On Music: Essays and Diversions - Hardcover

Holloway, Robin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1870626745 ISBN 13: 9781870626743

Publisher: Continuum Intl Pub Group, 2003

Synopsis

This collection of essays contains some of the most exciting and original analyses of the Wagner operas from music critic and composer Robin Holloway, who is known for his trenchant style and impassioned thinking. These essays provide sustained, meditative, and illuminating accounts both of the masterpieces of the romantic era and of the classical tradition from which they derive. Holloway persuades listeners that music matters, that there is a real difference between good and bad, great and trivial, and sincere and sentimental, and that one's enjoyment can only be enhanced by the habit of critical study.

About this title

About the Author:

Robin Holloway is well-known as a versatile and lyrical composer, who has written many chamber, orchestral and vocal works. As critic and teacher, a professor of Music and cambridge, his ground-breaking study of Debussy and Wagner has been praised for its insights into Debussy's harmonic language.

Review:

"As ever, Holloway's prose is rich, dense and stylistically idiosyncratic." Reviewed by Roger Nichols, BBC Music Magazine, 2008

"[S]timulation, amusement and enlightenment for anyone who cares about how music is made, heard and understood." Reviewed by Geraint Lewis in Gramophone, 2008

"endlessly diverting and superbly readable. .. rare to find such combination of exuberance, clarity, erudition and humour. Holloway is incapable of writing a dull sentence... This volume is a model of lively, informed writing on all aspects of music, leaving most other practitioners' well and truly in the shade" - Classical Music

Reissue of previous review, Classical Music. 20 December 2008.

About this edition

• Publisher: Continuum Intl Pub Group
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1870626745
• ISBN 13: 9781870626743
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 438