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Classical Music: The Great Composers and Their Masterworks
Book by Stanley, John
280 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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About the author
John Stanley
11 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 26, 2020
Nos seus melhores momentos, relaciona diversos compositores dos mais diferentes backgrounds em uma trama fácil de entender, e nos piores, se torna uma desinteressante lista de composições, conquistas, e recomendações para se ouvir (sem gerar muito interesse no leitor).
January 28, 2021
good fine book
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 12, 2024
A bit of a coffee-table read, although maybe I'm just influenced by the presence of pictures and its necessarily piecemeal structure. (The pictures are really lovely! Books can have pictures!)
It's an almost invaluable Classical 101 crash-course, for at once managing to demystify centuries of musical tradition—or, absolve of pretension—and to never 'talk down', never tossing aside rigour in its efforts to be approachable. This approachability is accomplished by commendable effort to contextualise each musical era discussed within broader history and the history of all arts, which is important. And very interesting! I was especially engaged by the earliest periods, with which I had less familiarity; the anecdote about castrati is now a favourite.
In general it's not a very compelling book as criticism, instead describing the music in simple functional terms. From there the reader can explore and bring their own emotions, which the great music writers could express and assign to technique so well. Nonetheless understanding this, from here spawn my quibbles.
Given this objective approach, perhaps Stanley gets a little too rapturous for Beethoven; by comparison, the obligatory closing paragraph for Mozart (the greatest of all composers) reads like a Wikipedia article. Similarly one might think from this book alone that Chopin was a relatively minor composer—a gifted pianist responsible for a few pretty tunes—where Liszt was some genius all-time great of greats, when really the opposite is closer to the truth. This latter case does reflect a broader problem with focusing narratives mostly on life events. It's a useful exercise in humanising these aged, canonised figures, particularly for the uninitiated, but some aesthetic picture is lost; 'lived quietly and wrote the most beautiful piano works in all history' loses out to notorious showmanship and continental tours and scandal.
Also, the concept of permitting more than one Recommended Work where apparently necessary can create some strange implicit preferences—Elgar and Richard (frickin') Strauss both get two, beside each other on a double-page spread, where a whole host of greater composers get only one. But that's very petty, and an inevitability.
I suspect the inclusion of Weill and (to a lesser extent) Gershwin should allow for also Kern and Arlen and Rodgers and Porter and Berlin, or at least warrant their mention, though that becomes a slippery slope. Stanley himself acknowledges the increasing difficulty to define classical music and the role of a composer in 20th- or 21st-century society. Yet his choosing Berio over Morricone does betray some exclusionary instincts.
Perhaps it's less classy in general throughout the modern section: where are Glass, La Monte Young, Riley, Eastman, Radigue? Or Murail and Grisey? Saariaho; Adès; Ferneyhough; Golijov? Heck, why not widen scope to the likes of Carl Stone, Pamela Z and John Oswald—or Yoko Kanno!—though then we must allow Aphex Twin and etc. It's less classy in the modern section because things have got messier and, in general, less great. The wide range of opinions and particularly eras served here is admirably broad (albeit not entirely diverse).
The post-text is plenty didactic, and a bit misguided at points—waning rewards in the classical sphere is due to all those societal factors mentioned, yes, but it's noticeable how little Stanley cares to throw blame inward. 'Composers' have also (frankly) fallen out of touch, just as popular musicians stray increasingly further from the cutting edge as compared to 50-60 years ago. The forces are equal and opposite, leaving we discontented in the middle with very little to study and feel simultaneously. This stagnation does shine through in those musicians chosen across that final period, who too often fall in neoclassical or plain epigone camps. I'd rather it were Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker and Ravi Shankar and Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder and Franco.
But it's true that none of those compare to Mozart or Bach or Beethoven or Handel or Haydn. So: a good text!
It's an almost invaluable Classical 101 crash-course, for at once managing to demystify centuries of musical tradition—or, absolve of pretension—and to never 'talk down', never tossing aside rigour in its efforts to be approachable. This approachability is accomplished by commendable effort to contextualise each musical era discussed within broader history and the history of all arts, which is important. And very interesting! I was especially engaged by the earliest periods, with which I had less familiarity; the anecdote about castrati is now a favourite.
In general it's not a very compelling book as criticism, instead describing the music in simple functional terms. From there the reader can explore and bring their own emotions, which the great music writers could express and assign to technique so well. Nonetheless understanding this, from here spawn my quibbles.
Given this objective approach, perhaps Stanley gets a little too rapturous for Beethoven; by comparison, the obligatory closing paragraph for Mozart (the greatest of all composers) reads like a Wikipedia article. Similarly one might think from this book alone that Chopin was a relatively minor composer—a gifted pianist responsible for a few pretty tunes—where Liszt was some genius all-time great of greats, when really the opposite is closer to the truth. This latter case does reflect a broader problem with focusing narratives mostly on life events. It's a useful exercise in humanising these aged, canonised figures, particularly for the uninitiated, but some aesthetic picture is lost; 'lived quietly and wrote the most beautiful piano works in all history' loses out to notorious showmanship and continental tours and scandal.
Also, the concept of permitting more than one Recommended Work where apparently necessary can create some strange implicit preferences—Elgar and Richard (frickin') Strauss both get two, beside each other on a double-page spread, where a whole host of greater composers get only one. But that's very petty, and an inevitability.
I suspect the inclusion of Weill and (to a lesser extent) Gershwin should allow for also Kern and Arlen and Rodgers and Porter and Berlin, or at least warrant their mention, though that becomes a slippery slope. Stanley himself acknowledges the increasing difficulty to define classical music and the role of a composer in 20th- or 21st-century society. Yet his choosing Berio over Morricone does betray some exclusionary instincts.
Perhaps it's less classy in general throughout the modern section: where are Glass, La Monte Young, Riley, Eastman, Radigue? Or Murail and Grisey? Saariaho; Adès; Ferneyhough; Golijov? Heck, why not widen scope to the likes of Carl Stone, Pamela Z and John Oswald—or Yoko Kanno!—though then we must allow Aphex Twin and etc. It's less classy in the modern section because things have got messier and, in general, less great. The wide range of opinions and particularly eras served here is admirably broad (albeit not entirely diverse).
The post-text is plenty didactic, and a bit misguided at points—waning rewards in the classical sphere is due to all those societal factors mentioned, yes, but it's noticeable how little Stanley cares to throw blame inward. 'Composers' have also (frankly) fallen out of touch, just as popular musicians stray increasingly further from the cutting edge as compared to 50-60 years ago. The forces are equal and opposite, leaving we discontented in the middle with very little to study and feel simultaneously. This stagnation does shine through in those musicians chosen across that final period, who too often fall in neoclassical or plain epigone camps. I'd rather it were Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker and Ravi Shankar and Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder and Franco.
But it's true that none of those compare to Mozart or Bach or Beethoven or Handel or Haydn. So: a good text!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews