Charmingly written, with plenty of interesting historical tidbits—recommended for anyone interested in early music.
A comprehensive account of one of the key inventions in music history: a method for writing down a composition so someone could learn it without hearing it performed.
Kelly (Music/Harvard Univ.; Music Then and Now, 2012, etc.) assumes neither familiarity with medieval music nor the ability to read music. Instead, he focuses on the conceptual breakthroughs that led a few medieval musicians and scribes to devise a way to make it easier to teach novices the extensive body of music that filled the church year. The very idea required something of an intellectual leap; after all, music cannot be seen, and when a song is over, it lives only in memory. Still, over several centuries, a system of marks, or neumes, was developed to record Gregorian chant. At first, the system was rather inexact; the neumes recorded the general shape of the melody but not the exact pitches. The key invention came in the early 11th century, when an Italian monk named Guido drew a set of parallel lines—the ancestor of the staff—to define the pitch that each neume represented. Guido also named each note of the scale, making it easier to teach music. The pope enthusiastically endorsed his system, and it caught on throughout Western Europe. But Guido made no attempt to notate rhythms, leaving subsequent scholars to guess at a key component of how chant was sung. A couple of centuries later, masters Leoninus and Perotinus hit on the idea of changing the shape of the notes to show how long to hold them. Their system, codified in the next century, became (with additional adjustments as styles changed) the core of our modern musical notation. With over 100 illustrations from original manuscripts, Kelly makes the story clear enough for nonmusicians to follow, and the book includes a CD to let readers hear how many of the examples actually sound.
Charmingly written, with plenty of interesting historical tidbits—recommended for anyone interested in early music.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0393064964
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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