Sound Within Sound, Kate Molleson
Sound Within Sound, Kate Molleson
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
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Sound Within Sound
Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century

Author: Kate Molleson

Narrator: Kate Molleson

Unabridged: 10 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/27/2024


Synopsis

Think of a composer right now. Was it a white man? Perhaps in old-fashioned clothing and wild hair? The music history we're taught is one dominated by men, and even then, only a select few enter the zeitgeist. This conventional history perpetuates the myth of "great works" created by "genius" artists. Men who enjoyed institutional privilege during their lifetimes and have since been enshrined by an industry of publishers and record labels. But just because we haven't heard of spectacular female composers doesn't mean they weren't creating music all the same.

Profiling a dozen pioneering twentieth-century composers, acclaimed journalist and BBC broadcaster Kate Molleson reexamines the canon while bringing to life largely forgotten sonic revolutionaries whose dramatic lives and bursts of creativity played out against a backdrop of seismic geopolitical and social change. These composers, working at a remove from London, Paris, Vienna, and New York, were sidelined and ignored for systemic, structural reasons. This is a landmark alternative history of twentieth-century composers; a radical, new, and truly global work of revisionist history. It is a campaigning book that challenges the status quo while introducing you to a world of groundbreaking music.

About Kate Molleson

Kate Molleson is a journalist and broadcaster. She presents BBC Radio 3's New Music Show and Music Matters. Her documentaries (BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service) have investigated music in Greenland, opera in Mongolia, lost recordings of Arabic classical music and the Ethiopian nun/pianist/composer Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou. Her articles are published in the Guardian, the Herald, BBC Music magazine, Opera, Gramophone, and elsewhere. She was commissioning editor of Dear Green Sounds, a history of Glasgow's music venues commissioned by UNESCO. She teaches music journalism at Darmstadt and Dartington.

Kate grew up in various parts of Scotland and the far north of Canada and studied clarinet performance at McGill University (Montreal) and musicology at King's College London, where she researched the operas of Ezra Pound. She was a copy editor, music critic, and cycling columnist for the Montreal Gazette and deputy editor of Opera magazine before moving home to Scotland as the Guardian's classical music critic in 2010. She lives in Edinburgh.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jonfaith on February 03, 2025

He dreamed of travelling beyond notions of consonance and dissonance, beyond sight and hearing and past and present to arrive at a state he called caossonance, where light becomes sound and a grand union of the senses is achieved. There's nothing like browsing in an actual store and encountering some......more

Goodreads review by Matt on December 27, 2023

Picked up this book for the chapter on Ethiopian composer and pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam Guèbru, but got much more out of it than I had anticipated. Kate Molleson, makes the subject matter accessible for those not familiar with music theory or its vernacular as she explores the theory and impetus......more

Goodreads review by Scott on November 14, 2024

I read about this book in a recent edition of The Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music (September 2024), and since I haven’t read a book about music in awhile–Michael Oliver’s biography of Stravinsky last December–I thought that I would take up Sounds within Sounds, which I have read as a Kindle doc......more

Goodreads review by Serdar on March 15, 2024

Of all the composers profiled here, I was only familiar by name with one of them beforehand (Elaine Radigue), so it made for a exciting survey of folks nearly lost to time, and richly deserving of wider discussion and appreciation. It also spurred me to read that big ol' book on the AACM I have sitt......more

Goodreads review by Dan on November 07, 2022

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Abrams Books for an advanced copy of this book on modern composers who have flown under the radar and people's speakers. I love music of all kinds. Starting with AM radio in the car, than watching Soul Train, Solid Gold and occasionally American Bandstand......more