Music has been a passion ever since I joined my mother’s hippie jam sessions as a toddler. During my 17 years as a professional cellist-in-training, I tried Yo-Yo Ma’s Stradivarius and played Pachelbel’s Canon at a gazillion weddings. I even made it to Carnegie Hall, performing in a university orchestra on the gilded stage. But injuries, both physical and psychological, put an end to my classical music career. Trying to forget my cello years, I entered journalism, eventually becoming a staff health reporter at Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. Later, when a percussion workshop triggered a dramatic shift in my perspective, I answered the call to explore music in a more expansive way.
I wrote...
Wired for Music: A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound
Music is much more than “ear candy” or a series of torturous exercises we remember from piano lessons. In the right doses, it can double as a mild painkiller, antidepressant, sleeping pill, and memory aid. Yet today, many of us miss out on some of music’s most potent effects.
Adriana Barton learned the hard way. Starting at age five, she studied the cello for nearly two decades. Years later, as a journalist, she set out to uncover music’s true potential, combing through medical studies, traveling to neuroscience labs, and meeting with traditional healers to get to the root of music’s profound effects on the human body and brain. A captivating blend of science and story, this book will change the way you think about music.
Natalie Hodges had me at stage fright and quantum physics.
In poignant descriptions of her life as a violinist-in-training, I recognized a kindred tormented soul. Both of us abandoned classical music in our 20s, drained by the dilemma she so aptly articulates: “Why keep trying to love something that doesn’t love you back.” But Hodges’s relationship to music, like mine, did not end there.
Moving beyond painful memories, she dances between the hard and soft sciences to reveal the interplay of music, improvisation, and elastic time. The book itself is a virtuosic riff on personal reinvention.
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A virtuosic debut from a gifted violinist searching for a new mode of artistic becoming
How does time shape consciousness and consciousness, time? Do we live in time, or does time live in us? And how does music, with its patterns of rhythm and harmony, inform our experience of time?
Uncommon Measure explores these questions from the perspective of a young Korean American who dedicated herself to perfecting her art until performance anxiety forced her to give up the dream of becoming a concert…
This book enticed me with the audacity of its premise: a quasi-mystical connection between classical music and the feral nature of wolves.
Renowned pianist Hélène Grimaud grew up a rambunctious child in southern France who found meaning in the melodies of long-dead composers. Years later, on a dark Florida night, she has a chance encounter with a wolf. Lupine mythologies permeate her story, and psyche.
No longer content to admire wolves from a distance, she later founds a wolf conservation centre in upstate New York. While this book may not be a literary tour-de-force, I was enthralled by the theme of “rewilding” music.
An acclaimed French pianist describes her life-changing first encounter with a wolf hybrid in 1991, her efforts to protect the threatened wolf species, and her foundation of a wolf preserve on the grounds of her New York State home. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
Like most readers, I like my science sandwiched between stories.
Tim Falconer delivers a winsome tale of a writer diagnosed with “amusia"—the clinical term for “tone deafness”—who nevertheless longs to sing. Bashful yet determined, he delves into the science of auditory deficits and musicality on a quest to uncover why he can’t sing in tune, and whether anything can be done about it.
I couldn’t help but cheer him on as he endures remedial singing lessons and a nail-biting buildup to a public performance. Will he pull it off? And is there hope for other bad singers out there? I loved how Falconer used himself as Exhibit A to prove that even extreme tone deficits needn’t keep us from the joys of making music.
In the tradition of Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music and Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, Bad Singer follows the delightful journey of Tim Falconer as he tries to overcome tone deafness - and along the way discovers what we're really hearing when we listen to music.
Tim Falconer, a self-confessed "bad singer," always wanted to make music, but soon after he starts singing lessons, he discovers that he's part of only 2.5 percent of the population afflicted with amusia - in other words, he is scientifically tone-deaf.
Bad Singer chronicles his quest to understand human evolution and music, the…
In the words of Joni Mitchell, you “don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” Only a person who has gone deaf partway through life knows what it means to live with and without sound. And music.
In this evocative book, British journalist Bella Bathurst chronicles her profound loss of hearing starting at age 27—and twelve years later, its dramatic return. The health reporter in me gave a thumbs-up to her skillful exploration of the lesser-known science of hearing.
She introduces expert lip readers, soldiers who accept deafness as an occupational hazard, and the copper “ear trumpets” used by Beethoven as his greatest joy ebbed. When Bathurst regains her hearing, I was awed by her description of hearing music anew: “It was a thousand volts of birdsong.”
In 1997, Bella Bathurst began to go deaf. Within a few months, she had lost half her hearing, and the rest was slipping away. She wasn't just missing punchlines, she was missing most of the conversation - and all of the jokes. For the next twelve years deafness shaped her life, until, in 2009, everything changed again.
Sound draws on this extraordinary experience, exploring what it is like to lose your hearing and - as Bella eventually did - to get it back, and what that teaches you about listening and silence, music and noise. She investigates the science behind…
Baroque in prose and unabashedly erudite, this scholarly memoir by a Pulitzer Prize-winning arts critic may not be for everyone.
But I adored his uncanny descriptions of musical interpretation (such as Glenn Gould’s “flinty” recording of Bach) along with Kennicott’s prickly asides—“I hate the word ‘healing.’” Following the death of his beloved yet cantankerous mother, Kennicott channels his grief into learning to play Bach’s masterwork, the Goldberg Variations.
For a lapsed pianist in midlife, it’s a Herculean task. Unanswerable questions absorb him along the way: What does it mean to know a piece of music? What does it mean to know another human being? Throughout his musings and often comical childhood memories, Kennicott’s devotion to his Baroque master shines clear: “If Bach’s Goldberg Variations are not great, then nothing is.”
As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn't seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach's music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer's greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his…
Wendy Lee Hermance was heard on National Public Radio (NPR) stations with her Missouri Folklore series in the 1980s. She earned a journalism degree from Stephens College, served as Editor and Features Writer for Midwestern and Southern university and regional publications, then settled into writing real estate contracts. In 2012 she attended University of Sydney, earning a master’s degree by research thesis. Her books include Where I’m Going with this Poem, a memoir in poetry and prose. Weird Foods of Portugal: Adventures of an Expatmarks her return to feature writing as collections of narrative non-fiction stories.
Weird Foods of Portugal describes the author's first years trying to make sense of a strange new place and a home there for herself.
Witty, dreamlike, and at times jarring, the book sizzles with social commentary looking back at America and beautiful, finely drawn descriptions of Portugal and its people. Part dark-humor cautionary tale, part travel adventure, ultimately, Hermance's book of narrative non-fiction serves as affirmation for any who wish to make a similar move themselves.
"Wendy Lee Hermance describes Portugal´s colorful people and places - including taxi drivers and animals - with a poet´s empathy and dark humor. Part travel adventure, part cautionary tale, Weird Foods of Portugal is at it´s heart, affirmation for all who consider making such a move themselves."
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