This compendium of musical biographies offers useful insights and accessible descriptions of various styles, composers, and...
A comprehensive introduction to the world of classical music makes a case for the 100 greatest composers.
Intended as an entry point for those interested in the subject but who lack knowledge, this debut book offers an overview of the history of classical music and Smook’s list of the greatest composers, beginning in the Baroque period and ending with 20th-century giants. The volume’s ranking relies on a six-tier rating system for composers based on “the aesthetic importance of their major musical works; the overall substance of their musical legacy; their innovations in musical form and style; their influence on other composers.” In the first and highest tier, the author lists Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Unsurprisingly, German and Austrian composers are the most represented in Smook’s conservative list. Each composer entry delivers a brief biography and includes a section on the artist’s musical legacy. The author offers this description of Chopin’s legacy (the Polish composer is in Tier 3 of Smook’s rating): “Chopin created or developed a number of new forms of solo piano music to exploit his poetic use of the instrument.” The legacy sections include samplings of the composers’ popular works. There are also miniprofiles of artists who almost made the top 100 list (among them, Anton Webern—musical cousin to Schoenberg—and the Estonian minimalist composer Arvo Pärt). The author’s descriptions are a bit dry though the book is intended for neophyte listeners. The brief overview of classical music history effectively avoids jargon and includes clear definitions of musical terms (for example, “cantata” and “recitative music”). In the introduction, the author admits to no formal musical training and confesses that he doesn’t play an instrument. The work adds nothing new to interpretations of classical music (“I am not presenting new information,” Smook asserts). The volume also suffers from a bizarre insistence on categorization—“Remember that music falls into four basic categories,” he tells readers, which he identifies as Orchestral, Chamber, Keyboard, and Vocal. Still, the book should serve as a helpful and handy guide to those new to the genre.
This compendium of musical biographies offers useful insights and accessible descriptions of various styles, composers, and periods.Pub Date: June 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3785-1
Page Count: 379
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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