Critical Questions: On Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940-1980

by Jacques Barzun, Bea Friedland (Editor)

This collection of writings allows the reader a rare opportunity to see Barzun's lively, engaging, rich, and original mind at work on several strategic areas of cultural music and the musical life, esthetics, biography, criticism, and social commentary. Barzun makes use of a variety of contexts as a forum for evidence and opinion, including essays, program notes, letters, and reviews. And he approaches a wide variety of particular and general questions. What is it like to sit in on a recording session with a great orchestra? What is the role of the piano in Western culture? What is art in relation to objective reality and to the perceiving mind? Can one translate music into words? What is cultural history?

For anyone unfamiliar with Barzun's work, Critical Questions will serve as a valuable introduction to one of the most important cultural historians of our time. Others will be glad to have these pieces—most of them no longer easily available—brought together in a single volume. Uniformly insightful, provocative, and a pleasure to read, they show the consistency of Barzun's thought even as they exhibit diversity.

Genres: Essays

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Works of French-American educator, author, and historian Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (see Charles Robert Darwin, Karl Marx, and Richard Wagner) (1941) and The American University (1968).

He presented ideas and culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques...

Reviews

[Craig Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the subject materials covered within this collection of essays by Dr. Barzun are not those that I generally am interested in, I found myself fascinated by the presentation and history of those aspects of cultural and musical history that I am not versed in.
As I once read (in a book by Richard Feynman), one should reach out beyond ones own area of practice and expertise and experience other aspects and other disciplines. This collection fits that aspiration nicely.

[Kilian Metcalf · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I could trade lives with anyone else, Jacques Barzun would be that person. Witty, cultured, educated, literate, articulate, he embodied everything that I value highly. This collection of essays is a good introduction to anyone unfamiliar with the man and his work.