33 books like Counterpoint

I was struck by the ease with which Hodges moves from her own experience learning the violin to the scientific underpinnings of her subject: from math, physics, and neurology to quantum mechanics, biology, and entanglement theory, always in search of a clue to how music informs our experience of time.

Complex topics are suddenly eased by an anecdote from her personal life and practice: a bow dropping during Paganini or the story of her mother buying her “a red dress, bright as D major.” There’s a quality of searching that runs through these essays, both for scientific meaning in music as well a deeper understanding of the dynamics of her own life. 

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.

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 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.”

I came to the piano as an adult and felt pretty sorry for myself–how am I supposed to do all this torturous practicing before and after work?

Then I read Zhu Xiao-Mei’s account of studying the piano during the Cultural Revolution, and realized what real commitment looks like. Zhu is a brilliant concert pianist who had to master Bach while practicing in a labor camp freezer. Read this tragi-comedy of China, politics, and Bach, and surmount your (room-temperature) challenges.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the great Glenn Gould, one of the outstanding Bach pianists.

This book captures what I love and hate about him, through the lens of his pianos and his blind piano technician. Gould actually hated the piano in a sense, always pushing it toward something it wasn’t, thinning out its sound like a harpsichord, while also trying to make its hammers more continuous-sounding, like an orchestra.

He’s also insufferable in the way that most great artists are, and this book documents that, including his imagined injuries, senseless lawsuits, and the abuse his technicians endured, who kept his pianos alive until they were inevitably smashed.

When one reads Bernhard, one never reads anything else the same again. In fact, every story feels false by comparison. Maybe it’s because The Loser is written in one unbroken paragraph or because it repeats a line ad nauseum or because the story, in any other writer’s hands, would feel mawkish.

But this novel about a triangular intellectual relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and his two students is anything but. It’s funny, heartbreaking, and confusing. The way life is. 

I studied this 1930s text, a classic in the theory of holistic healing, as part of my training as a Bach flower remedy practitioner. Bach was working as a medical doctor when he was reportedly diagnosed with terminal abdominal cancer. He determined to make an original contribution to medicine before he died, and recovered.

Convinced that most illness is rooted in psychological and spiritual imbalance, Bach devoted his life to developing a natural method of treating the person, not the disease—a series of 38 flower essences designed to balance emotions and personality. I don’t accept all of Bach’s philosophy, but I do know that his remedies work. 

Hang-gliding is a literal leap of faith. You jump from terra firma and hope that the wind rises beneath your airfoil. Running from Safety is the author’s leap of faith, and, by extension, the readers. “Have you ever met anybody…like the people in your books?”  This is the cryptic question that begins this life exploration. 

As a writer myself, I know that every character in my books is me. Bach knows this, too. But do we really learn from the collection of stuff we hold inside, stuff that is our history? The book begins when Bach is confronted by Dickie, his child-self. The boy asks for one thing: He wants his adult self to sign off on the meaning of life contained in his eight-year-old vision of maturity. Bach is appalled at his simple naiveté. What should you tell your younger self? 

Mary Durant was my mother. This was her first novel, published in 1963. When I read it, the proverbial light bulb popped to life in my very young head: I recognized the real-life people and events upon whom the characters and plot were based, and because of that familiarity, saw the way my mother had changed things around, invented circumstances, conversations and fashioned composite characters to create a story. It was a behind-the-scenes crash course in the art of fiction-writing, the marvelous synthesis by which the novelist spins fact and invention into literature. And I understood that really good fiction, though technically a "made up" story, is always imbued with Truth with a capital "T," and that great writing and Truth are inextricably intertangled.

My mother was a first-rate writer and reader, and because of her, I was initiated into the quasi-secret bandwidth of real literature. The key: it’s all… show more.