A thorough survey showing how “there very well might be something irreducibly human about all the music of the Earth.”
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. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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