A bold, fresh, and informative chronicle of music’s evolution and cultural meaning.
A revisionist history highlights music’s connections to violence, disruption, and power.
In a sweeping survey that begins in “pre-human natural soundscapes,” music historian Gioia (How To Listen to Jazz, 2016, etc.) examines changes and innovation in music, arguing vigorously that the music produced by “peasants and plebeians, slaves and bohemians, renegades and outcasts” reflected and influenced social, cultural, and political life. For the earliest humans, writes the author, music-making was far more important than simply entertainment: Songs “served as a source of transformation and enchantment for individuals and communities,” embodying myth and cultural lore. Music also was indelibly connected to violence, from troops’ drums and horns to rousing anthems. “Every violent group in history,” Gioia notes, “has its motivating songs,” evidence that music “is a mighty force” for change. Disruption, however, was not limited to martial music. Once the audience emerged “as the judge of aesthetic merit during the late medieval period and Renaissance,” music changed from an art sanctioned by aristocracy and the church to one that pleased “the untutored crowd.” Popular musicians presented themselves as dramatic, artistic personalities; when they offered works celebrating “love and glory, the singer emerged as the focal point of the lyrics, the real subject of every song.” Gioia aims to overturn long-held images of many composers: Beethoven, for example, was hardly “the ultimate classical music insider, the bedrock of the symphonic tradition,” but rather a passionate personality whose “strange, peculiar, arbitrary, bizarre, mysterious, gloomy and laborious” music caused him, early in his career, to be considered “a volatile outsider whose impulses needed to be held in check.” With Beethoven, writes the author, “everything gets viewed through a prism of revolution, upheaval, and clashing value systems.” That desire to upend the status quo has invigorated music, whether it is jazz, folk music, hip-hop, or electrified bands. Despite efforts to quash innovation, “in the long term, songs tend to prevail over even the most authoritarian leaders.”
A bold, fresh, and informative chronicle of music’s evolution and cultural meaning.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4436-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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