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A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love With Classical Music
For readers of Mozart in the Jungle and Year of Wonder , a new history of and guide to classical music.
Paul Morley made his name as a journalist covering the rock and pop of the 1970s and 1980s. But as his career progressed, he found himself drawn toward developing technologies, streaming platforms, and, increasingly, the music from the past that streaming services now made available. Suddenly able to access every piece Mozart or Bach had ever written and to curate playlists that worked with these musicians' themes across different performers, composers, and eras, he began to understand classical music in a whole new way and to believe that it was music at its most dramatic and revealing.
In A Sound Mind , Morley takes readers along on his journey into the history and future of classical music. His descriptions, explanations, and guidance make this seemingly arcane genre more friendly to listeners and show the music's power, depth, and timeless beauty. In Morley's capable hands, the history of the classical genre is shown to be the history of all music, with these long-ago pieces influencing everyone from jazz greats to punk rockers and the pop musicians of today.
Paul Morley made his name as a journalist covering the rock and pop of the 1970s and 1980s. But as his career progressed, he found himself drawn toward developing technologies, streaming platforms, and, increasingly, the music from the past that streaming services now made available. Suddenly able to access every piece Mozart or Bach had ever written and to curate playlists that worked with these musicians' themes across different performers, composers, and eras, he began to understand classical music in a whole new way and to believe that it was music at its most dramatic and revealing.
In A Sound Mind , Morley takes readers along on his journey into the history and future of classical music. His descriptions, explanations, and guidance make this seemingly arcane genre more friendly to listeners and show the music's power, depth, and timeless beauty. In Morley's capable hands, the history of the classical genre is shown to be the history of all music, with these long-ago pieces influencing everyone from jazz greats to punk rockers and the pop musicians of today.
624 pages, Hardcover
Published November 10, 2020
29 people are currently reading
249 people want to read
About the author
Paul Morley
32 books75 followersPaul Morley is an English journalist who wrote for the New Musical Express from 1977 to 1983, during one of its most successful periods, and has since written for a wide range of publications. He has also has been a band manager and promoter, as well as a television presenter.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 14, 2020
I’m afraid I struggled with A Sound Mind. Paul Morley says some interesting things and makes some valid points, but oh dear – he does go on. And on. And on.
The subtitle of the book gives a clear idea of the content. It’s the story of how Morley began to develop an interest in and then a love for classical music, having been a rock critic for decades. There are some interesting observations, especially as I (like many others, I suspect) have made a similar move toward classical music as I have aged. He is very acute, too, on things like the universal, instant accessibility of huge amounts of music and how it means that we probably value it less than when an album was a significant investment of pocket money. But…
All of this is almost submerged in a deluge of self-referential verbiage. Quite early on, Morley actually talks about rock critics’ “compulsion to use too many words,” but apparently without any self-awareness, because it certainly applies here. He makes the error of assuming that all his readers are as fascinated as he is by every nuance of the development of his emotional and intellectual response to classical music. I’m afraid that this reader wasn’t and this, along with some clumsy and almost incomprehensible semi-metaphorical ramblings about plane journeys and the like made the whole thing very hard going for me. (And if I read one more sentence with endless lists of “from Haydn to Bowie, from Webern to [insert name of obscure band]….” I will not be responsible for my actions. OK, Paul, we get it – you’ve listened to a lot of music.)
At well over 600 pages, I suspect that this would have been a much better book if it had been half the length. There are quite a lot of interesting and penetrating observations here, but finding them is a real effort. I think the book is summed up for me in this little quote: “...the prog-rock concept album, with its own bloated, self-involved aesthetic that needed urgent, almost therapeutic puncturing by punk rock”. He is, as so often, absolutely right, but can’t seem to see that his own book is just as bloated and self-involved and needs urgent, almost therapeutic puncturing by a good, strong editor. I can’t really recommend it.
(My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley.)
The subtitle of the book gives a clear idea of the content. It’s the story of how Morley began to develop an interest in and then a love for classical music, having been a rock critic for decades. There are some interesting observations, especially as I (like many others, I suspect) have made a similar move toward classical music as I have aged. He is very acute, too, on things like the universal, instant accessibility of huge amounts of music and how it means that we probably value it less than when an album was a significant investment of pocket money. But…
All of this is almost submerged in a deluge of self-referential verbiage. Quite early on, Morley actually talks about rock critics’ “compulsion to use too many words,” but apparently without any self-awareness, because it certainly applies here. He makes the error of assuming that all his readers are as fascinated as he is by every nuance of the development of his emotional and intellectual response to classical music. I’m afraid that this reader wasn’t and this, along with some clumsy and almost incomprehensible semi-metaphorical ramblings about plane journeys and the like made the whole thing very hard going for me. (And if I read one more sentence with endless lists of “from Haydn to Bowie, from Webern to [insert name of obscure band]….” I will not be responsible for my actions. OK, Paul, we get it – you’ve listened to a lot of music.)
At well over 600 pages, I suspect that this would have been a much better book if it had been half the length. There are quite a lot of interesting and penetrating observations here, but finding them is a real effort. I think the book is summed up for me in this little quote: “...the prog-rock concept album, with its own bloated, self-involved aesthetic that needed urgent, almost therapeutic puncturing by punk rock”. He is, as so often, absolutely right, but can’t seem to see that his own book is just as bloated and self-involved and needs urgent, almost therapeutic puncturing by a good, strong editor. I can’t really recommend it.
(My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley.)
December 1, 2020
Wow! Kimley and I will be discussing this book on our next BOOK MUSIK Podcast. You can hear our conversation with Paul Morley here: Book Musik podcast
December 22, 2020
There are few things Paul Morley enjoys listening to more than classical music. Unfortunately, one of those is the sound of his own voice. Instead of being an engaging guide to orchestral music, A Sound Mind is a self-referential and bloated monstrosity.
Morley argues for more recent, avant-garde forms of classical music, that these show the same experimentation and novelty that energised pop and rock music from the 1970’s. This isn’t an introduction to classical music aimed at the neophyte, with Morley taking a deliberately scattergun approach to the best-known composers. Kraftwerk are covered in more detail than Handel. Frank Zappa and David Bowie have a more central role than Bruckner.
The depressing reality of the book is that Morley is writing for people like him: 50-something blokes with an obsessive interest in lists and prog rock who cling to dreams of intellectual relevance.
After wading through the full 600 pages, the instinct is to assume that Morley’s initial version somehow avoided any editing whatsoever. But what if this is not true? There is a horrifying possibility that an original 1,600 page version can be found in the bowels of Bloomsbury Publishing crammed with even more obscure references, pretentious arguments, and tendentious diversions about teenage visits to Woolworths.
The irony is that if Morley took the same sparse approach to his writing as many of his favourite modern composers do to their music, A Sound Mind would have been substantially more engaging.
Morley argues for more recent, avant-garde forms of classical music, that these show the same experimentation and novelty that energised pop and rock music from the 1970’s. This isn’t an introduction to classical music aimed at the neophyte, with Morley taking a deliberately scattergun approach to the best-known composers. Kraftwerk are covered in more detail than Handel. Frank Zappa and David Bowie have a more central role than Bruckner.
The depressing reality of the book is that Morley is writing for people like him: 50-something blokes with an obsessive interest in lists and prog rock who cling to dreams of intellectual relevance.
After wading through the full 600 pages, the instinct is to assume that Morley’s initial version somehow avoided any editing whatsoever. But what if this is not true? There is a horrifying possibility that an original 1,600 page version can be found in the bowels of Bloomsbury Publishing crammed with even more obscure references, pretentious arguments, and tendentious diversions about teenage visits to Woolworths.
The irony is that if Morley took the same sparse approach to his writing as many of his favourite modern composers do to their music, A Sound Mind would have been substantially more engaging.
December 1, 2020
Tosh and I are joined by author Paul Morley to discuss this book on our Book Musik podcast.
Paul is a man after our own heart with wildly eclectic taste in music, an insatiable curiosity and a willingness to challenge his own assumptions. He is a well-established and highly respected pop/rock writer who’s been covering the scene since the 70s. In his 50s he realized that pop music wasn’t giving him the jolt it once did and decided to explore classical music. He discovered that its newness to himself made it as exciting if not more so than the latest pop phenomenon. It’s a fascinating adventure and the book is a passionate call to never stop expanding one’s horizons.
Paul is a man after our own heart with wildly eclectic taste in music, an insatiable curiosity and a willingness to challenge his own assumptions. He is a well-established and highly respected pop/rock writer who’s been covering the scene since the 70s. In his 50s he realized that pop music wasn’t giving him the jolt it once did and decided to explore classical music. He discovered that its newness to himself made it as exciting if not more so than the latest pop phenomenon. It’s a fascinating adventure and the book is a passionate call to never stop expanding one’s horizons.
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January 19, 2022Even more than most Paul Morley, a maddening mixed bag of a book, Morley, you see, has got into classical. Which means that we get him using his intermittent gift for the laser-guided description to quite correctly observe that the organ "embodies with epic, ecstatic sadness the time and space that the cathedral contains and will ultimately be engulfed by." But also that we get wince-inducing trendy vicar-isms like "Glenn Gould, who in many ways was more Iggy than Iggy". Early on, especially, there is also an attempt to position A Sound Mind as a book about how streaming has changed the consumption of music, and how that interlocks with time changing the individual's listening – though he never quite explains (and increasingly it fades out altogether) why he seems to favour Tidal, which of all the streaming services is the one that has been accused of the most grievous shenanigans against musicians other than the already ultra-successful. And yes, there probably is something to his argument that the pop record has a relation to the physical item which classical doesn't, that packaging was more integral to some of its high points – though even then, his paean to the likes of Eno's Obscure Records label seems like an obvious hole in the argument. But he's foolishly ready to fall for the myth that everything is on streaming now, when it's a rare week I don't find a gap, and he talks blithely about the death of the vinyl album, when in fact it's experiencing a revival. In general, his awareness that he's making a cliched middle-aged move with this change of allegiances doesn't stop him from sometimes coming across as the default snob convert. If Holst now sounds better than King Crimson, maybe that's less because pop and rock are dead, and more because King Crimson were always prog bobbins?
And there's the other problem with this book, for me at least: I know that King Crimson were prog bobbins. Whereas the revisionist account of classical which Morley says he's building here: is it revisionist? If so, is it good revisionism, or bad revisionism? If someone who knew more about classical than me were to read this, would they think it a sound account? If they didn't, would their objections be sound, or simply the fusty mutterings of the Man getting annoyed at that young punk Morley telling it like it is? I have no toolkit to even begin to tell you. I've definitely listened to more classical while I was reading it, so in that sense – and of course, by having me talking about Paul Morley – it's succeeded in its goals. But for all that he argues music floats free of meaning without context, 'especially pop', I find it so much more with classical, even classical I'm listening to precisely because it's been given intriguing context by this book, where my experience was often very reminiscent of the Indie Club sketch from The Fast Show – this amazing description of some weird and vast sound, followed by music which was, you know, perfectly pleasant background classical, but not something that I'm ever likely to listen to again, much less see join the list of maybe two dozen composers and pieces I recognise or with which I genuinely have any engagement. The exception being Cornelius Cardew's AMM, not because they spoke to my soul but because they were a dreadful bloody racket I turned off halfway through. Which was unfortunate because they were one of the times when Morley, writing about something else, also offered a handy review of his own style: "Much of it was static at the same time as it feverishly circled itself and headed out in new directions before tracking back." See also, on Woolf: 'This connection was always of interest to me, the idea of how you wrote about music, and transformed a piece of music into words about that piece of music when particularly a great piece of music was its own best description and explanation." And yes, his love of paradox and lists, and in particular his love of combining the two, means that a) the illustrative passages are often too long plausibly to quote and b) that it can at times devolve into 'In summary, Libya is a country of contrasts'. But there's still something fascinating in watching a man who has more or less got away with these flights of fancy for as long as I've been alive suffer occasional open pangs of impostor syndrome now he's operating in a sphere which has retained a greater tolerance for formal, technical vocab. Some of which he guides the reader through – it's good knowing what those K numbers on Mozart mean, not least because Mozart is one of my two dozen. Morley says of him that Mozart "has become one of those who will not be forgotten, because eternity recollects them" – a beautiful phrase and notion, which I've already been stealing, but this is the problem with how classical is often discussed, isn't it, whether on that annoying bit the showy driver in Pig listens to, or here – the sense that because something has been remembered this far, it will continue to be. Even if we somehow dodge the impending end of the sort of society which can sustain both orchestras and streaming sites, of how many forgotten people has something similar been said, their names now dust while we remember Ea-Nasir? There are moments when Morley seems on the verge of realising this; he talks about how music without words was in its early days seen as a new departure, a somewhat superficial form, "a kind of fancy lark" – but then he misses what's staring him in the face and concludes "Pop music, if you like", when surely the real lesson is that in regaining lyrics, returning to song, pop was music coming back to itself? Over and over, he walks that line, still enough of an outsider to admit "Recorded music perversely created a natural, human sound; to the outsider, the unfiltered, microphone-free opera singer can sound totally unnatural, somewhere between a neutered monster and a distressed fairy." But he's also worked his way far enough in to say that "the invention of opera was, in part, of imagining what heaven might be like, as an almost hysterical abstraction of our reality". Which is as good an excuse for it as I've ever heard.
Outside its big and faltering arguments, though, there were plenty of bits I enjoyed. Some of them are from more core Morley territory, as when he discusses the creative tensions and separate dominions with Horn and ZTT, or the wonderful Art of Noise slogan I'd not encountered before, "art exists because reality is neither real nor significant". I had no idea, either, that Mike Oldfield's eponymous tubular bells had been borrowed from John Cale, being the same ones used on Paris 1919. Assuming, of course, that it's actually true; when he describes Huddersfield as "the sturdy, steady West Yorkshire town that, oddly enough, was the birthplace of both the first female Doctor Who – Jodie Whittaker – and the second captain of the Starship Enterprise – Patrick Stewart" he spoils an interesting coincidence by being wrong about both roles (though SF seems like a weak spot in general, as witness the baffling description of Alien as "a coda and kind of continuation to Stanley Kubrick's 2001" and yes, they do both use classical, but really?). Still, I hope he's on surer ground regarding Huddersfield when he describes Satie, Cage and Messiaen dining together in the town's Pizza Hut, because that's such a delightfully incongruous image. And on Huddersfield's musical culture generally, and what it says about classical in general, he's excellent on the the way that the experimental end now mostly feels every bit as comfortably heritage as the old stuff, "interest in culture as more of a convivial time-passing hobby than a cause [...] it turned out that what came after modern and then postmodern was more, much more of the sam, much of it curated at fastidious annual festivals". Even if he then flips annoying again, positing it as an alternative to a pop culture in which people are just shovelling down what they're told to like, despite the fact that it's surely exactly the same thing, just operating on a smaller and less successful scale.
Still, wherever I may disagree with him, one section of the book I cannot fault in the slightest is when he gets the knives out for Classic FM, the channel/brand/blob which even I can recognise as a horrific denaturing. Its desperate grasps at relevance and accessibility, even down to pathetic gestures like losing the '-al'. "For ITV, this is the Arts. For the rest of us, it is the pimped end of the pier." He is hilariously, if unnecessarily, savage about Titchmarsh, and when he drops a reference to "the general Barlowering of musical standards" I was so impressed I could only wonder, how is this not already a pun in general use? So yeah. Even if I very much disagree with Morley's apparent defection to the baffling tribe who think there will ever come a time when more people listen to Harrison Birtwistle than Be My Baby, even if it did take me well over a year to soldier through this (and a fair bit of that as an aid to recapturing sleep, when the circular prose addressing a topic of little direct interest was ideal), I can't deny it had its moments. And Hell, it's always fun to watch Morley write his way across those tightropes, whether or not he makes it to the other side.
(Netgalley ARC)
And there's the other problem with this book, for me at least: I know that King Crimson were prog bobbins. Whereas the revisionist account of classical which Morley says he's building here: is it revisionist? If so, is it good revisionism, or bad revisionism? If someone who knew more about classical than me were to read this, would they think it a sound account? If they didn't, would their objections be sound, or simply the fusty mutterings of the Man getting annoyed at that young punk Morley telling it like it is? I have no toolkit to even begin to tell you. I've definitely listened to more classical while I was reading it, so in that sense – and of course, by having me talking about Paul Morley – it's succeeded in its goals. But for all that he argues music floats free of meaning without context, 'especially pop', I find it so much more with classical, even classical I'm listening to precisely because it's been given intriguing context by this book, where my experience was often very reminiscent of the Indie Club sketch from The Fast Show – this amazing description of some weird and vast sound, followed by music which was, you know, perfectly pleasant background classical, but not something that I'm ever likely to listen to again, much less see join the list of maybe two dozen composers and pieces I recognise or with which I genuinely have any engagement. The exception being Cornelius Cardew's AMM, not because they spoke to my soul but because they were a dreadful bloody racket I turned off halfway through. Which was unfortunate because they were one of the times when Morley, writing about something else, also offered a handy review of his own style: "Much of it was static at the same time as it feverishly circled itself and headed out in new directions before tracking back." See also, on Woolf: 'This connection was always of interest to me, the idea of how you wrote about music, and transformed a piece of music into words about that piece of music when particularly a great piece of music was its own best description and explanation." And yes, his love of paradox and lists, and in particular his love of combining the two, means that a) the illustrative passages are often too long plausibly to quote and b) that it can at times devolve into 'In summary, Libya is a country of contrasts'. But there's still something fascinating in watching a man who has more or less got away with these flights of fancy for as long as I've been alive suffer occasional open pangs of impostor syndrome now he's operating in a sphere which has retained a greater tolerance for formal, technical vocab. Some of which he guides the reader through – it's good knowing what those K numbers on Mozart mean, not least because Mozart is one of my two dozen. Morley says of him that Mozart "has become one of those who will not be forgotten, because eternity recollects them" – a beautiful phrase and notion, which I've already been stealing, but this is the problem with how classical is often discussed, isn't it, whether on that annoying bit the showy driver in Pig listens to, or here – the sense that because something has been remembered this far, it will continue to be. Even if we somehow dodge the impending end of the sort of society which can sustain both orchestras and streaming sites, of how many forgotten people has something similar been said, their names now dust while we remember Ea-Nasir? There are moments when Morley seems on the verge of realising this; he talks about how music without words was in its early days seen as a new departure, a somewhat superficial form, "a kind of fancy lark" – but then he misses what's staring him in the face and concludes "Pop music, if you like", when surely the real lesson is that in regaining lyrics, returning to song, pop was music coming back to itself? Over and over, he walks that line, still enough of an outsider to admit "Recorded music perversely created a natural, human sound; to the outsider, the unfiltered, microphone-free opera singer can sound totally unnatural, somewhere between a neutered monster and a distressed fairy." But he's also worked his way far enough in to say that "the invention of opera was, in part, of imagining what heaven might be like, as an almost hysterical abstraction of our reality". Which is as good an excuse for it as I've ever heard.
Outside its big and faltering arguments, though, there were plenty of bits I enjoyed. Some of them are from more core Morley territory, as when he discusses the creative tensions and separate dominions with Horn and ZTT, or the wonderful Art of Noise slogan I'd not encountered before, "art exists because reality is neither real nor significant". I had no idea, either, that Mike Oldfield's eponymous tubular bells had been borrowed from John Cale, being the same ones used on Paris 1919. Assuming, of course, that it's actually true; when he describes Huddersfield as "the sturdy, steady West Yorkshire town that, oddly enough, was the birthplace of both the first female Doctor Who – Jodie Whittaker – and the second captain of the Starship Enterprise – Patrick Stewart" he spoils an interesting coincidence by being wrong about both roles (though SF seems like a weak spot in general, as witness the baffling description of Alien as "a coda and kind of continuation to Stanley Kubrick's 2001" and yes, they do both use classical, but really?). Still, I hope he's on surer ground regarding Huddersfield when he describes Satie, Cage and Messiaen dining together in the town's Pizza Hut, because that's such a delightfully incongruous image. And on Huddersfield's musical culture generally, and what it says about classical in general, he's excellent on the the way that the experimental end now mostly feels every bit as comfortably heritage as the old stuff, "interest in culture as more of a convivial time-passing hobby than a cause [...] it turned out that what came after modern and then postmodern was more, much more of the sam, much of it curated at fastidious annual festivals". Even if he then flips annoying again, positing it as an alternative to a pop culture in which people are just shovelling down what they're told to like, despite the fact that it's surely exactly the same thing, just operating on a smaller and less successful scale.
Still, wherever I may disagree with him, one section of the book I cannot fault in the slightest is when he gets the knives out for Classic FM, the channel/brand/blob which even I can recognise as a horrific denaturing. Its desperate grasps at relevance and accessibility, even down to pathetic gestures like losing the '-al'. "For ITV, this is the Arts. For the rest of us, it is the pimped end of the pier." He is hilariously, if unnecessarily, savage about Titchmarsh, and when he drops a reference to "the general Barlowering of musical standards" I was so impressed I could only wonder, how is this not already a pun in general use? So yeah. Even if I very much disagree with Morley's apparent defection to the baffling tribe who think there will ever come a time when more people listen to Harrison Birtwistle than Be My Baby, even if it did take me well over a year to soldier through this (and a fair bit of that as an aid to recapturing sleep, when the circular prose addressing a topic of little direct interest was ideal), I can't deny it had its moments. And Hell, it's always fun to watch Morley write his way across those tightropes, whether or not he makes it to the other side.
(Netgalley ARC)
February 17, 2022
Morley’s writing has (some) merit as musical commentary. His feelings on classical music are refreshingly, extremely positive. Some portions of the book are interesting, a highlight being his interview with John Adams. Essentially, Morley advocates for classical music to not fight for cultural relevancy by attempting to keep up and adjust with trends in popular culture, but instead remove its stuffy and elitist character. This is where the problems begin…Whilst I recognise that claiming that he wishes to ‘rewrite its (music’s) history’ is a cheap sell to naive readers such as myself, Morley’s suggestion for an alternative interpretation leaves a lot to be desired. This feeling is especially potent seeing as Morley has recently spent extensive time within the Music community, and therefore has consulted considerable amounts of academic thought. Without even addressing the hotly debated issue of deconstructing the canon, Morley declares that in this history, the most obvious and popular form (string quartet), and the most obvious and popular instrument (piano), take centre stage. Morley explores the ‘undiscovered’ lives of European, white and male composers, with a large section of writing focusing on MOZART AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HIS SONATA AND OPERA WRITING (THIS IS NOT NEW!!!) To add further insult to injury of not doing what is said on the tin, Morley litters his chapters with ‘edgy’ composers like Webern and SO MUCH CAGE. Essentially, Morley argues for an interpretation where although some canonic composers remain, such as Haydn and Mozart, avant-garde composers play key role in explaining the synthesis between classical music and technology. Regarding structure, the writing lacks flow and cohesion as much of the writing is taken from pre-existing presentations, interviews and articles. Finally, knowing that I am not one to talk, seeing as I too can speak for England (case and point this review), Morley is unable, throughout this 600 page saga, to write concisely. This is especially disappointing given that the target audience for this book is likely those who don’t frequently engage with the spewing sentences of musical academic writing (looking at you Nick Cook). To summarise, Morley has some interesting things to say on how music is created and shared, however, his rewritten history is irksome, and dare I say it, lazy?
January 24, 2022
3.5 stars, if Goodreads allowed that sort of distinction.
I can't argue with criticisms of the book being overlong, repetitive, flowery, etc. If I had to use one word to describe the book, it'd be "stuffed." Turn to any page and you'll find paragraphs chock-full of references, name-drops, and obscure lingo wrapped up in languid, sometimes sluggish syntax that seems characteristic of Morley's style.
But where some readers might find this unbearable - pretentious, even - the book, for me, was like a kid rushing over to his gang of friends, breathlessly reporting in huge gobs of narrative an event unlike anything he'd experienced before. There's structure, of course, but it's kind of like that: Morley has awakened to an entirely fresh conception of what music was/is, through a newfound love of classical music, and - coming off the heels of a semi-mid-life-crisis - seems desperate to impart to readers the enormity of this revelation. And trust me: it's enormous. This took me around a year to finish.
To be fair, it's far from the longest book, in terms of its page count, but it's super dense. And torturous, at times, because Morley relentlessly throws new information at your head before you can let the long-term narrative really set in. I'll likely return to this book as a compendium/encyclopedia (the deluge of obscurities, of rarified "art" pieces and forgotten works of fading composers are, in my view, invaluable) and less because of my interest in Morley's personal journey - which was a significant part of the book, but seems secondary, honestly, to the "rewritten" history he lays out here.
At the end of the day, I'm grateful to Paul Morley for re-introducing me to a world that I, like him, have only recently come to appreciate beyond the stuffy elitism it's most commonly known for.
I can't argue with criticisms of the book being overlong, repetitive, flowery, etc. If I had to use one word to describe the book, it'd be "stuffed." Turn to any page and you'll find paragraphs chock-full of references, name-drops, and obscure lingo wrapped up in languid, sometimes sluggish syntax that seems characteristic of Morley's style.
But where some readers might find this unbearable - pretentious, even - the book, for me, was like a kid rushing over to his gang of friends, breathlessly reporting in huge gobs of narrative an event unlike anything he'd experienced before. There's structure, of course, but it's kind of like that: Morley has awakened to an entirely fresh conception of what music was/is, through a newfound love of classical music, and - coming off the heels of a semi-mid-life-crisis - seems desperate to impart to readers the enormity of this revelation. And trust me: it's enormous. This took me around a year to finish.
To be fair, it's far from the longest book, in terms of its page count, but it's super dense. And torturous, at times, because Morley relentlessly throws new information at your head before you can let the long-term narrative really set in. I'll likely return to this book as a compendium/encyclopedia (the deluge of obscurities, of rarified "art" pieces and forgotten works of fading composers are, in my view, invaluable) and less because of my interest in Morley's personal journey - which was a significant part of the book, but seems secondary, honestly, to the "rewritten" history he lays out here.
At the end of the day, I'm grateful to Paul Morley for re-introducing me to a world that I, like him, have only recently come to appreciate beyond the stuffy elitism it's most commonly known for.
February 14, 2021
Boooooorrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiinnnnnnnnggggggg
September 27, 2022
Morley's beautiful, exhausting prose goes round in circles - oh we're back here again? and again? - yet pushes ever onwards, not to any conclusion, over and over the most interesting concepts he can find, accumulating the odd outrageous statement into an impressive pile of tosh as he goes. Thus, this is a polarizing work, but if you're already half-way to thinking about the things he's thinking about, you'll be on his side, whether you agree with him or not.
I thought I'd never finish this, but I did. I thought it would never finish, and I'm not sure it has. But as it went on and on, there were many many times when I found myself loving it and saying so out loud.
I thought I'd never finish this, but I did. I thought it would never finish, and I'm not sure it has. But as it went on and on, there were many many times when I found myself loving it and saying so out loud.
September 20, 2022
I've been flirting with tackling this brick for awhile, and almost tossed it aside again when I realized who the author actually was. This is as I have distant memories of Morley acting out when he was a leading gadfly in the British music press, before attaching himself to the semi-fiasco that was ZTT Music; after which I lost track of him.
Flash forward a generation or so, and Morley is well past his mid-life crisis, and has reinvented himself as a commentator on classical music for the aging hipsters of the world. In as much as I resemble that remark, I actually got a good bit out of this book. Morley's adventures in trying to get a clue, his overview of a lot of music I might not otherwise have heard of, and some astute comments on the rise and fall of a certain type of music environment and economy, were all well appreciated. However, there is no denying that this work probably could have been about 150 pages shorter, and is more of a memoir of Morley's career, than a left-field history of classical music.
My actual rating is more like 3.5.
Flash forward a generation or so, and Morley is well past his mid-life crisis, and has reinvented himself as a commentator on classical music for the aging hipsters of the world. In as much as I resemble that remark, I actually got a good bit out of this book. Morley's adventures in trying to get a clue, his overview of a lot of music I might not otherwise have heard of, and some astute comments on the rise and fall of a certain type of music environment and economy, were all well appreciated. However, there is no denying that this work probably could have been about 150 pages shorter, and is more of a memoir of Morley's career, than a left-field history of classical music.
My actual rating is more like 3.5.
August 19, 2024
What a shame. Clearly well researched. Maybe it's too full of info. Maybe it's just too rambling.
I gave up about 100 pages before the end. Paul "why use one word if ten will do" Morley, I suspect would have done better to listen to his editors who I'm sure will have asked him to trim this to less than 400 pages. The sheer amount of verbiage was both impressive and off putting.
I'll keep it, and use for ideas about classical musicians to listen to from composers I still know very little about.
I gave up about 100 pages before the end. Paul "why use one word if ten will do" Morley, I suspect would have done better to listen to his editors who I'm sure will have asked him to trim this to less than 400 pages. The sheer amount of verbiage was both impressive and off putting.
I'll keep it, and use for ideas about classical musicians to listen to from composers I still know very little about.
November 15, 2021
I am fond of Paul Morley, I don't agree with all of his opinions and he can come across as arrogant and rambling, but I like his writing and television work. Maybe I'm just biased because I'm also a Northerner who is obsessed with music and prone to going off on tangents. The book is Paul's own account of his middle aged deep dive into classical music after decades of being a prominent rock and pop writer.
March 6, 2023
Morely knows a lot of words and is not afraid to demonstrate it, and honestly I didn't have such a problem with that per say (I also know a lot of words, don't worry), except that it made Morley's whole thesis into a huge, bloated thing where you couldn't find a single structured argument no matter how painstakingly you searched.
Oh man, this could have been so much shorter – and the better for it!
Oh man, this could have been so much shorter – and the better for it!
February 12, 2021
Sometimes this book has moments of brilliance. It has led me to listen to so many new things, some of which I may never have discovered or might even have avoided. However it is far too long and the author does end up repeating himself a lot. Some judicious editing is needed. Overall though a book I wouldn't have wanted to miss.
March 9, 2021
he does go on about himself. exhausting to read.
October 21, 2023
Hands up who’s finished a book by English pop critic Paul Morley? I’ve started a few, but A Sound Mind, his collected thoughts on Classical music, is the only book I’ve finished, but by golly was it hard work. Six months of tedium punctuated by the odd interesting digression. The 108 page chapter on the history of the quartet just about killed me. And I actually like Paul Morley. I used to watch him on News Night Review and I always enjoyed his sparky commentary; he was enthusiastically opinionated, well spoken and deeply knowledgeable about everything to do with modern music. I had time for him, and always took note of what he liked and didn’t like. Many years later, coincidentally (or perhaps not: we’re both white, middle-aged men), I’ve landed at a similar place in my listening tastes as Morley. What I grew up listening to no longer appeals to me, so I’m increasingly drawn to the unfamiliar, the atonal, and quite frankly, oftentimes unlistenable, whether it be avant-garde, experimental, minimalist, or modern Classical music. Most of these genres are not really music, more like interesting sounds. And while Morley eventually covers everything I care about - often to a satisfying level of depth - what I noticed while reading A Sound Mind, is that while I like to hear what Morley thinks, I hate, hate, hate the way he writes. I blame him, I blame his editor for letting get away with:
“And after all that immense, titillating, glorious, exhausting, intertwining, hot-blooded, heart-warming, ancient, modern, cooling, brief, calculating, seething, prodigious, postmodern, post-beyond endeavour and fulfilment, a vast intimidating set of precedents, revelations, meditations, connections, detours, examinations, detachments, confrontations and refinements that are often themselves genius, musical movements coexisting and overlapping and merging into each other, a sacrosanct history that intimidates and/or inspires the boldest, the bravest of composers.”
Unfortunately Morley regularly conjures up these extravagantly long winded sentences, or rather lists of synonymous adjectives, with occasional antonym thrown in to show the complexity of the subject being discussed (after all don’t we all live with contradictions?). Eventually these laundry lists of descriptions become less and less meaningful, and I began to question the authenticity of his efforts. How does a person so relatively new to Classical music find so much to say on such a vast and complicated subject? My mind would wander as I read page after page of flowery elucidation about Ravel or Debussy or Mozart, and I thought maybe this is some sort of elaborate Burroughsian cut-up exercise - where sentences are formed by arbitrarily plucking descriptive terms and famous composers from two separate hats. It’s a mess - there is no order, very little cohesion, and too many words. I would have found this book much more useful if Morley just listed a dozen names that he found most interesting. But he does that too. There are a dozen useful lists actually. And random interviews with Brian Eno, John Adams, Ollie Knussen and Harry Birtwistle (although Morley the interviewer is almost as bad as Morley the writer). And reviews. It is a mish-mash of everything Classical. But it’s not an enjoyable experience for the reader, and it doesn’t do Morley, the thinker and critic, justice either.
“And after all that immense, titillating, glorious, exhausting, intertwining, hot-blooded, heart-warming, ancient, modern, cooling, brief, calculating, seething, prodigious, postmodern, post-beyond endeavour and fulfilment, a vast intimidating set of precedents, revelations, meditations, connections, detours, examinations, detachments, confrontations and refinements that are often themselves genius, musical movements coexisting and overlapping and merging into each other, a sacrosanct history that intimidates and/or inspires the boldest, the bravest of composers.”
Unfortunately Morley regularly conjures up these extravagantly long winded sentences, or rather lists of synonymous adjectives, with occasional antonym thrown in to show the complexity of the subject being discussed (after all don’t we all live with contradictions?). Eventually these laundry lists of descriptions become less and less meaningful, and I began to question the authenticity of his efforts. How does a person so relatively new to Classical music find so much to say on such a vast and complicated subject? My mind would wander as I read page after page of flowery elucidation about Ravel or Debussy or Mozart, and I thought maybe this is some sort of elaborate Burroughsian cut-up exercise - where sentences are formed by arbitrarily plucking descriptive terms and famous composers from two separate hats. It’s a mess - there is no order, very little cohesion, and too many words. I would have found this book much more useful if Morley just listed a dozen names that he found most interesting. But he does that too. There are a dozen useful lists actually. And random interviews with Brian Eno, John Adams, Ollie Knussen and Harry Birtwistle (although Morley the interviewer is almost as bad as Morley the writer). And reviews. It is a mish-mash of everything Classical. But it’s not an enjoyable experience for the reader, and it doesn’t do Morley, the thinker and critic, justice either.
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