MUSICAL REVOLUTIONS

Fortune favors the bold, but sometimes the rewards come only later, as this book on musical pioneers reaffirms.

Unlike his previous book, When the World Stopped To Listen, which focused only on American pianist Van Cliburn, Isacoff’s latest describes many moments in music history that “ushered in a new direction—often unexpected, like a planet following an invisible orrery, discernible only after the fact.” Those moments sometimes were met with hostility, as when Carnegie Hall audiences reacted violently to Steve Reich’s “Four Organs” in 1973, with one attendee shouting in response to the electric organs and relentless maraca accompaniment, “All right, I confess!” In erudite if truncated chapters, Isacoff covers dozens of landmarks in Western music: 11th-century monk Guido of Arezzo, who invented “a staff of four lines, unlike the five lines used today, on which musical note symbols were placed”; 12th-century composers Léonin & Pérotin, who were key to the development of polyphonic techniques; the birth of opera, which “delivered flamboyant spectacle, enticing music, and engaging theater”; the pioneers of jazz, “perhaps the most important development in the modern era—America’s musical gift to the world”; and the influence of Juilliard dropout Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, the 1959 “recording that turned the jazz world upside down.” The narrative is randomly organized, but Isacoff’s encyclopedic knowledge of music is still very much in evidence. The book is an excellent choice for readers who want a quick survey of Western music’s major developments, and it’s filled with memorable tidbits—e.g., that Florentine stage designer Bernardo Buontalenti “was credited with inventing gelato as well as enhancing opera stagecraft” and that Arnold Schoenberg feared the number 13 so much that he misspelled Aaron’s name in his opera “Moses und Aron” to avoid a title with 13 letters.

Too-short yet informative and often astute essays on some of the biggest moments in Western music.