Robin Holloway is a composer and, until his retirement in 2011, don at Cambridge, where he taught many of the leading British composers of the last half-century. He has also always written on music, including a long-standing column in The Spectator, previously publishing two collections of “essays and diversions” (which I confess I haven’t read).Now comes his summa, Music’s Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music, styled as “an invitation to western classical music”. The first thing to say is: it’s very long. Indeed, the proof copy of 1,216 pages didn’t fit through my letterbox Read more ...

We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...

Thomas Pynchon is having a moment. Paul Thomas Anderson’s second Pynchon adaptation, One Battle After Another (loosely based on Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland), is a critical and commercial hit; and his new novel Shadow Ticket is garnering the sort of reviews and attention that generally tend to accrue to authors with much less of an aversion to playing the publicity game. For long-term Pynchon fans, this is heartening. Pynchon has never really gotten the recognition he deserves, compared with what critics would consider the big hitters of post-WWII US fiction. This despite the fact that Read more ...

Into the Groove is Justin Lewis’s follow-up to 2023’s Don’t Stop the Music, in which he traced 40 years of pop history by offering bite-sized facts for every day from January 1st to December 31st, jumping randomly from year to year. I noted in my review for theartsdesk that Lewis was particularly strong on the Eighties, so I was pleased this sequel focuses on that decade, with a similar format, this time going month-by-month through the years that were perhaps the very peak of pop.I am firmly in the ideal demographic for Into the Groove: the 1980s: the Ultimate Decade in Music, having Read more ...

Joanna Pocock’s second full-length book, Greyhound, tells the story of a single journey made and remade. In 2006, after the death of her sister and several miscarriages, Pocock travelled 2,300 miles from Detroit to Los Angeles by bus. She replicates the trip seventeen years later, curious to see how the States have changed and hoping to catch sight of her former self: “A ragged person running away from loss.”Greyhound synthesises the two trips and represents a blend of aims and genres typical of Fitzcarraldo’s non-fiction list: part memoir, part reportage; a polemic on environmental vandalism Read more ...

Writing in her diary just over 100 years ago on 19th June 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote: “In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense”.Set on a hot day in London in the middle of June in 1923, Mrs Dalloway might at first appear to be about very little – a middle-aged woman and survivor of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, wife to a conservative MP, is going to give a party. She buys some flowers; she repairs her green silk dress; she has a Read more ...

How do you tell the story of a person’s mind? In the preface to Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, published this year by Bloomsbury, Frances Wilson points out that biography was one of her subject’s own fixations.Spark’s first full-length book, Child of Light, reinterpreted the life of Mary Shelley by means of a novel two-part structure: half “Recollection” and half criticism. She went on to write several literary biographies and her fiction is populated by chroniclers, libellers, and legacy-obsessed pensioners.In 1992, hoping to counter the “strange and erroneous” accounts of her Read more ...

Composers and musicians explore acoustic space. Generally, they have got by with combinations of readily accessible sounds, with occasional novelties as instruments improved, bit by bit.In the 20th century that changed radically. New technologies offered almost unlimited increase in the sounds that could be conjured up on stage or in the studio. And conceptually, the range of sounds some considered musical expanded just as much, abolishing the boundary between music and noise, and even – thanks to John Cage – permitting the composer to propose no sounds at all.Elizabeth Alker dives into this Read more ...

Many readers and writers think of epistolary novels as old-fashioned, just as letter writing itself can seem a bit quaint nowadays. The genre became popular during the 18th and 19th centuries following the success of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) and of later Gothic novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).Unsurprisingly, however, it began to fizzle out after the invention of the telephone. In 1984, the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg published her epistolary novel The City and the House (La città e la casa), and the action, such as it is Read more ...

I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter use the troubling phrase: "Not everyone agreed on the reality of that." Once the domain of Andre Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, such sentiments are now alarmingly commonplace: part and parcel of the BBC’s increasingly unhinged approach to impartiality. Of course, similar sentences can be heard in cafés and pubs across the country, and on social media, and within our homes, as we struggle more and more to negotiate truth’s withering state.Poets have always wondered and worried about this, theirs being a world poised at the edge of meaning. Tom Read more ...

Do we need any more Beatles books? The answer is: that’s the wrong question. What we need is more Beatles books that are worth reading. As the musician and music historian Bob Stanley pointed out, in his 2007 review of Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love, probably the best biography of The Beatles to date, “the subject is pretty much inexhaustible if the writer is good enough.”Gould is more than good enough, and he spent nearly two decades writing his book; whereas Ian Leslie has worked his up from a Covid-era blog post paean to Paul McCartney that went, as they say, viral. Leslie attests to Read more ...

The slightly overwrought subtitle, "How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World and Shapes Our Future", gives a good indication how computer enthusiast Sam Arbesman treats his subject. Software, written in a variety of programming languages whose elements we refer to as code, is ubiquitous.It underlies many parts of modern life, and current efforts look like extending its reach profoundly. And, while we can try to understand it by reading books like this, it’s not clear that we can influence it. Although it is made by humans, it is easy to get the impression (digital Read more ...