Robin Holloway surveys the history of classical music
In his new book Music’s Odyssey composer and writer Robin Holloway’s distils his reflections on the history of Western classical music, drawing on a lifetime of listening.
Robin Holloway charts a personal journey through Western classical music in his new book Music’s Odyssey, recently published by Allen Lane. Spanning 900 years of music history, from plainchant to the 21st-century avant-garde, the epic volume draws on Holloway’s multiple perspectives as an academic – now Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, as a distinguished writer on classical music, and as a composer in his own right.
> Buy the book from Presto Music
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Robin Holloway describes how “My aim in this book is to offer an invitation to the glorious long voyage of Western classical music for all those who enjoy and love it, and seek to deepen their enjoyment and love without getting caught up in musicology and technicalities: an entry to Aladdin’s cave, an injunction to ‘taste and see’ re-angled for the sense of hearing in all its complex and various modes. Not historical, but broadly chronological and thematic, from the earliest adventures in notation up to the present day – some fourteen centuries of continuity and interruptions, revolutions and renewals, complements and contrasts, via many detailed descriptions of individual composers and individual pieces.
“In part, it is an account of how music is made – its core of practice, skills, conventions, traditions – but also an attempt to chart the evolution of expression, what is being said, what felt, what communicated ‘from the heart to the heart’ – how music works upon its listeners, how it moves and stirs, how it reaches and appeals to the highest flights and deepest places (and everything between) of the organising pattern-making mind, the ebb and flow of the sensual body, the centres of emotion.
“Everything is within the art itself, at whatever epoch, in whatever idiom, whatever genre or intention. Nor is evaluation eschewed – why, as well as how, it is so good and why sometimes so deplorable. The style throughout is inherently allusive and I have tried everywhere to preserve the intonations and rhythms of speech – spontaneous, improvised, natural as breathing.”
"There is a lifetime’s worth of listening packed into this weighty tome, a generous 1,184 pages… Holloway loves to trace influence and lineage, but more delightful are the wormholes he finds between centuries… Music’s Odyssey is a summation of his work as a writer on music. His ears are open, his opinions sharp."
The Times
“Enthusiasts picking up this book will straightaway recognise a companion for life. They will be inexhaustibly educated, provoked and amused by the absoluteness of its commitment and the sharpness of its judgement … the book’s endearing loquacity, humour and energy bring to mind the literary fecundity of a Burgess or a Joyce. It is hard to believe that one person possesses and has been able to put on paper such an accumulation of knowledge.”
The Critic
“The delight sings loudly off the page ... [Holloway] is fascinated by musical lineage and is a meticulous tracer and charter of influence , throwing cables across centuries and pulling seemingly disparate figures suddenly near. Irreverent , outspoken and unfailingly opinionated, with knowledge as broad as his vocabulary, [he] offers an unofficial alternative account…”
The Spectator
Robin Holloway
Music’s Odyssey
Published by Allen Lane (Penguin)
ISBN: 9780241183021
1184 pages
Hardback £45.00
Ebook £18.99
Holloway’s music can be heard on a recent release from Resonus Classics, featuring his Violin Concerto and the Sonata for Solo Violin, with Alda Dizdari as soloist. The concerto, dating from 1990, is shaped around a sequence of ‘Windows’ inspired by poets Rainer Maria Rilke and John Ashbery, and the performance features the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Alexander Walker (RES10370). The new recording can be set alongside Ernst Kovacic’s 2003 recording on the NMC label, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Matthias Bamert (NMC D097).
> Buy the new recording from Presto Music
> Further information on Work: Violin Concerto
Photo: Paddy Gormley