The Triumph of Music: Composers, musicians and their audiences, 1700 to the present
by Tim Blanning (Allen Lane)

What is the difference between Mozart and Sir Elton John? Of the many possible answers that might suggest themselves, the one that interests historian Tim Blanning is the gulf in their social status during their respective lifetimes. Mozart, a hired hand of the archbishop of Salzburg, was seated with the valets and cooks at dinner. Sir Elton, on the other hand, is massively rich and hobnobs with the royal family. The process by which musicians climbed the respectability ladder — from servants to superstars — is the subject of this fascinating book. Continued →

The Pirate’s Dilemma
by Matt Mason (Allen Lane)

One couldn’t wish for a more colourful circus of corporate stupidity and vindictiveness than the public actions of the major record labels over the past decade. They have secretly installed spyware on people’s computers and sued American college students; last month, one label filed a US court claim that throwing their promotional CDs in the bin constituted a violation of copyright. At the same time, they have been demanding a tax on iPods, the proceeds from which would flow directly into their pockets, and firing the A&R staff upon whom their future depends. None of this, of course, is meant to protect the interests of musicians, only of their executive leeches.

It is a farcical ongoing case study in how not to respond to what former pirate-radio DJ Matt Mason calls “the pirate’s dilemma”. Continued →

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by Alex Ross (4th Estate)

What is a composer? Is it someone who invents music from nothing, or someone who seeks inspiration in mathematical procedures, folk music, or birdsong? Is it someone who imagines a situation in which noise could be interpreted as music, and makes that situation happen? Or someone who takes other musics and mashes them up through loudspeakers? Is a composer a person who stands colossus-like outside the times, tuned in to the eternal spheres, or someone messily implicated in history as it happens? Does public acclaim mean the composer is a successful communicator, or a sellout? Is a composer an artist, a celebrity, a monk or a prankster? Continued →

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
by Oliver Sacks (Picador)

It is a remarkable fact that if I merely type “the Mission: Impossible theme tune” or “Beethoven’s Fifth”, you will probably start humming to yourself. We take it for granted, but how is it possible? What is going on in our brains? Oliver Sacks, the neurologist author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, here devotes a book to the cognitive miracles of music. “It really is a very odd business,” he muses, “that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.”

Sacks’s deeply warm and sympathetic study is about pathologies of musical response and what they might teach us about the “normal” faculty of music. It reports on fascinating new findings from anatomy — a musician’s brain is easily distinguishable on a scan from those of others; and the passage from ear to brain is not a one-way conduit but works both ways, the brain being able to tune the ears, as it were. But mostly Musicophilia is about the more mysterious, and currently inexplicable, ways in which music affects the brain, for good or ill. And when it affects the brain, it affects the whole person, as Plato knew, seeking to ban some types of music from his Republic for the health of the citizenry. Shakespeare’s Richard II, meanwhile, could have provided an epigraph to Sacks’s book – the King at one point complains:

This music mads me. Let it sound no more;
For though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.

Continued →

Prince: A Thief in the Temple
by Brian Morton (Canongate)

Prince is the black Bob Dylan. Both men are from Minnesota; both have had some of their biggest hits through performances of their songs by others (in Prince’s case: “Manic Monday” by the Bangles; “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinead O’Connor); both are very bad but somehow weirdly compelling film actors; both reserve the right on occasion to explore the limits of repetition (Dylan’s interminable blues jams, Prince’s interminable funk jams); and both are massively prolific and inventive musicians. Both are, to use the word with due care, geniuses.

The half-time show at this year’s SuperBowl saw Prince, in peach shirt and powder-blue suit on a giant neon-lit stage in the shape of his celebrated bi-gendered phallic symbol, a black chiffon headscarf offering his hairdo little protection against driving rain, effortlessly straddle rock epochs. He segued from “All Along the Watchtower” (by Dylan out of Hendrix) into “Best of You”, by the Foo Fighters, many of whose fans weren’t even alive when Prince first lit up the charts. The choice of covers might have been a deliberate historical framing device to set off the climactic number: “Purple Rain”, that cavernous masterpiece, with one of the most heart-wrenching applications ever conceived of the repeated riff over changing chords in a guitar solo. Continued →

Hitchcock’s Music
by Jack Sullivan (Yale)

The most famous moment of film music in history was nearly mute. Beginning post-production on Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock instructed his composer, Bernard Herrmann: “Do what you like, but only one thing I ask of you: please write nothing for the murder in the shower. That must be without music.” Herrmann mused, and scored the scene anyway. After seeing it with music, Hitchcock changed his mind, responding imperturbably to Herrmann’s reminder of his original instruction: “Improper suggestion, my boy, improper suggestion.” Hitchcock, who had been so pessimistic about Psycho‘s prospects that he was considering cutting it up for television, now knew he had something special on his hands. Continued →

Wannabe: How the Spice Girls Reinvented Pop Fame
by David Sinclair (Omnibus)

In the future I will be able to tell my grandchildren that I once saw the Spice Girls in concert. They will look up at me, cheeks gleaming, in their tracksuits and Union Jack mini-dresses (for by then the third Spice Girls revival will be in full swing), and for a moment I won’t be just some gnomic old codger but a man who was there when pop history was being made.

The Spice Girls put on a terrific show, and when my glowing review appeared in the Guardian, I got a heartwarming email from their agent telling me how they had all read the review in their dressing room, and how delighted they were to be praised by a newspaper that, for some reason, they normally associated with a sneering attitude to their work. I like to think that, in a small way, I touched the Spice Girls’ lives. Continued →

On tour with the Darkness

The lobby of the Jury’s Hotel in Cardiff resembles a Barratt’s town square built of brick, with an enormous clocktower that usefully shows the time in New York and Tokyo. Piped insidiously into the atmosphere is a loop of orchestral arrangements of popular songs. Handbags and Gladrags evokes the awful image of po-faced Welsh whinge-rockers the Stereophonics. It’s hard to imagine a band less like the Darkness. Finally I manage to escape and arrive in the beer-sticky warren that is Cardiff University students’ union to meet the band. Well, all of the band except singer Justin Hawkins, who is still in bed. They had a “heavy night” last night in Stoke, involving depth charges of Bailey’s in pints of Guinness. Continued →

Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City
by Paul Morley (Bloomsbury)

After 20 pages, I was convinced that Words and Music was the best book about pop I had ever read. After 280 pages, I was at least convinced that it was the weirdest book about pop I had ever read. But that too is a kind of recommendation. Most books about pop are simply products of glossy merchandising, or obsessive-compulsive histories of studio minutiae for prog rock or gangsta rap aficionados: they are essentially tribal credos, written by insiders for insiders, a sort of comfort reading whose sole purpose is to reassure the audience of the importance and heroism of their discrimination. Continued →

Sleepless with John Tavener

Friday, 9.55pm The Temple in the City of London. Narnian lampposts glow in the twilight; black-clad singers roam the courtyard. I am approaching, with trepidation, the 12th-century Temple Church to witness the world premiere of John Tavener’s new work, The Veil of the Temple. Combining the forces of the Holst Singers, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Temple Church’s own boys’ choir, this piece is, the composer says, “a journey towards God” – an attempt to reconcile east and west, Islam and Christianity. A laudable aim, of course. But it’s going to last seven hours. Continued →

In the cockpit with Bruce Dickinson

Bruce Dickinson is teaching me to fly. We are in the cockpit of a Boeing 737 simulator in the British Airways flight training facilities at Heathrow. Through the windows we see the winking nightlights of Gatwick airport. “You’re doing extraordinarily well here, sir,” says the legendary heavy-metal frontman, as I wrench the joystick around and yellow alarm lights wink on. While he solicitously explains the functions of the banks of switches, levers and luminescent screens, I’m waiting for him to start hollering “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter”. “Too low – flaps,” says a stern electronic voice in an American accent. Buzzers sound. The runway looms up to meet us. Groundrush. I have information overload.

We land safely – thanks, I suspect, to Dickinson’s finessing of my controls. The hydraulic cabin comes to a shuddering halt and the whine of the engines and air-conditioning subsides. Which leaves only one question. What on earth am I doing in a £10m airliner simulator with the lead singer of Iron Maiden? Continued →

A heavy-metal awards party

Something like a polite cocktail party is taking place in a chintzy antechamber to the London Hilton’s Grand Ballroom. A few guests have carefully outrageous hair; many others sport nicely styled goatees and Gap casuals. One man is wearing a leather jacket with the word “REFUSE” printed on the back. Whether that is because his band is rubbish, or he Just Says No, is hard to determine. The throng sips champagne and chatters idly. This is, of course, the annual awards ceremony held by the raucously onomatopoeic Kerrang! magazine, of hard-rock legend. It is so dangerous that Ben Elton has been invited. Continued →