The Making of Music: Volume 1
The Making of Music: Volume 1
Presented by James Naughtie
(avg)
Publisher: BBC Audiobooks
Price: £25.00
Website: www.bbcaudiobooks.co.uk
'You can't separate music and musicians from their world,' says James Naughtie in the first volume of his insightful Radio 4 series. Naughtie sets out to show how music has evolved, taking us on a journey from the consecration of Notre Dame to the trials and tribulations of the Reformation, passing through baroque and the stresses of Mozart and Beethoven right up to the virtuosic writings of Paganini and Liszt.
Naughtie has an eloquent and impassioned way of talking about music but seems particularly interested in the social and political influences on the composers, believing that the history of music is 'a journey through the history of our countries and our thinkers, our wars and excursions, our jumbled and confusing societies at their best and their worst'.
Naughtie packs a lot of historical information into these six discs but also provides sufficient musical examples to illustrate his facts, even if they are slightly unimaginative choices - among them Bach's St Matthew Passion, Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus and Beethoven's 'Waldstein' Sonata.
Although there is nothing here that won't be found in books devoted to music, it still provides a basic but informative introduction to the journey of music from plainchant to Paganini. Robert Thompson
This review was submitted by a Muso reader and the opinions
expressed reflect solely the opinions of the writer, not those of
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