Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century

by Kate Molleson

A radical new book by journalist, critic and BBC Radio 3 broadcaster Kate Molleson, which fundamentally changes the way we think about classical music and the musicians who made it on a global scale.

This is the impassioned and exhilarating story of the composers who dared to challenge the conventional world of classical music in the twentieth century. Traversing the globe from Ethiopia and the Philippines to Mexico, Jerusalem, Russia and beyond, journalist, critic and BBC Radio 3 broadcaster Kate Molleson tells the stories of ten figures who altered the course of musical history, only to be sidelined and denied recognition during an era that systemically favoured certain sounds - and people - over others. A celebration of radical creativity rooted in ideas of protest, gender, race, ecology and resistance, Sound Within Sound is an energetic reappraisal of twentieth-century classical music that opens up the world far beyond its established centres, challenges stereotypical portrayals of the genre and shatters its traditional canon.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Audiobook, Cultural, Biography

312 pages, Hardcover

First published July 7, 2022

About the author

Kate Molleson is a Scottish music journalist who regularly presents BBC Radio 3 programmes including Breakfast, Music Matters and Afternoon Concert.

A writer for The Guardian and The Herald, she also contributes to Opera, Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine and was commissioning editor of Dear Green Sounds, a history of Glasgow's music venues commissioned by UNESCO.

Her radio documentaries (BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service) include a portrait of Ethopian nun, pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam and a two-part feature on Mongolian opera.

Molleson grew up in various parts of Scotland and the far north of Canada an studied clarinet performance at McGill University, Montreal, and musicology at King's College, London, where she researched the operas of Ezra Pound. She was a copy editor, music critic and cycling columnist for the Montreal Gazette and deputy editor of Opera magazine before moving home to Scotland as The Guardian's classical music critic in 2010.

She lives in Glasgow.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

He dreamed of travelling beyond notions of consonance and dissonance, beyond sight and hearing and past and present to arrive at a state he called caossonance, where light becomes sound and a grand union of the senses is achieved.

There's nothing like browsing in an actual store and encountering something previously unknown. It was just such an occasion which had my discovering this book. At another store minutes earlier, I overheard two employees discussing how the best recommendations come from other people not algorithms. Thus, I stumbled upon this work, which is something I always envisioned but had yet to encounter. The author is quick to assert that this isn't comprehensive but simply a survey of a number of composers who routinely don't make the list in surveying 20C experimental music. This is also work of that period in 2020 when questions were being asked about stories are left untold. I only owned music by a single composer: Ustvolskaya.

Each chapter is a brief biography of a composer and maximum effort is taken to compare the projects of each. It was perfect for a nerd like me. Here's to hoping I don't spend too much money exploring their music as a result

[Matt Hancock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked up this book for the chapter on Ethiopian composer and pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam Guèbru, but got much more out of it than I had anticipated. Kate Molleson, makes the subject matter accessible for those not familiar with music theory or its vernacular as she explores the theory and impetus behind the works of various composers. Breaking from the “genius” trope that clouds the history of classical music, Molleson introduces us to Else Marie Pade, Muhal Richard Abrams, Élaine Radigue, Annea Lockwood, and others. In telling each of their stories we encounter heavy-weights of the music and art world including, but not limited to, Sun Ra, Carolee Schneemann, Charles Stepney, John Cage, and Yves Klein. Overall, a super engaging and expansive study of 20th century composers who have largely been left out of the mainstream narratives of music history.

[Lene Kretschz · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars Molleson presents a great deal of information, much of it important and little known, but her prose is so incredibly bad, so rife with cringeworthy metaphors and breathless adjectives, that I found it hard to finish. I just can't recommend this to anyone, despite the fact that I'd like all the composers featured to be far better known. An immense disappointment.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read about this book in a recent edition of The Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music (September 2024), and since I haven’t read a book about music in awhile–Michael Oliver’s biography of Stravinsky last December–I thought that I would take up Sounds within Sounds, which I have read as a Kindle doc because all of my books are still boxed up from the cross country move..

Molleson begins with her childhood love of classical music (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, the canon). When she is older, and her musical education formalized and more fully developed, she continues to hear and study those core composers. Her curiosity, though, leads her to search out other composers beyond the core, after which she grapples with the logic of those who defend the core by claiming that their “greatness” would be reduced if more composers were included. Molleson doesn’t believe in such an exclusive zero sum game. Molleson’s tastes are open and inclusive, and value from the addition of new, creative voices. For Molleson, classical music is not a protected reserve behind closed borders but an always open field full of creative people producing amazing new music. She asks a set of questions which establish the purpose of the book: “Why did the official narrative, the concert programmes, the festival line-ups, always revolve so narrowly around the same clutch of ‘core’ composers that I’d learned about in my kids’ stories? Why were they so exclusively white and so male, so European and so American? Where were all the others? Because there were plenty of others. There are.”

Her answer could have resulted in a very long book, because the twentieth and twenty first centuries have produced a lot of classical composers. Molleson, though, focuses on only ten, all outside the white male Euro-American canon. Sounds within Sounds functions–not as a compendium of the new–but as a guide to experiencing classical music as an open field rather than a closed reserve. Four of the composers are men, and six are women; nationally, there is one Mexican, one Brazilian, one Philipino, one Russian, one Ethiopian, one Dane, one French, one New Zealander, and two Americans (one woman, one African-American).

The essays are structured around interviews: the composers, if they are alive; family, friends, colleagues, and music scholars. Molleson is also part of the process, because with each composer and essay she is on her own path of discovery. She does not write from the distanced perspective of an expert but as someone who is learning and putting together different pieces of information (biographical, historical, musicological, political, personal) together to form a coherent interpretation of each composer and make sense of their unique creative output. What clearly attracts Molleson to these ten is their uniqueness: their paths to becoming composers make each stand out as distinct.
In the first chapter, Molleson focuses on the Mexican composer, Julían Carrillo, although she also spends some time on the more well known Silvestre Revueltas. I know the latter, particularly Sensemaya and La Noche de las Mayas, but I had never heard of Carrillo. More importantly, I had always thought that it was European and US composers (e.g., Charles Ives) who first explored microtones and had no idea that someone in Mexico, on the margins of cultural power, was doing breakthrough work challenging the standard twelve tone western scale. Within Mexico, though, Carrillo (and Revueltas, too) was an outsider, because he pursued a path that did not take into account Mexico’s post-Revolutionary recovery of folkloric and pre-Hispanic cultures as sources for remaking a national culture that is more authentic and less eurocentric. But Carrillo didn’t care about this post-Revolutionary push and followed his own microtonal muse. Molleson describes him as an odd bird, but it was that oddness that made him interesting and creative. From his system, El Sonido de 13, Carrillo claims the possibility for an infinite number of tunings, which would revolutionize not only the way that music is composed but played. Imagine a Beethoven symphony played using a microtonal scale. I like Molleson’s short analyses of exemplary works by Carrillo, and I feel fortunate to be able to listen to them through Spotify or YouTube. Throughout the book, I was happy to be able to use music streaming as a listening and research tool. Carrillo and the other microtonal composers opened up western classical music to new creative opportunities, which for Molleson is all to the good.

Chapter 2 is about Ruth Crawford Seeger, of whom I know a little and whose compositions are dauntingly modernist. I love a challenging listen. I had understood her story as one of lost potential, that she gave up compositing to marry Charles Seeger and become mother/stepmother to his children (the more famous children: She is stepmother to Pete and mother to Mike and Peggy). Beyond album notes, this is the longest biography that I’ve read on Seeger. Molleson’s take on Seeger is more nuanced and complex than the story of lost potential that I had in my head, but Seeger’s story is still one of unrealized potential and is sad. Crawford went to Chicago from Florida to study music, with the aim of returning home to become a piano. Chicago, though, lit a fire, and her exposure to early twentieth century modernism tapped into her latent genius as a composer. She goes east to study with Charles Seeger and then is the first woman to receive a Guggenheim and goes to Berlin, where she writes her great work String Quartet 1931. Of the composers she interacted with in Europe, she was most inspired by Bela Bartok, and his ethnomusicological work in his native Hungary. Ruth and Charles Seeger had fallen in love before she went to Berlin. It is the Depression, and with no other opportunities to pursue composition, she marries Seeger. Fortunately, Charles tapped into a WPA Project to record and preserve American folk music. Ruth transcribed the cylinders. She is still using her considerable musical talents, but to create an archive of others’ music, very much like what Bartok was doing in Hungary. It is also worth noting that after she finished a transcription, the Seeger family would learn the piece and sing it. Talk about a folk revival! Molleson notes that after the transcription work, Ruth had begun composing again, now pulling from her amalgamated knowledge of classical and folk music in a new burst of creativity. Unfortunately, she contracted cancer and died before being able to compose much. Molleson structures the essay around an affable interview with the daughter, Peggy Seeger; two women, two feminists, puzzling out the loss or trying the weigh the balance of gains and losses of a uniquely talented musical genius.

In each chapter, Molleson spends significant time detailing the historical and political circumstances for each composer. For Carrillo, the Mexican Revolution dominates; for Ruth Crawford Seeger, it’s the Depression. Chapter 3 is on the Brazilian Walter Smetak, with whom I was not familiar at all. Like Carrillo, Smetak became fascinated with microtones, and like the American Harry Partch he built his own instruments to best realize those microtones. He was hired by the Federal University of Bahia in the late 1950s, when the university went all in for culture and hired forward-thinking artists. Initially hired to do instrument repair, Smetak came to build sonic objects. Bahia was a melting pot of cultures–where there was no monocultural “authenticity”--and Smetak’s bricolage instruments reflected that multiplicity. Smetak coined the term “ caossonance,” a sound that is beyond consonance and dissonance. Molleson points out that Smetak was a precursor to the open-minded, free-thinking Tropicalia movement(e.g., Helio Oiticica, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Os Mutantes), whose wild and challenging art and music got them in trouble with the Vargas dictatorship (1964-85): too much freedom of expression. Perhaps like Ruth Crawford Seger, low and high art forge a link, but in Brazil that link became politically powerful and, thus, a target for government oppression.

I know Philipino José Maceda because of his album on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Gongs and Bamboo. He learned western music, becomes a pianist, and studied in Manila, Paris, and Los Angeles. As someone who bridged the West and the East but realized that the East occupied a subordinate position vis-a-vis the West, Maceda becomes an advocate for Asian classical composers. Like Bartok and Crawford Seeger, he becomes an ethnomusicologist and did extensive field recordings of folk music around the Philippines, Asia, and the world. Like Pierre Henri, Pierre Schaeffer, Else Marie Pade, and Éliane Radigue, he became a practitioner of musique concrete, which involves the recording and manipulation of found sounds. He wrote music for the non-western instruments he recorded. Unlike Carrillo, he is more of a nationalist, but only in that he uses the music of the Philippines as a starting point for his own creativity. Unlike the Tropicalia artists who were targeted by the Brazilian government, Maceda was weirdly championed by the Marcos dictatorship, particularly Imelda Marcos, as an example of living Philippine culture. The dictatorship made possible the performance of his piece musique concrete piece “Ugnayan,” which required the coordination of 38 radio stations across Manila. More often than not, creatives find themselves suppressed or oppressed by political systems, but not always.

At the Long Play Festival in Brooklyn two years ago, I saw the pianist Jenny Lin perform a piece by Galina Ustvolskaya. The lighting in the theater was dim, and I didn’t notice until the end that Lin was wearing wrist braces. It was a ferocious, loud, and repetitive piece, so I understood why Lin needed the braces. Some celebrate Ustvolskaya for her brutal minimalism, while others dismiss her for it. In Chapter 5, Molleson’s point and that of the others she interviewed–a contemporary composer, pianist, musicologist, and Ustvolskaya’s widower–is that Ustvolskaya was utterly unique, a unicorn, whose work cannot be explained by influence or education (Shostakovich was one of her teachers). She was gruff, exacting, and brutally honest, and, unlike Crawford Seeger, who felt the need to conform to a conventional gender role, Ustvolskaya did what she wanted. Like Carrillo in Mexico, she was a complete outsider. Perhaps her genius led to her outsider status, or perhaps her outsider status made her genius possible. That she wrote this music while living in Stalin’s USSR, which was never kind to artists, seems unfathomable.

In Chapter 6, Molleson takes up the anti-Ustvolskaya, the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam Guèbru, whom I first heard about from pianist Anthony Coleman at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville two years ago, who dedicated his solo piano set to her. Coleman is a gentle soul, and so was Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam Guèbru. Her music is the exact opposite of Ustvolskaya’s: gentle and meditative. Molleson centers the essay around her interview of Emahoy in her room at the Jerusalem convent where she lived. Molleson’s analysis is very much grounded in Emahoy’s life, which moved in so many directions: from musical prodigy to nun to her return to music, from learning western classics to listening to sacred music to improvising using Ethiopian scales to writing and recording music. All is mixed with history politics. Emahoy’s well-to-do family and the open culture Addis Ababa in the early twentieth century allowed Emahoy to pursue her talents, which included a European education. But those opportunities were deferred when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, and Emahoy and her family were jailed. After the war, though, when she applied for a visa to study music in Europe again the government inexplicably turned her down. In the resulting life crisis, she immersed herself in faith and sacred music. Years later, she took up the piano again, improvising songs based on Ethiopian scales and modes, after which she began to write music, which she recorded. Like everyone else in this volume, Emahoy’s path to creativity is distinct.

The Dane Else Marie Pade is another story, like Emahoy’s, of innocence put through the ringer and out the other side came a singular talent. As a child, Pade is sick much of the time and lives through the sounds that she hears, which fire her imagination throughout the rest of her life. As a teenager, she rejected the Nazi invasion of Denmark and worked with the Danish Resistance building telephone box bombs. She is captured and jailed. In the cell, she hears a short tune in her head and writes it on the wall, after which she is punished for defacing the cell. The tune becomes the basis and inspiration for her subsequent career in music. After the war, she worked for Danish Broadcasting, doing soundtrack/background work. She heard sounds in her imagination and turned to others, electronic engineers, to help her realize what she heard. As a woman in Denmark working in electronic music, she is on the margin of what is happening in Europe (Stockhausen, Shaeffer, Berio) and pursued her own path. Her most notable work–at least for me, a retired literature professor–was inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses. Just as Joyce wrote about Dublin, Pade created an electronic soundscape of Copenhagen, Symphonie Magnetophonique. José Maceda did the same for Manila with his giant collaborative piece, “Ugnayan,” as did Pierre Henri for Liverpool, Venice, and Paris.

The chapter on Muhal Richard Abrams seems the least well-realized in the book. I know, have read, or listened to much Muhal. He was a founder of the American Association of Creative Musicians (AACM), which changed the course of jazz in the 1960s. I’ve read Paul Steinbeck’s recent book Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM
Muhal is well celebrated in avant jazz circles, but as Molleson claims perhaps not beyond them. She makes the point about his productivity, that he uses a system, the Schillinger System, to facilitate composing for him or any one, a great leveler. Mollesen speaks to his productivity, his outreach to others, the wide variety of compositions (not just jazz). She doesn’t do the kind of analysis of pieces that she does in other chapters, and Molleson’s personal touch is missing. And as much as Muhal deserves a chapter in this book, so do others like Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, or Henry Threadgill. I agree with her, though, that Muhal is an original. Through his own works and those of his fellow AACMers, amazing amounts of creativity were unleashed. My love of jazz would be much diminished without Muhal Richard Abrams.

The chapter on Eliane Radigue, for me, may be the most enlightening one in the book. I have listened to Radigue’s music and heard it performed a few times. I like it, but wish that I liked it more than I have. I’m not sure that I have had the patience for it, because it is very slow and the minimalist of minimalist music. Molleson discussion helped a lot. Like Pade, it was sounds that intrigued Radigue, so when she heard musique concrete composer Pierre Schaeffer’s work on the radio she heard her future. Like Crawford Seeger, she faced similar tensions between family and art when she went to work for Schaeffer and Pierre Henri, who used her as an assistant but did not recognize her status as an artist. Following her artist husband who received a fellowship to study in New York, she found the milieu she needed (Steve Reich, LaMonte Young, John Cage, Laurie Siegel) to become the composer she imagined herself to be, searching to find the “sounds within sounds.” What I find most intriguing is the last section where Molleson talks about the work that she has created this century for musicians and acoustic instruments. Radigue does not write the music down, does not produce a score. Instead, she works by interviewing the musicians who will play a piece, conversing with the musicians until they have reached a collaborative understanding of what she wants. At Long Play this year, Ensemble Klang played her piece, “Occam Hexa V,” which they realized only after going to her apartment in Paris and spending time with her talking about the piece: Composition as oral transmission. What defines “Occam Hexa V” as a piece of music? There is no score. Ensemble Klang did not memory melody lines, rhythms, or chord changes. There were conversations and then performances of the piece. “The” is perhaps too definite of an article to link with Radigue and Ensemble Klang’s creation.

Like Radigue and Pade, Annea Lockwood is fascinated by sound, in particular sounds in nature. Molleson is at her best when she interviews the composer, because the information shared and Molleson’s analyses are, as a result, much more intimate and revealing. Biography and autobiography are essential for understanding the composers and compositions in this volume. I have listened to Lockwood’s work and seen it performed, but I’ve never really understood what she’s done until now. It is not enough to consider her a sound artist or a musique concrete composer manipulating found sounds.<--These are just categories and don’t reveal what is inside the music, the raison d’etre of the sounds. In the interviews, Molleson gets at the raison d’etre. Like Pade and Radigue, Lockwood was fascinated with sound at a young age in her native New Zealand. In the interview, Lockwood speaks at length about her focus on the sounds in the natural world, which Molleson then interweaves with the love story between Lockwood and her life partner, Ruth Anderson, who was also a sound composer. The love story illuminates the art story and vicé-versa.

In Sounds within Sounds: Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century, details about the composers, their lives and works are important, but what Molleson does best here is piece together complex paths–perhaps “maps” would be a better term–of creativity.

[Serdar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the composers profiled here, I was only familiar by name with one of them beforehand (Elaine Radigue), so it made for a exciting survey of folks nearly lost to time, and richly deserving of wider discussion and appreciation. It also spurred me to read that big ol' book on the AACM I have sitting still unread.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Abrams Books for an advanced copy of this book on modern composers who have flown under the radar and people's speakers.

I love music of all kinds. Starting with AM radio in the car, than watching Soul Train, Solid Gold and occasionally American Bandstand, and later MTV and Night Flight. Movies though were a big influence. I loved movie soundtracks, especially Star Wars, Conan the Barbarian and of course Blade Runner. Hearing this kind of music, both classical and electronic made me want to hear more. My father introduced me to Holst and his Planets and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. From there I would read interviews with musicians I liked and went back to their influences Frank Zappa and Edgard Varèse, and others. Though I do have to say my taste in composers all seemed to be white and male, which means I missed a lot of great music. I would have loved to have had this book back in the day. BBC broadcaster, historian and educator Kate Molleson has in Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century has written an alternate history of modern composers bringing to light men and women who have slipped through the cracks, and who have never received the accolades their work so deserves.

The book begins with a discussion between the author and George E. Lewis, an American composer and educator at a shared event. Molleson shares her idea for a book about composers that are not as well known and asks Lewis his opinion on how she should write the book. Lewis tells her, "Prove that they existed. Make your readers want to hear their music." And that Molleson does. Ten composers are featured, in chronological order not in a top ten list way, including composers like Julián Carrillo from Mexico, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Annea Lockwood and others. Each chapter offers a biographical sketch, best works, a history of their reception and what people thought of them and musical controversies if necessary.

This is a book that will make great demands on a reader's musical streaming services. Reading along to the music gives the reader a better sense of what the composers were creating, and what makes certain pieces so important. The essay are very comprehensive, full of information about both the composers, their times, careers and sometimes why they have become forgotten. Many of the essays feature interviews with the composers, or their family, which is a nice touch, and really fills out the sketches. Molleson has a nice style, and has a good way of conveying information, though musicians will probably get more out of certain sections then laymen, however there is nothing that is too over a reader's head to follow along. What really comes across is that Molleson really loves to discuss music, and wants to pass that knowledge on to readers, and give these composers a little bit of fame for their beautiful works. My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Abrams Books for an advanced copy of this book on modern composers who have flown under the radar and people's speakers.

I love music of all kinds. Starting with AM radio in the car, than watching Soul Train, Solid Gold and occasionally American Bandstand, and later MTV and Night Flight. Movies though were a big influence. I loved movie soundtracks, especially Star Wars, Conan the Barbarian and of course Blade Runner. Hearing this kind of music, both classical and electronic made me want to hear more. My father introduced me to Holst and his Planets and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. From there I would read interviews with musicians I liked and went back to their influences Frank Zappa and Edgard Varèse, and others. Though I do have to say my taste in composers all seemed to be white and male, which means I missed a lot of great music. I would have loved to have had this book back in the day. BBC broadcaster, historian and educator Kate Molleson has in Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century has written an alternate history of modern composers bringing to light men and women who have slipped through the cracks, and who have never received the accolades their work so deserves.

The book begins with a discussion between the author and George E. Lewis, an American composer and educator at a shared event. Molleson shares her idea for a book about composers that are not as well known and asks Lewis his opinion on how she should write the book. Lewis tells her, "Prove that they existed. Make your readers want to hear their music." And that Molleson does. Ten composers are featured, in chronological order not in a top ten list way, including composers like Julián Carrillo from Mexico, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Annea Lockwood and others. Each chapter offers a biographical sketch, best works, a history of their reception and what people thought of them and musical controversies if necessary.

This is a book that will make great demands on a reader's musical streaming services. Reading along to the music gives the reader a better sense of what the composers were creating, and what makes certain pieces so important. The essay are very comprehensive, full of information about both the composers, their times, careers and sometimes why they have become forgotten. Many of the essays feature interviews with the composers, or their family, which is a nice touch, and really fills out the sketches. Molleson has a nice style, and has a good way of conveying information, though musicians will probably get more out of certain sections then laymen, however there is nothing that is too over a reader's head to follow along. What really comes across is that Molleson really loves to discuss music, and wants to pass that knowledge on to readers, and give these composers a little bit of fame for their beautiful works.

Recommended for fans of modern classical, or for all music fans. Creative people will get ideas and learn perseverance and how to accept that maybe the art that is being created is not for everyone, but someone out there might like it, and will be touched and changed by what you have made. Again play the music while reading, it will enhance the experience and add to the enjoyment of this very fun book.


Recommended for fans of modern classical, or for all music fans. Creative people will get ideas and learn perseverance and how to accept that maybe the art that is being created is not for everyone, but someone out there might like it, and will be touched and changed by what you have made. Again play the music while reading, it will enhance the experience and add to the enjoyment of this very fun book.

[Katya · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one were to read one book on music in their lifetime, this would be it. Accessible yet analytical, Molleson introduces 10 composers of the 20th century who often fall by the wayside in more popular interpretations of the eras of avant-garde and modernism. This book not only opened my eyes to new music but also exposed me to forgotten theorists and challenged my definition of what a ‘composer’ is. Will definitely be returning for a closer read once my brain returns from the post exam fog!

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

How I wanted to love this book: a book about music (check), that is relatively approachable (check), that tells me about musicians I know and love (check), and also tells me about musicians I do not know and hope to come to love (check). I mean, that's a lot of boxes.

Sadly, the book itself quickly became insufferable: every composer here, from the perhaps-maybe-fascists, through the Ethiopian nuns, to the ultra-contemporary piano drowners, are forced into the same mold. What's important about them isn't their music, but their Resistance to The Man. They are isolated, ignored, unheard (were they sometimes rich, often well-connected, generally tied in to the most important institutions in modern music? I mean, sure, but, Resistance!!!) They are then such astonishing Unique Geniuses that the world is forced to attend to the Incomprehensibly Perfect Sounds that the musicians are making! They will metaphysically alter your Very Being and also turn you into a good, liberal feminist, who thinks you're being inconceivably radical!

To wit: Ruth Crawford is awesome. She was not only an interesting and able composer in the modernist frame; she was also crucial to the rediscovery, preservation, and revivification of American folk music. In Molleson's tale, the latter only happened because of misogyny. It seems inconceivable that a person would want to engage in a group project of conservation, when she could instead be off Uniquely Geniusing.

That general Nietzschean attitude--that only the products of Special People are worthy of your attention, and if the Special People are doing something that is not Special, it's because the masses are dragging them down--drags the book down time and time again. There's a book in here that tells the stories of these people in their own terms, without inflating their genius, or downplaying the importance of social, institutional, and artistic support.

Of course, there's a reason for this framing. "Let me tell you how so and so went to school with famous composer x, then slowly and grindingly worked to develop something new from that background, with the help of a wide range of others." I fear that if Molleson had pitched that book, it would never have seen the light of day. Genius still sells.

[Simon Proulx · Rating 5 out of 5]

This past year I took a course on music history from 1900 to the present day as part of my university's mandatory musicology curriculum. My professor was a very open minded individual and presented composers from all walks of life such as Ruth Crawford and Raven Chacon. Of course, with such a small time span to talk about classical, jazz, folk, and other genres, there was always going to be part of the curriculum that was lacking.
Kate Molleson's book fills in and completes a lot of the discussions we had about classical music, particularly the music made in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to the emancipation of noise as sound that had been spearheaded by Edgar Varese.
What makes this book so impactful is Molleson's insistence to go beyond the classic canon of old white men, with a roster filled with 6 women and 4 people of color. It is so refreshing to learn about composers that I had never heard of before (I was familiar with 3 out of the 10 before starting this book) and to see how, in some ways, their lives in the margins of musical society enabled them to experiment in unique and unconventional ways. I loved how Molleson was able to connect the ways in which these composers went about their creative processes even if none of them had ever met each other.
Molleson's writing is clear, imaginative, and carefully balanced with interviews she conducted herself, scholarly voices, and the composer's voices themselves. Although the book is focused on ten composers, there are many more who are mentioned, providing opportunities to continue learning about composers whose voices are seldom heard.
Molleson's book is extremely important as musical society tries to find ways to continue to perform works by composers we have all heard of such as Brahms and Beethoven while bringing into the fold some voices who have been woefully underrepresented.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a master's degree in music and had a wonderful 20th century music class in grad school, but this book was a revelation. I had only ever heard of one of these composers before, but that was about it. Molleson eloquently tells us what else was going on while all those famous European guys were doing their thing.
My musical taste never ran to the really avant garde, atonal, or electronic, because I was a singer, and I agreed with Samuel Barber that dissonance produces tension, which requires resolution. But these composers are brought to life so well by Molleson that I found myself wishing for a website with excerpts of the music she discusses (to the extent that would actually be possible!).
If you teach 20th century music, add this book to your syllabus. If you want to understand the classical music of the 20th century better, read Alex Ross's book The Rest Is Noise, and follow it directly with this book.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly enjoyable and fascinating read. Kate Molleson's romp through a selection of 20th century composers doesn't tell you about the usual suspects, but finds people from all corners of the world, women and men, ploughing their own furrow. Innovators widening our musical horizons. She recounts fascinating life stories, gives overviews of their works, and undertakes interviews where possible and packs all this in a very readable format. It had me ordering CDs from all over the place to listen to some of the people I hadn't come across, but also had me smiling to know more about musicians I have seen perform and now better understand.

[Jürgen De blonde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read. Well written, full of information, stories, anecdotes and more composers than promised on the back cover. Very informative and knowledgeable, insightful and a total blast actually. Checking out works of the composers alongside reading the book was such a trip.

It's very nice to read concise biographies about the composers next to the contexts in which many of the described works came to be. There's plenty of cross-referencing, linking many of the composers' lines of thinking to one another, drawing parallels.

I loved it! A must read for every adventurous music lover that likes to go in depth.

[K.R. Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kate Molleson’s Sound Within Sound is a sparkling, revelatory lurch off of the highway of male white 20th century composers and across some of the glorious, underappreciated meadows and moors of the innovative but marginalized. Be ready to look up a lot of very interesting recordings. Particular revelations for me: Muhal Richard Abrams’ vast stylistic breadth and Eliane Radigue’s molecular-level nuance.

[Paul Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a superb book.

Kate Molleson can write about music and musicians in a vibrant and fascinating way. My ears have been opened to a whole world of music I was only dimly aware of. Highly recommended.

[Courtney Dantzler · Rating 5 out of 5]

an awesome and diverse selection of composers!

[Gemma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Molleson doesn't necessarily believe in the formation of complete sentences, but this was satisfying and horizon-expanding.

[Ian Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written, interesting. I find some of the music pretty weird but that's good.

[Bence Néveri · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVE IT SO MUCH!!!!!!

[Luca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a nice way to branch out my classical music listening and knowledge, definitely some intriguing keepers for the playlist i would say.

[Jordan Aylward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought this mainly for the sections on Eliane Radigue and Emahoy but some incredibly interesting stuff throughout here. I’ve got a lot of mad stuff to listen to

[Simon Bate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of new names to me...listened to a lot on youtube.com ... I would have really liked to have more photos; Molleson often talks about a certain photo but it is not there to refer to.

[Tomé Barrios]

10 biographies of unknown composers, at least for me, that gave me some different perspectives about music and the way we can search for different sounds besides the conventional way of it. 

I think the work that Kate Molleson had on searching all these biographies is incredible, and I really wish that this book could have another volume or any sort of continuation and could focus on unknown Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Middle Eastern, etc. composers that have so many different perspectives to be known. 

From all of these 10, the three who struck me the most, although I still have more to discover from them, were:
 
Éliane Radigue, from which I got to know how sound can be reinterpreted and waves can be felt. In fact, her music made me so intertwined that when I heard it for like 30 minutes, I thought I had passed only 10; it seemed that time had slowed down. 

Annea Lockwood has so many great compositions that are very different from what some people think of as music. When hearing her compositions, it seems that she teleports us to her dimension, where space is defined by sound and movement by time, and when time passes, the space changes, creating some sort of movement. 

Another is Walter Smetak, who made me rethink how some people let themselves submerge in music so spiritually that it means everything to them. His musical sculptures are so interesting, different, and meaningful to him that I myself wondered what music meant for me.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book about amazing composers.
You’ll hear a lot of new music while reading this.