How Shostakovich Changed My Mind

by Stephen Johnson

Music broadcaster and composer Stephen Johnson explores how Shostakovich's music took shape under Stalin's reign of terror, and how it gave form to the hopes of an oppressed people. Johnson writes of the healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness and tells of how Shostakovich's music lent him unexpected strength in his struggle with bipolar disorder.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography, History, Psychology, Health, Classical Music

Unknown Binding

First published March 22, 2018

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Blaine Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few books get added to my all-time favorites shelf and I didn't expect this one to make it, but here's why, in my case, it did.

To appreciate this book, you'll need to have discovered and fallen in love with the profound beauty and meaning of the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. For that to happen, you'll also need to have fallen in love with classical music in general, or have developed an ear for hearing deep emotional content within musical works, whatever genre. Once this discovery has occurred, Stephen Johnson's little gem of a book will reveal why people find the music of Shostakovich to be so therapeutic as well as emotionally profound.

Johnson explains it best, how Shostakovich's music brings people face to face with what lives inside them but is hard to say:

Long before I could find the words to describe my experiences, I could hear them reflected, mentally and physically, in sounds - coherent, ordered, sounds, whose process of musical working-through gave me hope that my own feelings might also be capable of resolution. Emotions and thoughts I had experienced as terrifyingly vast, chaotic, and threatening, acquired what Shakespeare calls 'a local habitation and a name' or - and this was just as valuable - a sounding form. In the midst of my long-drawn-out isolation, Shostakovich reassured me that I was not utterly alone. Someone else knew how I felt... In the process of giving form to feelings, music can do one more thing for us. It can invite us to identify with its formal processes - in the case of Shostakovich, with its poignant, harrowing, thrilling wordless narratives (138-139).

Johnson is a music broadcaster and composer who produces programs for the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007... and https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01n...). In this beautifully bound and printed Notting Hill editions hardback, Johnson explores the music, life and times of Shostakovich during Stalin's reign of terror and how his music gave form to the fears and hopes of people living in unimaginable despair and oppression. He discusses how music soothes and heals mental-emotional illness and tells his own story of how Shostakovich's music helped him through his struggle with bipolar disorder. It's a kind of dual biography of Shostakovich and Johnson supported by interviews with musicians, philosophers, therapists, and neurologists.

Recent decades of research have reshaped our view of who Shostakovich was and what his music meant to him and others - it's a fascinating story of meaning-making in music. Johnson is of course familiar with this research and debate and incorporates it into his narrative. Those other books are worth consulting, Volkov's Testimony: The Memoirs, Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, MacDonald's The New Shostakovich, and Glikman's Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941-1970. And, however much you can stomach, reading Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, 1918 - 1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books I-II gives one an idea of what Shostakovich lived through and is a shocking, sickening literary description of just how horrifyingly brutal living under tyranny can be.

But without a doubt, start with the music. My recommendations are the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 13th, 14th, and 15th symphonies; the 8th and 9th string quartets; the op.87 24 preludes and fugues; the first violin concerto; the piano trio; and two late works, The Execution of Stepan Rizan and Suite on Verses of Michaelangel Buonaroti. These works, together with Johnson's beautiful story, have provided me joy and meaning beyond words and thus deserve a place on the all-time favorites shelf. And don't miss maestro Bernstein's fabulous lectures on the 9th symphony (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVfz5...) and the 6th symphony (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7MPc...).

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating account of one man's longtime obsession with the music of Shostakovich, the heavy, emotionally charged work that saw him through a troubled adolescence, led to career in music journalism and, most critically, helped, in some not insignificant way, to avert a possible suicide. Johnson's ability to bring the music to life on the page, to capture the challenges of creating art in Stalin's Russia, and to address the ways music can help us through emotionally difficult times come together to create a compulsively readable book. A longer review can be found here:
https://roughghosts.com/2019/07/03/ro...

[Mohammad · Rating 4 out of 5]

دو سه سالی می‌شه، یعنی از زمانی که روی کاور والتز دومش نگاهم افتاد به آدم درونگرایی که با چشم‌های تیله‌ای مشکی پشت عینکش و موهای همیشه مرتب با دست‌هایی که به آرومی به جایی تکیه داده شدن به‌ گوشه‌ای خیره شده. شوستاکوویچ توی تصاویری که ازش موجوده همیشه برای من نماد هیاهوی درونیه، اعماق پر صدا، حکایت دنیاهای روشنی‌ که هنرمندها در دوران استبداد در درون خودشون زنده نگه می‌دارن. از اون زمان پیوسته و گسسته به موسیقیش گوش کردم، تک‌تک آواها و نت‌هاش برای من چیزی فرای تکنیک و پیچیدگی موسیقی کلاسیک بود، یه جور ندای آروم‌کننده که همزمان می‌تونست از ترس درونی خبر بده، یه جور گمراهی که آدم‌هایی که در نقطه‌های تاریخی غلط به دنیا اومدن نسبت به زمانه‌شون حس می‌کنن. هرچیزی که به عنوان یه جوون بیست‌و‌اندی ساله تجربه می‌کردم رو می‌تونستم لای بافت‌های موسیقی شوستاکوویچ تجربه کنم و این‌طور شد که بین این همه نوابغ موسیقی کلاسیک، من محبوب‌ترین آهنگساز خودم رو تونستم پیدا کنم.

کتاب «چگونه شوستاکوویچ نظر من را تغییر داد» بیشتر از اون‌که راجع به شوستاکوویچ باشه، در مورد موسیقیه و بیشتر از اون تاثیری که موسیقی می‌تونه روی انسان‌ها در مواجهه با غم، فقدان یا افسردگی بذاره. توی کتاب بررسی می‌شه که چطور افراد مختلفی تونستن با ارتباط‌گیری و گوش دادن به موسیقی - به ویژه موسیقی شوستاکوویچ - بهبود پیدا کنن و نظرشون راجع به دنیا یا اطراف‌شون تغییر کنه. موقع خوندن کتاب دچار شوک شدم، افراد زیادی مثل من عاشق شوستاکوویچ بودن، نه به خاطر این‌که بهترین سمفونی‌های جهان رو ساخته و نه به‌ خاطر پیانو کنسرت‌های مختلف و نه به خاطر این‌که به فرم باخ یا موتسارت حتی تونسته باشه نزدیک بشه، مسئله چیزی بود که من فکر نمی‌کردم یه پدیده جمعی باشه: موسیقی شوستاکوویچ تاثیربخشه، همون‌قدر که نویسنده توی مقدمه‌ی کتاب صحنه‌ای از مسخ کافکا رو مثال می‌زنه که خواهر گرگور شروع به نواختن می‌کنه و گرگور مسخ شده غمگنانه با سری خم شده بهش گوش می‌ده. متاثر شدن همیه پدیده‌ی غریبیه، مخصوصا وقتی توسط ناشناختگی یک پدیده باشه که توصیفش با کلمات سخته.

کتاب رو بیشتر برای این خوندم که از موسیقی شوستاکوویچ و زندگی غریبانه‌ش زیر حکومت مخوف استالین چیزهای بیشتری دستگیرم بشه، مثلاً عاشق داستان سمفونی لنینگراد بودم که حین‌ محاصره شدن شهر توسط نازی‌ها در سال ۱۹۴۲، حینی که ذخایر مواد غذایی ته کشیده و سرمایی لجام‌گسیخته توی هوا دمیده بود حکومت شوروی از این‌که شوستاکوویچ داره روی سمفونی بزرگش کار می‌کنه با خبر شد و ایده‌ای به سرش زد که باعث شد به سختی و با تمرین‌های کم‌ و نوازندگان زهواردررفته در تالار بزرگ فیلارمونیک این سمفونی رو روی صحنه ببره تا پیامی برای نازی‌ها و مردم شهر باشه: موسیقی قلب تپنده یک شهر یخ‌زده. فکر می‌کنم بعد دو بار خوندن کتاب هیاهوی زمان بتونم بگم که زندگی این آدم، سوا از موسیقیش هم یکی از عجیب‌ترین تجربه‌های زیستی‌ای هست که باهاش مواجه شدم، همینه که همیشه دوست دارم بیشتر و بیشتر ازش بدونم. چون شوستاکوویچ برخلاف عده‌ای از هنرمندها چنان احساسات زندگی و زمانه‌ش در هنرش تنیده شده که به سختی می‌شه اون هیاهوی درون، اضطراب زیر تاریکی، غم طردشدگی و وحشت تاریخ یک وطن رو در نواهاش حس نکرد‌.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essentially a lengthy essay on the power of music to emotionally heal us, this slim volume took a long time for me to finish. Not because of any shortcomings of style - Johnson's prose is clear and compelling, whether he's summing up complex brain science, riffing on the writings of philosophers and psychiatrists or sharing his own experiences. Instead, it's the depth and vitality of the insights being conveyed that made me take my time. Even more importantly, and relevant, is how often it seemed, relating his own struggles with bipolar and his relationship with music, especially tragic, melancholy, despairing, even angry music, Johnson was telling my story. The ability of great music to move from 'me' to 'we', to connect us with our deepest feelings and remind us we are not alone in them is the central theme of this book. It is also what the book itself did for me.

Although focused on music, the book also draws on powerful literary examples. In particular a moment in Kafka's Metamorphosis and an episode from the Moomin books. It seems to me that Johnson is plumbing something profound about the use of creativity, of art, how it provides a stage to explore our selves, alone or in concert with a real or conceptual range of fellow sharers.

This is a beautiful, unassuming book. It doesn't aspire to grand theories or remedies. Yet, it is enriching to anyone who has found bitterness in life and sweetness in a sad tune.

[Özer Öz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Türkçe'ye çevrilmiş olması çok iyi. Geçen yüzyılın en büyük bestecisi Şostakoviç ile ilgili güzel bir kaynak.

[Noelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am not worthless, despicable, insignificant, unworthy to be heard; how can I be, if music can make me feel like this?"

I felt so intelligent reading this.

It's actually a gift for my classical-obsessed brother we got for him on our trip, but the back sounded so interesting I absolutely ate it up on the plane.

I really enjoyed the fact that this wasn't solely focused on Shostakovich. There were touches of psychology, and the author's personal life, among other things. Along with that, I think he did a fantastic job encapsulating the concepts of music and how music can be such a crucial and beautiful thing in our lives.

[Jessica Dai · Rating 4 out of 5]

tldr shostakovich is a frickin genius and music is so special

if you're not intimately familiar with shostakovich's work (esp symphonies) plan to read this with easy access to somewhere to play/listen to them! (i.e. not on a plane/in bed)

[Mehrdad · Rating 2 out of 5]

به‌نظرم کتاب خیلی ژورنالیستی بود؛ ملغمه‌ای از چیزهای مختلف و به‌زعم من بی‌ربط.
دو ستاره رو به این خاطر می‌دم که قسمت‌های مربوط به زندگی شوستاکوویچ یا بستر تولد آثارش، زیبا و پرکشش بیان شده بود، به‌ویژه سمفونی شماره هفت (لنینگراد).

همچنین، آقای دادگری کتاب رو با نثری پاکیزه و روان ترجمه کرده.

[Louis Headley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A real page turner. Listening to Shostakovich's music is a cathartic experience and Johnson captures that experience well.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philosophy, psychology, neurology, and Shostakovich… Hell yeah.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This unobtrusive little work is a gorgeously expressed personal account of the power of music and the human mind. The book itself is especially lovely; the typography, two-color print, and handheld size are a perfect match for its intimate content. Johnson merges fact and feeling to create a tiny manifesto on Shastakovich, mental illness, music, and hope, and he manages it with clarity and pathos. A perfect, quiet read.

Notes

For me, the experience of music, listening attentively, creatively, what's close to that of dreaming; and on the subject of dreams, the poet Robert Herrick put it rather well: ‘here we all are by day, by night we are hurl’d / By dreams, each one into a several world.’ (PG. 16)

Perhaps the most terrible thing about this expertly engineered Hell was that, whatever people did to survive, whatever price they paid, in the end practically everybody lost. Nadezhda Mandelstam, a great chronicler of her times, put it trenchantly in her book Hope Against Hope:

Whoever breathed that air perished, even if he accidentally saved his life. The dead are dead, but everyone else —the executioners, ideologues, facilitators, praisers, the ones who shut their eyes and washed their hands, and even those who gritted their teeth all night — they were all also victims of the terror. (PG. 22)

Any writer found guilty of ‘deviation’ faced censure — or worse. As the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam put it, in art, as in every day life, ‘It was essential to smile. If you didn't, it meant you were afraid or discontented.’ To be afraid or discontented wasn't just a crime: it was treason. (PG. 24)

In my favorite of all Freud's writings, Mourning and Melancholia, Freud suggests that depression (melancholia) might be a form of frozen grief. Something, or someone, of vital importance to the suffer has been lost but this loss cannot be consciously acknowledged, and the grieving process, whereby the bereaved person slowly adjusts to a world without the beloved object, is blocked. On some level, I knew that my parents could never be the mother and father I so desperately wanted them to be. But it was only years later… that I began to allow the emotions of grief to thaw and flow. (PG. 66)

Robertson told me about his experience of taking part, with the quartet, in music therapy projects, often working with people who, for a variety of reasons, or paralyzed by depression:

As I understand it, people who are clinically depressed can get caught and they’re unable to move. The thing that the composer can do, and certainly the music can do, is give you a kind of ladder outwards from somewhere very extreme and painful. Part of it is that, in exploring deep emotion, and sometimes very painful emotion, it gives an element of what I think in medical circles you call the ‘locus of control’, in other words you can externalize your own feelings, you can observe them, you can make change, or at least realize that change is possible. You can see from the painfulness that actually something beautiful, something creative, has occurred, and then of course begins to give it meaning. And if there's one thing I think about the human condition it is that all things are bearable if they have meaning. (PG. 69)

‘The point is that the very idea that humans live in a free world is an allusion. The human consciousness can be split down the middle, or split into three, five, or ten parts in any society. We tell our children one thing, and quite another thing to our wives or husbands, while we tell a third thing when we are out with our friends… Human beings have to live in society by breaking up their consciousness into different parts — often contradictory parts. Shostakovich expresses this problem, the contradictory nature of our existence, in a condensed, undiluted way. And that's why we need him so much.’ (PG. 75)

For me, this is a message for now. I'm not sure I would have been capable of understanding it as a teenager, or an early adulthood. Even now, I grasp it only in moments: as TS Eliot writes, ‘human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality.’ But the message is real. And when I look back on the strange ordeal of my early home life, I seem to hear this music saying, ‘It’s nobody's fault’. Blame is one way of giving meaning to life, but it keeps us prisoner, attached (as the Buddha would say) to the suffering associated with that blame. Nobody was to blame: not my mother, not my father, and not me —whatever the voices in my head may have insisted. (PG. 78)

If you want proof of how far human beings deceive themselves, says Schopenhauer, just look at ambition: ‘Wealth is like seawater’, reeds one of his most famous aphorisms, ‘The more we drink, the thirsty are we become; the same is true of fame.’ (PG. 110)

By experiencing violence and suffering through the medium of tragedy, the spectator could acquire the courage to face the horror of existence and, as Nietzsche to put it, ‘say Yes to life’. What was embodied here was nothing less than ‘the artistic conquest of the terrible’. (PG. 112)

In the midst of my long-drawn-out isolation, Shostakovich reassured me that I was not utterly alone. Someone else knew what I felt – Perhaps even in some mysterious sense ‘heard’ me. ‘The fact of being heard,’ says Orbach, ‘and of hearing one’s words in a space in which they aren't necessarily interrupted or soothed but just hang, means they can reverberate.’ (PG. 139)

[Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't have anything particularly insightful to say so I'm going to write a few (or many) quotations that I liked here.
"it's a testimony to the sustaining, uplifting, ultimately restoring power of Shostakovich's music."
"when the employees at the radio station grew too weak to make programmes, they broadcast the sound of metronome ticking: 'It was the city's heartbeat. It was still there.' At one point, even that stopped; then, after forty-five agonising minutes, it started again. Press footage from the period shows the emaciated faces of the city's inhabitants transfigured with joy. Hugging one another, weeping. If that frail, tinny heartbeat could come back from the dead, perhaps the city itself could too?"
"Apparently, Govorov had an adjutant with a score of the Symphony beside him to tell him when the quiet passages were coming. There must be no shelling or artillery fire during Shostakovich's long, intense, pianissimos: the enemy must hear everything. There is a story that during this breathtakingly unlikely broadcast, one German officer blurted out, 'We'll never beat these people!'"
"Shostakovich had held a mirror up to horror, and reflected that horror back to those whom it all but destroyed- and in response they had roared their approval, their delight, their gratitude to the composer for giving form to their feelings."
"The feeling of loneliness is intense. But then, for a moment, the string writing fills out with a kind of grainy luminescence, through simple, rich harmonies that sound remarkably close to those of the Russian Orthodox church choir intoning a melancholy blessing. The grief-saturated, alienated voice is suddenly not alone. The suffering is shared."
"Visiting Shostakovich's Moscow apartment in later years, I was astonished to find it full of clocks... Apparently, Shostakovich used to listened to them ticking during his watchful sleepless nights and found them comforting. Their steady pulse can be heard in several of his major works".
"I was increasingly aware of something like guilt. How can I claim that this music speaks to me too, a citizen of a much freer, safer country, who has never known what it is to dread the knock on the door in the small hours? He beamed, and leant forward, holding my eyes with his. 'But of course you can! Shostakovich would have wanted you to! He knew he wasn't just writing for his own people and his own time.'"
"As I found Shostakovich's connecting ropes and pulled them taut, it was as though he personally was reassuring me... If Shostakovich could find the 'method', the thread of logic, in his teeming, cascading thoughts, then perhaps I could too."
"As usual when the Krasnaya Strela left Moscow, the PA system began to blare out a dire medley of military band music: heroic workers' songs, tub-thumping patriotic hymns, all loud, bombastic, mindlessly insistent. Shostakovich got up and scuttled out of the compartment, as though rushing to the lavatory. Suddenly the music stopped dead. Shostakovich reappeared, sat back down, and once again retreated into himself- for a moment, that is. Then he looked up, leaning forward confidentially towards his companion as though he was about to say something; instead, he put his fingers into the top pocket of his suit jacket, and lifted out a small pair of pliers. There was a flicker of a smile before the pliers disappeared again, as Shostakovich's facce resumed its customary anxious mask."
"The freedom I felt when listening to the scherzo of Shostakovich's Tenth, was, I think, more than philosophical. For five minutes, I had permission, like Ted Hughes's Crow, to 'fly the black flag of myself'... the prisoner is free, for a few precious moments, to roar and dance out his fury as he pleases. No one else can hear, or see, or hold him to account- not even himself."
Manashir Yabukov: 'Human beings have to live in society by breaking up their consciousness into different parts- often contradictory parts. Shostakovich expresses this problem, the contradictory nature of our existence, in a condensed, undiluted way. And that's why we need him so much'
"Before them, I had music; and if I need proof of what music engendered in me, I need look only to the unarguable evidence: I'm alive and still growing."
"Music can rescue us from the pain of individual consciousness and restore us, fleetingly, to a kind of primal innocence which somehow remains knowing at the same time."
"Think of the cello's 'Seryozha', but without the name- just the tone of the cello as it rises and falls: C sharp-D sharp-C sharp... Interpretations of that Lady Macbeth quotation have been many and varied. But I know what the cello's 'Seryozha' means to me: it means love."
"Was it writing and playing the Eighth Quartet that changed Shostakovich's mind about killing himself? Or was it the moment when he put his hand in his jacket pocket and found that the pills had gone- that his friend had heard him and acted to save his life? Music can do many things for us in times of spiritual isolation: it can soothe us, help us to contain painful emotions, reflect back to us an image of ourselves truer and better than the one to which we misguidedly cling."
"Shostakovich laid out for me how in the time of crisis he also could have withdrawn, nestled into pain, but how in the end something always drew him back, from the Hell of 'I' to the hope of 'We'."
"In the quartet's final moments, there is a faint but unmistakable echo of the motif that haunted Shostakovich's music for four decades, the motif which in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov introduces us to Russia and its long-suffering people. Even as his music slips quietly into nothingness something in Shostakovich still wants to say, 'We'.
"Shostakovich reassured me that I was not utterly alone. Someone else knew what I felt- perhaps even in some mysterious sense 'heard' me."
"I can feel my awe-struck ego shrink before the endlessly unfolding prospect of fields, lakes, and forests. It's much easier to be a detatched, self-sufficient individual in the cosier, enclosed landscapes of Western Europe. Is it any wonder that people here have wanted to stand together, like those countless trees."
"Only the day before, I'd talked to Boris Tishchenko, and heard him gently assure me that Shostakovich would have been delighted to know how much his music had helped me. And if so, I'm only one of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands."
"It's true: we all bring our stories to this music. But something in Shostakovich's music can make us feel that even in this moment of ultimate selfhood we are not alone. It did so for those besieged people, playing and hearing Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic; and in its much more modest, far less spectacular way, it did the same for me."
"He's almost unrecognisable: this isn't the nervous but intensely focussed young man of early official portraits, still less the inwardly withdrawn, masked figure of later years. He's beaming. Even those thick-lensed glasses can't conceal the delight in his eyes. Wedged tightly between a young soldier and a man in a wide-lapelled greatcoat, a briefcase perched incongruously on his knee, he looks as though he's never been happier in his life. Thank God he was able to find it somewhere."
"This is not 'The People', not the blank abstraction of Soviet Communism, but a network of individuals, possibly as oddly assorted as the random group in that Zenit Leningrad football photograph. Shostakovich's masterly orchestration brings out some of their sharply contrasted voices. Yet they are connected, however fleetingly, precariously, in this communal moment: myriads of minds, but with a single thought."
"Shostakovich can meet us in moments of terrible isolation, as he can in moments of shared joy."
"Shostakovich knows what I am feeling. His music assures me of that. Perhaps he knows better than I do... There is a great choir that I can join: a choir of grief, rage, and determination to survive. Where it is, I don't know yet, but I know that it is. And while the music lasts, I am part of it, one voice among many. Somewhere out there is a We to which I belong. The thought is comforting, sustaining, indescribably uplifting. When the final bars have faded into silence, I stand still for a moment. I am not worthless, despicable, insignificant, unworthy to be heard; how can I be, if music can make me feel like this?"

[Carrotcakie]

I have just finished this short book, and I am so grateful and feel so full from it. The way the author talks about Shostakovich and music — the life-saving force that is art — mirrors what I found in literature. I felt my heart burning the whole time.

Aside from this, I so very much appreciated learning more about Shostakovich and his life in Soviet Russia. I have played pieces on the piano by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and certain other composers mentioned here, yet I realize how little I knew about their stories. Going back to listen to some of his famous symphonies now, I see that knowing more about Shostakovich (and the impact of his work) makes all the difference.

It’s clear this book is written from a specific type of Western, educated author (you can feel it while you read), but bearing that in mind, it's extremely well-articulated, intelligent, and interdisciplinary. I love how the author brought in philosophy, psychology (and mental health/therapy), and literature to round out his points on music. This book brought together my favorite kind of analysis — one that engages both the mind and the heart.

A few quotes:
- “As a citizen in the public eye in a monstrous police state, Shostakovich would have felt the pressure to ‘split’ to a sanity-threatening degree; yet none of us, whatever kind of society we live in, can avoid it. ‘Human beings have to live in society by breaking up their consciousness into different parts – often contradictory parts. Shostakovich expresses this problem, the contradictory nature of our existence, in a condensed, undiluted way. And that’s why we need him so much.’”
- “There is something about hearing your worst feelings turned into something beautiful…’ In such moments, music can hold up to us the mirror that we long for, and when it does so we may find ourselves asking, with Gregor Samsa, How can I be a brute beast, an insect, if music can make me feel like this?”
- “Before them, I had music; and if I need proof of what music engendered in me, I need look only to the unarguable evidence: I’m alive and still growing.”
- "For me, finding those words in the contained environment of therapy has been valuable, but finding the sound of my thoughts and feelings, and hearing them transformed into something magnificent and beautiful by a great composer – that, for me, has struck even deeper reverberations. ‘Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the trouble,’ wrote T. S. Eliot. Words, yes; but (in my experience) music, no.”

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

In November 2018 I started listening to an mp3 disc that had a folder of Shostakovich music in it everyday on my commute to and from work. The more I listened, the more the music 'slowed down' for me and I was able to start to grasp melodies and separate pieces. I was learning the Symphonies and the Concertos (Holy God that Nicole Benedetti performance of the Violin Concerto No. 1...) and the String Quartets (15 of them in all!) I started checking out Shostakovich cds from the library and pretty much listened to them exclusively on my commutes for the last year. The liner notes were another layer of depth added to the experience as I started to learn about repeated motifs and melodies and the historical context of the works themselves.

Like any obsessive and believe me, I know myself well enough to know I am an obsessive, I started reading books about Shostakovich. I came across How Shostakovich Changed My Mind at my library and immediately connected with it. Being a life long music lover (it is the gentlest and most comprehensive and immersive, emotionally, of all the arts), I could appreciate Johnson's testimonies of how this music literally saved his life.

More historical accounts and biography of Shostakovich helped deepen the music more for me. Probably the most poignant passages were those where Johnson spoke with members of the original string Quartets that performed these works initially and whom Shostakovich consulted for their technical expertise.

This book is certainly aimed at a very small niche and possibly a niche within a niche within a niche...but if you find yourself in the midst of a year-long Shostakovich kick and are developing quite an emotional attachment to the music, I highly recommend this book.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, having grown up in a traumatic household with a mother who was insane, uses the music of Shostakovich to recognize that he an make sense of his own life.

"Shostakovich was also a composer first and foremost, and like many composers he seems to have been suspicious of words as a vehicle for his truest, most private thoughts."

On the first playing of the Leningrad Symphony in Leningrad itself in August of 1942, with the music piped in giant loudspeakers out to the German line surrounding the city. The audience inside loved it:

"In the Leningrad Symphony, Shostakovich had held a mirror up to horror, and reflected that horror back to those whom it had all but destroyed - and in response they had roared their approval, their delight, their gratitude to the composer for giving form to their feelings."

On reconciling his own feelings and emotions, using the music:

"Long before I could find words to describe my experiences, I could hear them reflected, mentally and physically, in sounds - coherent, ordered sounds, whose process of musical working-through gave me hope that my own feelings might also be capable of resolution."

And finally:

"In the process of giving form to feelings, music can do one more thing for us. It can invite us to identify with its formal process - in the case of Shostakovich, with its poignant, harrowing, thrilling wordless narratives. In doing so, it prepares us for the moment when, in full consciousness of the import of the words, we are able to say, "That happened to me." Then the hand releases its grip, and we notice with relief that the alarm has fallen silent."

[Rubery Book Award · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rubery Book Award Non Fiction Winner 2021

This is a beautifully produced book, small and tactile (also available as an ebook). The author is a well-known and respected music broadcaster and composer, who has appeared regularly on Radio 3 and Radio 4 for many years. He discovered Shostakovich’s music at the age of thirteen – curious, perhaps, as it’s “not the kind of music people would choose to cheer themselves up.” But he tells us, “this isn’t really a book about Shostakovich at all, rather about what his music has made people feel.” Early in the book, he focuses on a seemingly insignificant comment: in a meeting with one of the few musicians still alive who performed the seventh symphony during the Siege of Stalingrad in 1942, when the entire population were slowly starving to death, he asks him how it made him feel. The reply was: “It’s not possible to say”. This leads to an exploration of how music’s transformative effect defies analysis. The author is open about his personal struggles with bipolar disorder and how Shostakovich’s music has reflected his experiences: “finding the sound of my thoughts and feelings, and hearing them transformed into something magnificent and beautiful by a great composer.” This is an erudite piece of writing, superbly readable and full of extraordinary insights.

[Moslem Ahmadvand · Rating 3 out of 5]

اگر واقعاً بخواهیم رنج روانی را معنا کنیم به گونه‌ای که یا از آن راحت شویم یا بتوانیم بهتر با آن کنار بیاییم باید از روش‌های قدیمی‌تری استفاده کنیم. من به‌شخصه باور دارم که به نوع جدیدی از رابطه با نیروهای تاریک و مخرب درونم رسیده‌ام و وضعیت روانی‌ای که اکنون در آنم بهتر از هر زمانی است که به خاطر می آورم. به شهادت دوستان نزدیک و به ویژه کیت من در مواجهه با رویدادهای بالقوه بی‌ثبات کننده بسیار تغییر کرده‌ام. زندگی عاطفی‌ام احتمالاً همیشه حاد و ناپایدار خواهد بود. هنوز هم مواقعی احساس می‌کنم ناخدای یک کشتی بسیار کوچکم که می‌کوشد مسیرش را در میان اقیانوسی متلاطم دنبال کند اما با گذشت زمان ناخدای من با تجربه‌تر و ماهرتر شده است. او می‌تواند آسمان را در جست‌وجوی نشانه‌های توفان‌های پیش رو بهتر بخواند؛ او می‌داند که کجا مانور فرار انجام دهد یا در صورت ناموفق بودن چه طور کشتی را رو به جلو هدایت کند و به ناوبری درونی خود گوش دهد، و او اکنون آن‌قدر توفان‌ها پشت سر گذاشته که مطمئن باشد کشتی‌اش به این راحتی واژگون نخواهد شد. او دفترچه گزارش روزانه‌ای دارد که می‌تواند داستان چگونه زنده ماندن خود را بارها و بارها در آن بخواند.

صفحات ١٣٢ و ١٣٣

[Chris]

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, sure, but you can still enjoy the dance.

Stephen Johnson’s book communicates his understanding of the sounds of Shostakovich. You will download, or google, or purchase, and listen to the 4th, the 5th, the 7th, 10th and 11th symphonies (at least), and the 8th Quartet and the Cello Concerto. The D-S-C-H (Shostakovich’s initials is musical shorthand) theme of so many of the composer’s works will become so recognizable, even repetitive. (Was Dmitri trying to build his own little cult of personality?)

The listener can then match the descriptions of the music with the sounds and decide for themselves.

Johnson also writes candidly and descriptively about his own depression and the crisis that drew him out of it. Reading the book is worth it just for that harrowing passage.

Does music inspire, assuage, comfort, heal, create a sense of community, even in an individual listener? Does it save lives?

[Jeffrey Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson's emotional and intellectual involvement with music is extremely intense, and his appreciation and knowledge of Shostakovich's music is deep and comprehensive. Very few of his readers will be able to go all the way with him in that respect, or, in identifying with his deep psychological difficulties. The book ties the music to Johnson's bi-polar condition and his extremely difficult childhood with a bi-polar mother, so it's in part a personal account of growing up with mania alternating with close to suicidal depression, in part an appreciation of Shostakovich's music, in part the story of Shostakovich's difficult life under Stalin, and in part a lot the cogent presentation of very intelligent philosophical and psychological insight.
His main point is that music both puts us in touch with our deepest selves and enables us to move out of there by connecting us with others.
This is not a book for the casual reader, just as Shostakovich's music is not for the casual listener.

[Noelle Howe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book held so much emotional value within sometimes I had to stop reading in order to process what was going on. The author transitions from sections on Shostakovich to autobiographical sections and injects a sort of togetherness and compassion that made this all the more of an enjoyable read. I was already a fan of Shostakovich but I feel like the scope of this work reaches so far outside just Shostakovich. I already can't stand to hate any genre of music but this book just gave me another reason to step back and realize that pieces of music do so much for people, sure it's not a completely pure art but I feel like its impurities lend itself to the listener at times. Very thought provoking work. I plan to reread whenever I may need it.

[Simon Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sort of memoir which weaves a tale of how Shostakovich's music has influenced Johnson's life, from helping him through mental illness to getting him into music journalism. This was enjoyable enough, but I think (and this is probably pretty obvious) that I would have got more out of it had I been more familiar with Shostakovich's music and/or Johnson's journalism.

Johnathan Bliss's "A Pianist Under the Influence", about the impact Schumann had on his life, is a very different sort of book covering broadly similar territory - and I found it more engaging, in that it seemed much less reliant on prior knowledge of the composer's work.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a super little gem. I saw this on the new books shelf at my local library and knew I needed to get my own copy. For a start, Shostakovich is probably my all time favorite composer (or to get all Nick Hornby,he's definitely in the top three) and the premise intrigued me as hearing his fifth symphony performed by the CSO about ten years ago made me cry and few pieces of music have ever done that. It's a great essay, Johnson writes well about music theory with a accessible touch and shares his own story honestly. This is an interesting looking small independent publisher. Beautiful book binding and red placemarker ribbon. Just a soothing item to slip into your coat pocket....

[Riet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een mooi boek, eigenlijk meer een essay, over de kracht van de muziek van Shostakovitch. De schrijver komt uit een zeer getroubleerd gezin en leerde als tiener de muziek van S. kennen. Hij is er van overtuigd, dat de muziek uiteindelijk zijn redding is geworden. Naast veel psychotherapie. (Hij werd zelf gediagnostiseerd met bipolaire stoornis). Hij laat de muziek van S. leven, vooral de symfonien en de string quartets. Johnson is zelf componist en maakte muziekprogramma's voor de radio. Het is vlot geschreven en heeft in ieder geval tot resultaat, dat ik weer opnieuw naar Shostakovitch' muziek ga luisteren.

[Dirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably the best book I've ever read in terms of a writer's ability to put into words the effect of brilliant music upon an acutely receptive listener. Stephen Johnson states in his preface that at first he was going to focus primarily on Shostakovich and less on the author's personal story, the latter involving his struggles with bipolar disorder. As a result, there is a bit of unevenness and imbalance between Johnson's studious approach to musical analysis and his personal revelations of family issues, diagnosis and treatment, but on the whole it's a fine work.

[Will Leben · Rating 4 out of 5]

The two things I got from this book are a feeling for what Shostakovich was like as a person and a better sense of the musical brilliance behind some of his best known works.

In this short book the author serves up anecdotes from the composer’s life that accentuate his vulnerable side and show his heroism in the face of political threats, along with the usual personal challenges artists often face. The author also conveys some of the high points of some of Shostakovich’s music in words one can follow without having a musical background.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a remarkable book. Stephen Johnson is well-known to many of us as a passionate musicologist and broadcaster who wears his erudition lightly. Up until now, I didn't know that he had also suffered a lifetime of depression and bipolar disorder. What has saved his life has been music, and in particular the music of Shostakovich. This is a long essay about how music can provide emotional healing, and why, in times of darkness, we are drawn to dark, complex music to help us live and express our sorrow and our lamentation.

[VM · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kanske oschysst betyg, men jag kunde framför allt inte uppskatta den tillräckligt pga mina okunskaper om Sjostakovitjs musik - referenserna var för många och i vissa fall ”snabba” (=ovärt att kolla upp, eftersom det bara var en passus). Dessutom tyckte jag den var grundare än förväntat, tyvärr lite för popkulturell i stilen och lite för ointellektuell. Detta gjorde den visserligen lättläst och underhållande samtidigt som den var ständigt intressant, men jag fick ut mindre av den är jag hoppats. Dock läsvärd och dessutom förvånansvärt trevlig läsning!

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up from a display in my local bookstore since playing Shostakovich's 5th Symphony was one of my favorite experience is music. I was really enamored by this wonderful meditation on Shostakovich, mental health, communist Russia, and the emotional experience of music. It made me want to listen more and read more which I don't think you can ask for more of a book. Definitely recommend...especially if like me your dream job would be a Music Therapist.

[Slow Culture Magazine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been the object of a weekly feature on the cultural blog Slow Culture.

Composer Dmitri Shostakovich has been the object of countless publications, as a quick search on Goodreads can easily reveal. Is this title any different than other titles such as the remarkable The Noise of Time? YES.

With How Shostakovich Changed My Mind, BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson delivers a cross-cultural, cross-domain research comprising contextualized history, contemporary interrogations, and the wit reaffirming Notting Hill Editions' reputation.

[James B · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some very well written and insightful reviews of this book which added to my enjoyment of it. All I will say is that this is a book that draws you into thoughts on life, consciousness and most importantly the power and beauty of the work of a genius. I shall have it at my bedside for some time to come for reference as I enjoy those great works.