Customer Reviews

The Music Lover's Quotation Book (Musical Quotations)

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Words and quips from composers, performers, and listeners of music provide hundreds of entries covering a range of musical genres. This is packed with delightful observations on music and musical styles: the perfect gift for that musician who 'has everything' but the proper quote at hand for an occasion.

For skimming, or dipping in and out of, this book of quotations is quite enjoyable. It collects a variety of quotes from musicians, quotes about music, or quotes from musicians about music. They're arranged very loosely, alphabetically by subject -- for instance, "Song Titles", "Sound(s)", "Sour", "Speech", "Sphere(s)", etc. The quotes themselves are generally as witty and insightful as you might hope.

However, when you read the book from cover to cover, as I did, several flaws emerge. First, numerous quotes are included more than once, under different headings. For instance, Edgar Lee Masters quote, "Out of me unworthy and unknown / The vibrations of deathless music" appears under the heading "Deathless" and then again under the heading "Vibrations." This sort of thing strikes me as either shameless padding, sloppy editing, or both. Given that David W. Barber was both the compiler and the editor of the book, the blame falls on him either way.

Secondly, Mr. Barber, who is apparently an author of humorous books of musical history, quotes HIMSELF a number of times throughout the book. When you place your own words immediately alongside those of Joyce, Twain, Wilde, and Shakespeare, it can't help but come across as rather self-aggrandizing. Making matters worse is the fact that the Barber quotes themselves are not exactly memorable. Here's an example: "Haydn had neither the flashy individuality of Mozart nor the brooding, romantic passion of Beethoven. He was more of a middle-management type." Worth a smile, sure, but not enough to overcome the poor taste of quoting yourself.

Finally, one gets the impression that Mr. Barber's fact-checking was less than thorough. For instance, I was struck by one quote attributed to Bing Crosby: "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." So I hunted down the quote in order to learn its context. What I learned instead was that in fact, Bing Crosby never said this at all. It's a quote from BILL COSBY, who I think we can agree is an entirely different person. Consequently, the quote has no connection to music and doesn't belong in this book. I'm not sure how many more examples of this sort of thing you'd find in the book, but the fact that I found an error like this on the first quote I researched is not exactly a good sign.

I don't mean to give the impression that the book isn't pleasant or fun. It surely is. But given the above-mentioned issues, it comes across as something that was hastily thrown together over a weekend of trawling the internet, and the fact that Google, [...], [...], and a handful of other sites are mentioned in the acknowledgments reinforces this impression. The other purpose it serves is as a cautionary example of the dangers of serving as your own editor. Future compilers, take note.