Lively exegetical writing, particularly for laypeople, even if trying to make known the sheer physical pleasure of playing...
Seven essays on how a pianist relates to music, instrument, and performance (through both body and soul), from National Book Award–winner and pianist Rosen (Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen, 1998, etc.).
Piano hasn’t just been the preeminent area for musical experimentation over the past 250 years, writes Rosen, the place where Beethoven developed his sonatas, Gesualdo his madrigals, Debussy his radical harmonies. It’s also an instrument that requires a major injection of the body: think of those parallel octaves, as much sport as art. Rosen witheringly deflates the stiffs who think the body is morally inferior to the ethereal mind, revealing the pianist’s “inexplicable and almost fetishistic need for physical contact with the combination of metal, wood, and ivory.” It is absurd, he says, to take the body out of the equation; one need only think of improvisation, or the process of learning difficult technical passages. Non-musician readers may not feel the full impact of Rosen’s words, and may wilt at the pages of notation, but they can feast on his tour of the piano’s architecture and his story of all that can go wrong with the instrument during a performance, or his journey through the styles of composers from Bach to Boulez. Rosen discusses the importance of public performance (“a chance to bring a work of music into something approaching its ideal objective existence,” with audience conveying the objective factor); his fear that “the music school and the piano competition tend to hinder the direct and experimental approach” by favoring routine over individual eccentricity; and a disadvantage of recorded music, namely that “the intense concentration that the art of music sometimes requires has become harder to command” when the listener can wander off to get a glass of beer.
Lively exegetical writing, particularly for laypeople, even if trying to make known the sheer physical pleasure of playing is akin to explaining the sensation of color without recourse to sight.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-0382-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.
A brisk study of 20 of the Bard’s plays, focused on stripping off four centuries of overcooked analysis and tangled reinterpretations.
“I don’t really care what he might have meant, nor should you,” writes Smith (Shakespeare Studies/Oxford Univ.; Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, 2016, etc.) in the introduction to this collection. Noting the “gappy” quality of many of his plays—i.e., the dearth of stage directions, the odd tonal and plot twists—the author strives to fill those gaps not with psychological analyses but rather historical context for the ambiguities. She’s less concerned, for instance, with whether Hamlet represents the first flower of the modern mind and instead keys into how the melancholy Dane and his father share a name, making it a study of “cumulative nostalgia” and our difficulty in escaping our pasts. Falstaff’s repeated appearances in multiple plays speak to Shakespeare’s crowd-pleasing tendencies. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a bawdier and darker exploration of marriage than its teen-friendly interpretations suggest. Smith’s strict-constructionist analyses of the plays can be illuminating: Her understanding of British mores and theater culture in the Elizabethan era explains why Richard III only half-heartedly abandons its charismatic title character, and she is insightful in her discussion of how Twelfth Night labors to return to heterosexual convention after introducing a host of queer tropes. Smith's Shakespeare is eminently fallible, collaborative, and innovative, deliberately warping play structures and then sorting out how much he needs to un-warp them. Yet the book is neither scholarly nor as patiently introductory as works by experts like Stephen Greenblatt. Attempts to goose the language with hipper references—Much Ado About Nothing highlights the “ ‘bros before hoes’ ethic of the military,” and Falstaff is likened to Homer Simpson—mostly fall flat.
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4854-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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