This is about 20th century classical music. It starts with Wagner and Straus and ends up at the present day. I think it would have worked better if he reached back just a bit further and spent more time on Debussy and his peers. I found some parts better than others. An enormous part of the book is Schoenberg and his followers, which I'm not familiar with, so that was less interesting to me. Unfortunately he often focuses on operas, sometimes for many pages, and then when he mentioned one I had actually seen (Messiaen's Saint Francis), he only spent a page or two on it. The parts on Stravinsky and Kurt Weill were very good. Everything after that was less interesting but I kept with it to the end. There were some interesting tidbits in there, but I could have skipped a lot of it. It was sort of depressing to see how many composers went in the direction of deliberate difficulty, and had contempt for anything popular. The story picked up some toward the end when he discussed composers like Arvo Part, Steve Reich (who studied music alongside Phil Lesh), Philip Glass, and John Adams, but he gives them little attention after lavishing so much on earlier composers. There was also a pretty good chapter on the influences back and forth between avant-garde classical and popular music, but I thought it was too superficial - for example, I've read several times that Stockhausen's ideas were influential on Miles Davis' electric period, but no mention of that or even those ideas.
Recommended if you have an interest in one of the composers (just read that part), but otherwise not. DM is our symphony-going brother, so he might like some of it, but most of this music would never get on any program.
Recommended if you have an interest in one of the composers (just read that part), but otherwise not. DM is our symphony-going brother, so he might like some of it, but most of this music would never get on any program.
the hands that guide me are invisible
