An ambitious text that attempts to illuminate the history of music through the millennia and across world cultures.
In this follow-up to A History of Emotion in Western Music (2020), music professor Spitzer presents a history of humans and music that is dense in dates and facts but accessible. Readers need not understand music theory to follow the argument, although musical appreciation and some grounding in ancient history will be useful. The author’s sly humor (“Happiness is a warm lyre”) and knack for piquant observation ("Homer's sirens are as likely to have been whales as birds") help leaven the in-depth lessons, which Spitzer charts across three parts: life, history, and evolution. After a fine history of the development of musical ability in Home sapiens, the author turns to the three "killer apps" of Western music—notes, staff notation, and polyphony—which detached music from muscle memory, place and community, and the natural rhythms of speech. These three elements are much less prominent in the music of the Islamic world, concerned with ornament and the fluidity of the speaking voice; India, centered on underlying spiritual unity; and China, organized by timbre rather than pitch. Spitzer then investigates what made “Western classical music…so viral” (the score: music written down and disseminated beyond oral transmission) and where much of its future audience lives: Southeast Asia. Ultimately, the author regards the musical human as the "great synthesizer" of species, combining the rhythm of insects, melody of birds, musical tradition of whales, and social intelligence of apes. His interests range widely enough to include a discussion of musicians’ "late style," featuring examples as disparate as “the fruits of the ageing composer” and David Bowie's final album, Blackstar. Spitzer laments the widening "gap between listening and doing" in musical life, but he looks to the future with discussions of musical crowdsourcing, interactive composition, and audio implants.
A thorough survey showing how “there very well might be something irreducibly human about all the music of the Earth.” (Notes[395-451], Picture Credits[453], Acknowledgements[455-458], Index[459-470], A Note on the Author[471], A Note on the Type[473])Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-624-5
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Categories: HISTORY | WORLD | ANCIENT | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | PSYCHOLOGY | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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