100 books like Music Asylums

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 book up, which is regularly, it takes me on unexpected journeys and provokes new ideas. My favorite quote on the creative process: “The idea is to allow the chthonic material the freedom it needs to gurgle up.” 

There are lots of great books about music in human evolution, but this one conjures up such beautiful images and makes such a strong argument that it’s still my favourite.

The human species is over 230,000 years old, and we’ve probably been using singing as a form of social bonding for that whole time, and previous hominid species probably were as well. The book makes the point really well that singing is something we take for granted, but is really quite a remarkable human evolutionary adaptation.

I love this book because it explores the brain science behind how and why we perceive music and the role it often plays in our lives. I enjoy how he not only explains neuroscience in a clear and engaging way but also connects science with our unique human experience of emotions, memory, and individual taste.

As a neuroscientist and a musician, the author draws me in with his deep understanding and enthusiasm about music. His passion and curiosity shine through in a highly accessible and readable way. 

The authors of this book are all people whose collective work over decades has constantly shaped my own understanding of music, part of a movement to argue that music’s greatest potential comes in the ‘doing’ of it, not just the listening to it.

This book asks important questions about what are we – as musicians and artists of all stripes – going to do with our artistry to improve our worlds. There are lots of great examples in the book of how Art making can change our experience, and re-connect us with our common humanity.

We are all artists if we want to be, and together we can use our artistry to build the kind of worlds we actually wish to live in.

Ice Cream with Grandpa is about the love between a child and his Grandpa.

The child tells the story beginning with the first time his Grandpa gave him ice cream. Their love of ice cream bonds them, but they also enjoy gardening, and walks in the park. When Grandpa moves to an apartment, it took some adjustment. What helped was the ice cream parlor nearby. Grandpa eventually goes into a memory care home.

The child fears Grandpa won’t remember him. His mom explains that Grandpa is still Grandpa. They can still enjoy spending time together. On Grandpa’s last day in hospice, they eat ice cream. Grandpa passes, but the child continues to remember their love each time he eats ice cream.

This story moved me so much that I cried. I love that this book includes a Guide for Parents and Caregivers: Tips for Talking with Children about Dementia, Hospice,… show more.

Whether you’re a learner or a teacher, developing an interest in what goes on behind the scenes will naturally reap many benefits. This fascinating book deals with many issues that need to be considered whether music is a hobby or a profession. Susan considers how music is processed in the brain, what musical ability actually is, the psychological side of learning to play an instrument and sing, what feeds into our motivation, and generally the extraordinary impact that music has on our lives.

This is a history of classical music from 1900 onwards. I’ve always been interested in early twentieth-century western art. It seems to have veered off in radically new directions and expressed a different consciousness than what preceded it. Perhaps it was fomented by the dissolution of the relatively stable European order of the nineteenth century, shattered by the First World War. 

Alex Ross discusses the music of these times and the lives of the people who composed it. He is eminently capable, being musically trained, and finds the perfect balance between the technical and the personal. I was fascinated to learn that Shostakovich was a man who lived in constant fear of being purged. He always expected to be imprisoned. 

I also learned about Harry Partch, the American composer, who devised his own tuning systems and built an orchestra of strange instruments to play his music.

The Rest is Noise… show more.

This is actually not one book but a five-volume (!) series of books which contains some of the best writing on classical music I’ve ever come across.

Taruskin, who passed away recently, was a legendary musicologist. In his writings, he managed to combine analytic writing that addresses his colleagues with unbelievably sharp and insightful writing that I, as a classical music fan who is not a pro, enjoy tremendously.

Taruskin loved picking intellectual fights, and this sort of combative energy is gripping. In this series, there are major story arcs like the interplay between “oral” and “literate” traditions or the role of nationalism in 19th-century music. I liked how Tarsukin switches smoothly between a close analysis of a piece and a discussion of how it relates to the wider culture.

Yes, the title is spelled correctly. I’ve known Stanley Booth from our days in Memphis. He has written about The Rolling Stones, B. B. King, Al Green, and Keith Richards. Keith wrote that “The interesting thing about music to me is that music has always seemed streaks ahead of any other Art form or any other form of social expression.” It has never been said any better.

Stanley Booth’s Rythm Oil contains studies of numerous, forgotten musicians and singers. It is a study of remote history. Stanley Booth doesn’t write with ink. He writes with grit.

I never related to “hardcore” hip-hop when I was younger. NWA was too much for me. Even some Public Enemy hit my ears with a harshness that was hard to overcome.

It was the music of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest that sparked my need to become a poet. J Dilla is the pulse of that music, and all 90s hip-hop, in my opinion.

This book is a music lover’s dream. It goes deep into Dilla’s process and talks about his beat machines (as an electronic musician, I can’t get enough of those pages). This book is also a bittersweet and tragic story about someone whose thumbs literally changed the landscape of music. But someone whose earthly body left us too soon.