How Music Works
- Author: Byrne, David
Incisive and intriguing
How Music Works
- Author: Byrne, David
Purchase product
Incisive and intriguing
About
How Music Works is David Byrne's bestselling, buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Drawing on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators - along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists - Byrne shows how music emerges from cultural circumstance as much as individual creativity. It is his magnum opus, and an impassioned argument about music's liberating, life-affirming power.
Contents
- How Music Works
Awards and reviews
Incisive and intriguing
An entertaining and erudite book . . . this is a serious, straight-forward account of an art from that also manages to be inspiring
As accessible as pop yet able to posit deep and startlingly original thoughts and discoveries in almost every paragraph . . . this book will make you hear music in a different way
Unique among a deluge of music biographies and autobiographies coming out this Christmas, this wildly ambitious book breaks the mould
Byrne is a crisp and enthusiastic guide
Fascinating look at music's power to move
Disarmingly frank, a fresh perspective from a down-to-earth mind
As well as being an investigation into the context in which music is made, How Music Works is an accomplished celebration of an ever-evolving art form that can alter how we look at ourselves and the world
It was wildly ambitious to try and turn this galaxy of theory into a readable work of scholarship but Byrne has done it, and done it with style. Brian Eno might as well cancel that book deal now
An ambitious attempt at understanding a phenomenon to which the former Talking Head has dedicated his life's work
The finest music book of the year . . . Handsomely bound, beautifully printed, wittily illustrated, it would make a beautiful collector's item but there is much more going on between the covers . . . bursting with a sense of free-flowing curiosity
