How Music Works
Book description
How Music Works is David Byrne's buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about.
Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, Byrne draws on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators - along with journeys to…
Why read it?
4 authors picked How Music Works as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I wasn’t expecting this! One of the most gifted and quirky songsmiths of the age, the lead singer of art pop band The Talking Heads no less, turns his attention to the technological evolution of music.
I found profound insight and erudition on every page, but it’s not preachy or overly auto-biographical. Instead, Byrne limns out the changing shapes of music and how it comes into being in composition, performance, and education. He is as much at ease with Hume and Adorno as he is with scales, harmonies, and DJ culture, and the payoff is enormous.
Whenever I pick this…
From Nick's list on popular music, technology, and society.
This is a fantastic personal account of music’s power by David Byrne, the lead singer from the US band Talking Heads.
He mixes theory with fascinating insights from a life on the road as a musician, and provides a truly unique perspective on our fascination with music. The section on how our listening environment – whether that’s a concert hall, CBGBs, or our car – shapes the kind of music we listen to is really insightful.
We make music backwards, he suggests, to fit the environment we’re going to listen to it in.
From Dave's list on how being musical helps us be more human.
More than anything, what comes across in How Music Works is how much David Byrne loves music. He’s not offering a technical or theoretical explanation in this tome so much as exploring the value of music in society—what music gives us, how it shapes us, and how it emerges from various scenes and other social settings. Above all, Byrne argues, music is rooted in time and space. Music blossoms when it has a place in which to gestate, and the peculiarities of that place inevitably inform the shape the music takes. It’s impossible to read this book and not want…
From Marc's list on making noise.
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Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up…
Written by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, this book explores many facets of music—from the evolution of how certain kinds of music came to exist in certain cultures, to how recording changed the landscape of music, to common monetary breakdowns of independent and large label recordings and distribution. Byrne interlaces these insights with stories from his own music career (which Byrne fans are sure to enjoy)—from New York’s ever-changing underground scene to his many records and collaborations. His own musical tastes and opinions are fraught throughout this book as well. How Music Works is straightforwardly written and approachable in…
From Fred's list on pop culture’s influence on the artistic process.
If you love How Music Works...
Tap Dancing on Everest
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up…
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