A convincing, laymen-friendly reappraisal of a great musical theorist, teacher, and composer.
A new consideration of the life and work of the modernist composer endeavors to explain why his innovations in classical music are still relevant today.
In the prologue, Sachs, a music writer, Toscanini biographer, and educator at the Curtis Institute of Music, states explicitly that he aims to offer a "succinct interpretative study" of Arnold Schoenberg's life and work, not a full-scale biography or complete theoretical analysis. He includes basic biographical material such as Schoenberg's birth (1874, in Vienna), escape from Nazi Europe to America in 1933, and death in Los Angeles in 1951. Although Sachs presents a basic chronology of the composer's personal and professional life, the emphasis is on the work, specifically his invention of the 12-tone technique and resulting "serialist" music. The author makes clear that Schoenberg's renunciation of a clear-cut tonality or key does not mean the same thing as atonality or dissonance. In his cogent explanation of serialism, Sachs shows how the 12 tones of the chromatic scale offer the "emancipation from a hierarchy" of the single note as a key center. On the whole, readers don’t need extensive training in music theory to understand this significant development in the history of Western music. Even Schoenberg himself considered his compositional breakthrough to be an evolution, not a revolution, in music. The problem is that most listeners, even skilled musicians, perceive the sound of post-tonal music as emotionally monochromatic, and the result is that this oeuvre is rarely performed by major orchestras today. Schoenberg's path forward split the music world into pro and con factions in the mid-20th century, but Sachs makes a strong argument that composers today may choose from many musical idioms, serialist music being just one of them. Moreover, he shows, Schoenberg's adventures past classic tonality were inventive takes on traditional forms, not complete breaks with the past. Though rarely encountered, his music still matters today.
A convincing, laymen-friendly reappraisal of a great musical theorist, teacher, and composer.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781631497575
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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