Customer Reviews

Illegal Harmonies: Music in the 20th Century

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Without an entry for,'No Undue Noise', I'm piggybacking on this other collection of Andrew Fords'. He is an 'art music' composer. However, I know him only as the genial host of an excellent, urbane 2hour weekly musical smorgasborg on Radio National, simply titled, 'The Music Show.' That is, until I stumbled on this on this collection of his writing, mostly from the same radio's inhouse magazine,'24 Hours' and the Sydney Morning GHerald. His writing interests express the same range of interests in classicist musos and composers, Blues balladry, jazz and the like as heard during his airwaves hours. Some columns are perpicacious reviews of books on artists, Stravinsky, Glenn Gould or Wilfred Mellor's enthralling,'Angels of the Night'. The small cache on Dylan Literature is precscient. I agree that Greil Marcus's graceful writing is some of the best musical literature, albeit on the roots of Bob and the Band, and that he's resurrected the reputations of Doc Bloggs & Frank Hutchison much as Nick Tosche has for Emmett Miller in his finley wrought reliquary,'the Twisted Roots of Rock n Roll'. I'm not as gracious about the gushy hagiographies of Paul Williams. Ford writes very well on Joni Mitchell, honing in on her greatest albumn,'Blue.' Other essays I find rewarding are,'In Praise of Difficult Art', 'The Erotcs of Music'(a redressing of Sontag's'against Interpretation') and his parting address to students at the universitry where he once lectured,'Signing Off', which should be read by every lecturer in the arts who still twitches with creative energy.

Andrew Ford's Illegal Harmonies, is a very concise and readable book giving a concise summary of the last century of contempory classical music. Right up to people who fall outside the 'classical' genre such as Dear old Duke Ellington. The only shorting comming that it really has is its lack of detail about the avant-garde music from john cage and his ilk onwards. But these composers warrant a book to themselves anyway.

A really well written and interesting book that describes a complex topic in an easy to understand way and provides insights into the history of music that are thoughtful, thought-provoking and always based on sound (forgive the pun) evidence.