from Plato to Copernicus and from John Cage to Tantric Buddhists…Should be required reading for all writers and publishers.”
David Byrne is a brilliantly original, eccentric rock star, and he has written a book to match his protean talents . . . What’s best about [it] is that Byrne concentrates on his own experience, from a teenage geek splicing layers of guitar feedback on his father’s tape recorder (he had a mild self-diagnosed case of Asperger’s syndrome, he writes) to arty if neo-primitive rock star with the early Talking Heads at CBGB to increasingly sophisticated, globe-wandering art-rocker, happily collaborating with all manner of world musicians and pop-technological innovators.”—The New York Times Book Review
“From the former Talking Heads frontman, a supremely intelligent, superbly written dissection of music as an art form and way of life . . . Byrne touches on all kinds of music from all ages and every part of the world . . . Highly recommended—anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“In this fascinating meditation, Talking Heads frontman Byrne (Bicycle Diaries) explores how social and practical context, more than individual authorship, shaped music making in history and his own career . . . his chapters on Heads recording sessions are some of the most insightful accounts of musical creativity yet penned. The result is a surprising challenge to the romantic cliché of musical genius . . . Byrne’s erudite and entertaining prose reveals him to be a true musical intellectual, with serious and revealing things to say about his art.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Endlessly fascinating, insightful, and intelligent.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Byrne explores a whole symphony of argument in this extraordinary book with the precise, technical enthusiasm you’d expect from the painfully bright art school–educated son—born in Scotland, raised in the States—of an electrical engineer, occasionally mopping his fevered brow in the crestfallen manner of a nineteenth-century poet . . . It’s fascinating.”—The Guardian
“How Music Works is as engaging as it is eclectic: a buoyant hybrid of social history, anthropological survey, autobiography, personal philosophy, and business manual, sometimes on the same page . . . Even for the most ardent explorers (and Byrne is one) this is some seriously unknowable territory.”—The Boston Globe
“By all accounts, Byrne’s style and energy are as apparent on the page as on the stage.”—Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine
“Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Jay-Z, even Daniel Lanois have all given us books in recent years. And they’ve all been interesting and worth reading. But none of them is as good as David Byrne’s book . . . He weaves his account of the evolution of music from animals to humans and the history of changes in the way music studios work into the most accessible and unpretentious narrative of such a story that I have yet come across.”—The Globe and Mail
“A decidedly generous book—welcoming, informal, digressive, full of ideas and intelligence—and one has the pleasant sense that Byrne is speaking directly to the reader, sharing a few confidences he has picked up over the years.”—The Washington Post
As this book's title suggests, musician and Talking Heads cofounder Byrne (Bicycle Diaries) brings the same ambition and wide-ranging focus to his writing that has always been present in his music and visual art. In chapters that function as distinct essays, he explores several hows of music: how technology has shaped its history, how artists can make money from it, and how our culture and surroundings affect our reactions to it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this broad approach results in shallow spots, with underdeveloped lines of thought and interesting topics that vanish too quickly. Yet despite the lapses in rigor, Byrne has a knack for presenting ideas and theories from music scholarship—notably, the still-emerging field of sound culture—in an accessible manner. VERDICT While he avoids focusing on his musical career, Byrne's ability to draw upon his experiences with Talking Heads and as a solo artist to illustrate his points is a clear strength. Music fans of all stripes will find engaging material in this book.—Chris Martin, North Dakota State Univ. Libs., Fargo, ND
From the former Talking Heads frontman, a supremely intelligent, superbly written dissection of music as an art form and way of life. Drawing on a lifetime of music-making as an amateur, professional, performer, producer, band member and solo artist, Byrne (Bicycle Diaries, 2009) tackles the question implicit in his title from multiple angles: How does music work on the ear, brain and body? How do words relate to music in a song? How does live performance relate to recorded performance? What effect has technology had on music, and music on technology? Fans of the Talking Heads should find plenty to love about this book. Steering clear of the conflicts leading to the band's breakup, Byrne walks through the history, album by album, to illustrate how his views about performance and recording changed with the onset of fame and (small) fortune. He devotes a chapter to the circumstances that made the gritty CBGB nightclub an ideal scene for adventurous artists like Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie and Tom Verlaine and Television. Always an intensely thoughtful experimenter, here he lets us in on the thinking behind the experiments. But this book is not just, or even primarily, a rock memoir. It's also an exploration of the radical transformation--or surprising durability--of music from the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction through the era of iTunes and MP3s. Byrne touches on all kinds of music from all ages and every part of the world. Highly recommended--anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.
| BN ID: | 2940175396745 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2022 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 1,100,892 |
Chapter One
Creation in Reverse
I had an extremely slow-dawning insight about creation. That insight is that context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed. That doesn’t sound like much of an insight, but it’s actually the opposite of conventional wisdom, which maintains that creation emerges out of some interior emotion, from an upwelling of passion or feeling, and that the creative urge will brook no accommodation, that it simply must find an outlet to be heard, read, or seen. The accepted narrative suggests that a classical composer gets a strange look in his or her eye and begins furiously scribbling a fully realized composition that couldn’t exist in any other form. Or that the rock and roll singer is driven by desire and demons, and out bursts this amazing, perfectly shaped song that had to be three minutes and twelve seconds—nothing more, nothing less. This is the romantic notion of how creative work comes to be, but I think the path of creation is almost 180 degrees from this model. I believe that we unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit preexisting formats.
Of course, passion can still be present. Just because the form that one’s work will take is predetermined and opportunistic (meaning one makes something because the opportunity is there), it doesn’t mean that creation must be cold, mechanical, and heartless. Dark and emotional materials usually find a way in, and the tailoring process—form being tailored to fit a given context—is largely unconscious, instinctive. We usually don’t even notice it. Opportunity and availability are often the mother of invention. The emotional story—“something to get off my chest”—still gets told, but its form is guided by prior contextual restrictions. I’m proposing that this is not entirely the bad thing one might expect it to be. Thank goodness, for example, that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we make something.
In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us. That holds true for the other arts as well: pictures are created that fit and look good on white walls in galleries just as music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not in both). In a sense, the space, the platform, and the software “makes” the art, the music, or whatever. After something succeeds, more venues of a similar size and shape are built to accommodate more production of the same. After a while the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted—of course we mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.
In the photo below you can see the room at CBGB where some of the music I wrote was first heard. Try to ignore the lovely decor and think of the size and shape of the space. Next to that is a band performing. The sound in that club was remarkably good—the amount of crap scattered everywhere, the furniture, the bar, the crooked uneven walls and looming ceiling made for both great sound absorption and uneven acoustic reflections—qualities one might spend a fortune to re-create in a recording studio. Well, these qualities were great for this particular music. Because of the lack of reverberation, one could be fairly certain, for example, that details of one’s music would be heard—and given the size of the place, intimate gestures and expressions would be seen and appreciated as well, at least from the waist up. Whatever went on below the waist was generally invisible, obscured by the half-standing, half-sitting audience. Most of the audience would have had no idea that the guy in that photo was rolling around on the stage—he would have simply disappeared from view.
This New York club was initially meant to be a bluegrass and country venue—like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The singer George Jones knew the number of steps from the stage door of the Grand Ole Opry to the back door of Tootsie’s—thirty-seven. Charley Pride gave Tootsie Bess a hatpin to use on rowdy customers.Below is a photo of some performers at Tootsie’s. Physically, the two clubs are almost identical. The audience behavior was pretty much the same in both places, too.
The musical differences between the two venues are less significant than one might think—structurally, the music emanating from them was pretty much identical, even though once upon a time a country music audience at Tootsie’s would have hated punk rock, and vice versa. When Talking Heads first played in Nashville, the announcer declaimed, “Punk rock comes to Nashville! For the first, and probably the last time!”
Both of these places are bars. People drink, make new friends, shout, and fall down, so the performers had to play loud enough to be heard above that—and so it was, and is. (FYI: the volume in Tootsie’s is much louder than it usually was in CBGB.)
Looking at this scant evidence, I asked myself, to what extent was I writing music specifically, and maybe unconsciously, to fit these places? (I didn’t know about Tootsie’s when I began to write songs.) So I did a little digging to see if other types of music might have also been written to fit their acoustic contexts.
