Short, extremely perceptive discussions about ``meaning'' and ``understanding'' in serious music that will captivate new listeners as well as the musically tuned-in. Readers who can set aside their envy of Rosen's talents—he is a renowned pianist on stage and recordings, a persuasive advocate of new music, and a world-class prose stylist (The Classical Style won a National Book Award in 1972)—will devour these three lectures that Rosen gave in Rome last year under the aegis of the New York Review of Books. For wit, intelligence, and original thought about the problems of how to speak (or write) cogently about classical masterpieces as well as the challenging musical art of today, Rosen has few rivals. He starts with a large enough question: ``What does it mean to understand music?'' Expanding his first ``modest'' definition that ``understanding music simply means not being irritated or puzzled by it,'' he goes on to suggest that the historical evolution of musical criticism began with judgment (i.e., deciding how a musical piece measures up to accepted classical models or, more generally, to listeners' unconscious expectations) and in the last 200 years was transformed into an imaginative exercise in comprehension. Given the radical leaps in musical language taken by 20th-century composers, Rosen's investigation of changing critical criteria is especially pertinent for the contemporary listener who, sorely tried, is still trying to understand modern music. Rosen does rely on some musical examples printed in the text, but an inability to read musical notation will not measurably diminish the reader's pleasure in following his train of thought. Not every reader will agree with all of Rosen's notions, particularly his Mahler-esque maxim that ``the name generally given to widely accepted error is tradition.'' Still, few music lovers will come away unsatisfied. A work of genuine intellectual nourishment, brief but brilliant.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8090-7254-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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
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