Jimmy page book biography of beethoven
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Good Books, Bad Books, You Know I’ve Had My Share
Introduction
Regular readers of this blog, which is to say people who read the articles I write unrelated to disability as well as those about accessibility and such (about 10 of you), would know that I’m also passionate about music, literature, poetry and a lot of other artistic endeavors. At any given time, I’m usually reading two or three books concurrently. Recently, I’ll have one silly book, something bygd Terry Pratchett for instance, a non-fiction book about some topic I find interesting and a work of “art literature” often from the past.
Over the past week, I read a non-fiction book that I thought was so terrible that I had to reach for one of the greatest books in the canon of American literature just because I needed a strong dose of beauty and genius to rebalance a brain punished by the non-fiction work I had read immediately prior.
The Blues
The blues, a style of music that derived from spirituals sung by African
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2020 marks 250 years since Beethoven's birthLudwig van Beethoven: to some, simply the greatest ever composer of Western classical music. Yet his life remains shrouded in myths, and the image persists of him as an eccentric genius shaking his fist at heaven. Beethoven by Oxford professor Laura Tunbridge cuts through the noise in a refreshing way.
Each chapter focuses on a period of his life, a piece of music and a revealing theme, from family to friends, from heroism to liberty. It's a winning combination of rich biographical detail, insight into the music and surprising new angles, all of which can transform how you listen to his works. We discover, for example, Beethoven's oddly modern talent for self-promotion, how he was influenced by factors from European wars to instrument building, and how he was heard by contemporaries.
This tour de force - published for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth - provides a fresh overview and a wealth of material that has never been revea
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A Great Deaf Bear
Sunday afternoon was Beethoven time – torpor, majesty. Tired after cooking the lunch, but sweetly imploring, my father relished his captive audience. Mother and older brother had somehow slipped out of the sitting room, which left me and my sister, both musical, both too young to be free. My father stood by the coffin-like gramophone, a bulky inheritance from ailing Uncle Jimmy. The stylus grazed the vinyl. What would it be? One of the earlier string quartets? The violin concerto, with Menuhin? The likeliest choice was one of the 32 piano sonatas, from a cherished collection of different recordings: the names of the pianists, presented always as surnames and seemingly disclosed only in that sitting room, shimmered like distant towns, invented places: Arrau, Gilels, Richter, Barenboim, Brendel.
I couldn’t or wouldn’t listen. I disliked Beethoven’s bombast: the melodramatic dynamic contrasts that seemed like huge arguments followed