For the Love of Music
A Conductor's Guide to the Art of Listening
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
With a lifetime of experience, profound knowledge and understanding, and heartwarming appreciation, an internationally celebrated conductor and teacher answers the questions: Why should I listen to classical music? How can I get the most from the listening experience?
A protégé of Leonard Bernstein--his colleague for eighteen years--and an eminent conductor who has toured and recorded all over the world, John Mauceri helps us to reap the joys and pleasures classical music has to offer. Briefly, we learn the way a musical tradition born in ancient Greece, embraced by the Roman Empire, and subsequently nurtured by influences from across the globe, gave shape to the classical music that came to be embraced by cultures from Japan to Bolivia. Then Mauceri examines the music itself, helping us understand what it is we hear when we listen to classical music: how, by a kind of sonic metaphor, it expresses the deepest recesses of human feeling and emotion; how each piece bears the traces of its history; how the concert experience--a unique one each and every time--allows us to discover music anew. Unpretentious, graceful, instructive, this is a book for the aficionado, the novice, and anyone looking to have the love of music fired within them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Classical music is "the epitome of Western art and human expression," according to this passionate meditation. Grammy Award winning conductor Mauceri (Maestros and Their Music) takes an impressionistic ramble through the classical canon, celebrating its unique ability to convey narrative drama with extraordinary emotional force despite being a wordless evanescence of "invisible houses made of vibrating air." In loosely thematic chapters, he sketches basics of music theory, compositional structure (he gives an illuminating discussion of Richard Wagner's use of leitmotifs, musical phrases associated with characters or events, to orient listeners during his stupefyingly long Ring operas), the electrifying charisma of live acoustic performances with their high-wire displays of physical dexterity married to complex aesthetic decision-making, and the elevating effect of classical music's suggestion of a harmonious moral order. Writing in graceful, engaging prose, Mauceri weaves in his own experiences of listening and conducting, along with evocative appreciations of favorite pieces. (In Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, a musical portrait of Stalin's Russia, "the timpani pounds out a repeated series of inflexible and barbaric eighth notes, all of which begin to accelerate, as if we were under the heels of a thousand jackboots.") Mauceri's love letter will provoke newbies to give classical a whirl and inspire fans to listen with fresh ears.
